‘Here, take him outside, and give him five-and-twenty, to teach him wisdom.’
She threw the robes off her, and put them on him. ‘Do you be emperor, and I empress.’
Were I a painter, I would paint a picture—the Forest of Arden, a Gypsy encampment, with tents, dogs, donkeys, and children, a Gypsy story-teller, and Shakespeare. But one knows, of course, that Shakespeare derived the material of his Cymbeline from the novel of Boccaccio [[124]](Dec. ii. 9), immediately in all likelihood, and not through the second story in Westward for Smelts. Granted he did, the question arises next, whence did Boccaccio get his material? Did he invent it, and, if so, is this Gypsy story derived from Boccaccio, and not it only, but Campbell’s West Highland tale of ‘The Chest’ (No. 18), Larminie’s ‘Servant of Poverty’ (West Irish Folk-tales, pp. 115–129), and at least two other folk-tales cited by Köhler—one in Wolf’s German Hausmärchen, p. 355, and one from Roumania in Ausland, 1856, p. 1053? Campbell’s story at any rate cannot have come from Boccaccio, containing, as it does, the essence, not merely of Cymbeline, but also of The Merchant of Venice. For its hero borrows £50 on condition that if he does not repay it within a year and a day he is to lose a strip of skin cut from his head to his foot;[31] ‘Yes,’ says the heroine, ‘but in cutting it, not one drop of blood must be shed.’ To go fully into this question would occupy pages and pages; I must content myself with referring to The Remarks of M. Karl Simrock on the Plots of Shakespeare’s Plays, with notes by J. O. Halliwell (Shakespeare Soc. 1850), pp. 64–75 and 45–63, and to Reinhold Köhler on Campbell’s tale in Orient und Occident, ii. 1864, pp. 313–316. But it is just worth pointing out that Gypsies may have had a considerable influence on the European drama. The Scottish Gypsies who, as recorded in the Introduction, used yearly to gather in the stanks of Roslin during the last half of the sixteenth century, acted there ‘severall plays.’ We have not the dimmest notion what those plays may have been; still, this would be quite an early item in any history of the stage in Scotland. Sir William Ouseley in his Travels in Persia (1823), iii. 400–405, gives a long description of a Persian puppet-play, curiously like our own Punch and Judy: ‘the managers of these shows, and the musicians who attended them, were said to be of the Karachi or Gypsy tribe.’ I myself at Göttingen, in 1873, several times came across a family of German Gypsies, very full-blooded ones, who were marionette-showers; like a dull dog, I never went to see their shows. Gorger (Rómani gaújo, Gentile or man) is current theatrical slang for a manager; and Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) shows that the slang of our English show-folk contains a good many Rómani words. The very Pandean pipes are suggestive of importation from South-east Europe. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister offers something to the purpose, so also do the Bunjara players in Mrs. F. A. Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896); and my own In Gypsy Tents, pp. 295–6, gives a glance at an English travelling theatre whose performers spoke fluent Rómani.
No. 34.—Made over to the Devil
There was a rich man, and he went into the forest, and fell into a bog with his carriage. And his wife brought forth a [[125]]son, and he knew it not. And the Devil came forth, and said, ‘What will you give me if I pull you out?’
‘I will give you what you want.’
‘Give me what you have at home.’
‘I have horses, oxen.’
‘Give me that which you have not seen.’