For many historians the embassy was doomed from the start, notwithstanding the lavish gift offered to the Safavid ruler, because the Spanish ambassador could never offer Shah Abbas what he wanted. Not only did it fail to secure a deal, but within three years of the ambassador's departure from Ispahan, in 1622, Persian troops, with the help of English ships, conquered the strategic island and fortress of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, marking a turning point in the decline of Portuguese power in Asia. The embassy of Don GarcĂa de Silva y Figueroa, sent in 1614 by Philip III of Castile and II of Portugal to negotiate an alliance with Shah Abbas against the Ottomans, was a fiasco. The point is that towards the end of the 16 th century the Iranian royal court was visited by a large embassy of Englishmen led by One of these conjectures seem to me relatively more convincing: the circle of Islamised Georgians at the Safavid court in Persia, in particular Allahverdi Khan and his family. Only conjectures may be made on this issue. The means by which the story of Rustaveli's poem reached the intellectual circles of the England of Shakespeare's time remains a mystery. On the basis of the story of the love of the main characters of MPS, Tariel and Nestan, the cited dramatists wrote two plays: Philaster and A King and No King, that were successfully produced throught the 17 th century on the English stage. My research of recent years has enabled me to state and argue an absolutely new fact both for Kartvelology (Georgian Studies) and for English literary criticism, namely that Rustaveli's MPS was used early in the 17 th century as a plot source by the English dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In the present study attention is focused on Rustaveli's The Man in the Panther Skin along these lines. In the Middle Ages the road from East to West was not only a trade and economic route but it served as a cultural bridge as well, Georgia being an important user of this bridge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |