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Updated: May 19, 2025
It is found in the Pantcha-Tantra, in the Hitopadesa, in Bidpai's Fables, in the Arabic original of The Seven Wise Masters, that famous collection of stories which illustrate a stepdame's calumny and hate, and in many mediaeval versions of those originals . Thence it passed into the Latin Gesta Romanorum, where, as well as in the Old English version published by Sir Frederick Madden, it may be read as a service rendered by a faithful hound against a snake.
If it be said that Bracciolini wrote a History of Florence, and that these remarks which, unquestionably, refer to some "history" from the expression "describendi gesta illius," apply to that work, it must be borne in mind that he did not write that history until towards the close of his life, that is, more than thirty years after these letters which passed between him and Niccoli, for the events recorded in his History of Florence are carried down to as late as the year 1455; that that historical work is the only one he wrote under his own name; that it is no more written in imitation of the ancients, than any other of his acknowledged productions; and that even if it were, he would not have required for its composition such maps as Ptolemy's, nor such works as those of Suetonius and Plutarch.
The second contains: JOHN OF LONDON'S Commendatio Lamentabilis in Transitu magni Regis Edwardi quarti, a funeral eulogy containing the most elaborate contemporary analysis of Edward's character. The CANON OF BRIDLINGTON'S Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon, with a continuation down to the death of Edward III., of little value after 1339.
HENRY VI. 1, 2, and 3 Retouched old plays, probably with Marlowe. TITUS ANDRONICUS Probably chiefly by Kyd, retouched. KING JOHN Old play retouched. SECOND PERIOD 1596-1601-2 MERCHANT OF VENICE Italian novels, Gesta Romanorum, and earlier plays. MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM North's Plutarch, Chaucer, Ovid. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL Painter's Palace of Pleasure.
Myles was replete with old Latin gestes, fables, and sermons picked up during his school life, in those intervals of his more serious studies when Prior Edward had permitted him to browse in the greener pastures of the Gesta Romanorum and the Disciplina Clericalis of the monastery library, and Gascoyne was never weary of hearing him tell those marvellous stories culled from the crabbed Latin of the old manuscript volumes.
The story, as I have said, was imagined from events in Irving's history of the "Conquest of Granada," a book which the boy loved hardly less than the monkish legends of "Gesta Romanorum," and it concerned the rival fortunes of Hamet el Zegri and Boabdil el Chico, the uncle and nephew who vied with each other for the crumbling throne of the Moorish kingdom; but I have not the least notion how it all ended.
Douce's edition of the Gesta, he selects but one scene of action, yet it is the making of Macbeth one would almost suppose that this was the germ-thought which kindled his furious fancy, preceding his discovery of the Macbeth tradition as related in Holinshed's Chronicle. The Emperor Manelay has set forth to the Holy Land, leaving his empress and kingdom in his brother's care.
The influence of the Gesta Romanorum is most conspicuously to be traced in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate; but it has served as a source of inspiration to the flagging ingenuity of each succeeding generation. It would be tedious to enter on an enumeration of the various indebtednesses of English literature to these early tales. A few instances will serve as illustration.
No one can read fairly the "Gesta Dei per Francos in Oriente," or the deeds of the French Nobility in their wars with England, or those tales however legendary of the mediaeval knights, which form so noble an element in German literature, without seeing, that however black were these men's occasional crimes, they were a truly noble race, the old Nobility of the Continent; a race which ruled simply because, without them, there would have been naught but anarchy and barbarism.
Whatever be the final solution to this problem, enough has been said to show that the beast-fable is, in all probability, the most primitive form of short-story which we possess. For our purpose, that of tracing the evolution of the English short-story, its history commences with the Gesta Romanorum. At the authorship of this collection of mediaeval tales, many guesses have been made.
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