As usual, shereached the Princep Ghat railway station for circular rail,overlooking the majestic Ganges. It used to be their regularmeeting place since they had met there for the first time.And, as usual, she reached right on time on June 27, 2002.Little did she think that a day like this will ever come inher life! But fate generally has something in store which wenever imagine – even in our nightmares. It was undoubtedlytheir first meeting after their split which had come due tothose five words, after a strong relationship of fivebeautiful springs –

‘This kid isnot mine!’

A cold chillran down her spine. She was not prepared – at least forthis! After a silence of three seconds, in a shivering voiceSheema said, ‘How could you even say that? Is this reallywhat I should get after five long years of commitment to youeven by going against my family?’

With tears liketwo drops of pearl she tried to look up in to the eyes ofher love. But as her eyes went up to confront his eyes,Gourav had already moved ten steps away from her. She triedto move towards him and hold his hand. But those ten stepsnow seemed to be more than ten miles! From a distance Sheemaheard him saying, ‘Listen, I can't get married to you.’

After atumultuous step taken by her to go against her family'sdecision and the society's rebukes, Sheema was ordained thestatus of a ‘slut’ by the person whom she loved more thananyone else in her life. In vain she tried to convinceGourav to get married as soon as possible – not to saveherself from being beaten to death by her parents or to saveher family's honor and reputation in the society where herown aunt was brutally murdered in the name of ‘honorkilling’; but only to bring their love-child into this world– a place which she imagined as the ‘most beautiful place’till she heard those words which she couldn't believe.

This articlefocuses on D.T. Niane's Sundiata: An Epic of OldMali and different narrations ofAl-Sirah al-Hilaliyyah in Egypt, toinvestigate the similarities and differences between them inrelation to the structure of the epic, represented by thestages through which the folk cultural hero passes: theprophecy, the birth of the hero, the alienation of the hero,and the final recognition of the hero. The article dependson the comparative method and the oral-formulaic theory(Finnegan Oral Poetry; Ong Oralityand Literacy).

It may besomewhat striking that the Arab folk conscience has so farkept on the oral narration of ‘Sirat Bani Hilal’; though itsnarration began as early as the tenth century. Thesirah is an Arabic folk art while theepic is a Western folk art. Although they differ in name,structure and content, they share a great deal of theirartistic characteristics. In his study of the relationshipbetween the Arabic sirah and the Westernepic, al-Hagagi has proved a high degree of similarity. Heeven considers the structure of the epic a part or a sectionof the folk sirah. Thesirah is the whole of which the epic isa part. The similarities even transcend the few existingdifferences of structure and text, blurring the differenceof language and locale (al-Hagagi Birth of a Hero inthe Folk Sirahs: 25-6). Among the importantsimilarities are focus on the topics of war, chivalry andmotivation for revenge. Linguistically speaking, the lexicalitem ‘epic’ is translated into Arabic as‘malhama’ which gives the meaning ofbodily engagement in the heat of battle, thus, denotingraging battle, but technically speaking it is a ‘longnarrative poem recounting great deeds and extraordinaryheroism’. Similarly, the ‘sirah’ is thebiography of a hero or a tribe including encounters, warsand fighting. Arabic dictionaries considermalhama and sirahsynonymous (al- Wageez Arabic Dictionary)in the tradition of the scholars that use the two termsinterchangeably. Scenes of battle are so numerous in boththat they can be seen as series of scenes of continuousbattles where these scenes and battles are greatly similar.The two genres are not set apart despite the radicaldifference between them. The epic tends to display conflictamong gods or demigods, sometimes with heroines that aregoddesses as well.

A NOTE ON THE DYNAMICS OF THIS PRODUCTION

From the view point of directing, this, purposefully, is a drama of juxtaposed, variegated actions: a further exploration of theatrical ‘naturalness’ in the evocation of African atmosphere and rhythms through time, space, sound and matter. Technically here, no action need stop so that another can begin. Sometimes, the actions of one moment crash one upon another; other times they follow one after the other with innate civility, yet ‘trippingly’ – driven in their ‘natural’ modes by the tensions of threatened wills. Overall, a convoluting concourse of happenings is the particular stage picture to be evoked.

CAST

Papa

Mama

Dr Hamidu Gidada, alias Ernesto Che Guevara

Chinwe Ejindu

Onyema Ejindu

Banji Falegan, alias Di Law

Akpan Ntuk Akpan, alias Ten Trouble, One God

Adiagha/Woman 1/Mama Ukot

Ukot

Prof Tekena Dokubo

Betty Oviamwen

Garuba Kazaure

Mama Rosa/Woman 2

Landlord

Bible/Choral group leader

Elkenah Igwe or Friend

Policeman 1

Policeman 2

Kalada Amanye

Fisherman

Mrs Dokubo

2 thugs

Neighbourhood children

Bible choral group members

TIME SEQUENCE

Friday evening

Happenings I, II, III, IV

Saturday evening

Happenings V

Sunday evening

Happenings VI

HAPPENINGS I

They are happening in the very backyard of this multi-tenanted building which still radiates an aura of genial strength on its foundations. Frankly, though, the building is cheerless. Cheerless and sapped of strength by man's unrelieved dependence on its sheltering niches.

A slightly raised verandah runs along the building which is structured in a mundane rectangular form with the foreground side missing.

Doors to rooms open onto this verandah. It is thus possible for tenant “A” to emerge from his room and rendezvous with tenant “Z” by simply walking on the verandah. Cutting across the bare grounds of the yard is another option, however. The choice depends on whim.

Round the corner Down-Left, or thereabout, is the approach to the kitchen, bathroom and latrine – unseen to the audience. The articles tenants take with them to that part of the building will disclose the precise destination of the individual – if the audience must know.

A tap stands perkily somewhere in the foreground – more to the left.

Farther right is a clothes-line diligently linking two posts despite a sagging resolve.

Lionel Britton (1887–1971) was the son of Richard Britton, an eventually bankrupted and not fully qualified solicitor who died of tuberculosis in 1894 when Britton was seven, and Ira Britton, who supplemented the family income as a boarding-house keeper and briefly remarried. Despite the professional promise that might have bestowed a safely bourgeois existence from his father's side, Lionel Britton largely grew up with his maternal grandparents in Redditch and left home for Birmingham, where he lived on a loaf of bread for a week before heading to London. His family did not have the means to pay for his interest in learning and education – he attended a national school – and Britton was an errand boy for a greengrocer's and then a bookshop. He was imprisoned for over a year as a conscientious objector during the First World War and gained employment working for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers in the 1920s. He unsuccessfully applied for Soviet citizenship in the late 1910s but is also notable for the fact that, unlike some leading intellectual figures in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, he recognised that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship and not a worker's paradise.

His relatively brief but brilliant literary flourishing at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s resulted in a novel – Hunger and Love (1931) – and the plays Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930), Spacetime Inn (1932) and Animal Ideas: A Dramatic Symphony of the Human in the Universe (1935). Hunger and Love was a Bildungsroman of a kind, but supplants the normative alignment of individual becoming and socialisation with a shift towards a collective, communal temporality at odds with bourgeois modernity. Spacetime Inn and Brain might be deemed science-fiction plays, though such a designation does not do justice to how each again disorders time and history. The former is set in the eponymous hostelry where two working-class Cockneys, Bill and Jim, win the sweepstake and traverse the dimensions of spacetime to join the company of fellow guests such as Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Dr Johnson, Karl Marx, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, The Queen of Sheba and Eve.

Edward Wilson-Lee was brought up in Kenya amongst conservationists and is now a Shakespeare scholar teaching at Cambridge. Shakespeare in Swahililand, a piece of popular scholarship telling stories of Shakespeare being read, adapted and performed across East Africa, is something of a bringing together of these two disparate worlds the author has inhabited. It is by no means an attempt at a comprehensive history, though it ranges in time from the 1850s and stories of Shakespeare-loving explorers, right up to a concluding discussion of the circumstances that led to newly independent South Sudan mounting a production of Cymbeline for the 2012 Globe to Globe festival in London – though strangely Wilson-Lee never actually tells us the year of that event. It is also not a piece of conventional scholarship in that, although he is of course dependent on literary sources for the Victorian period information, most of the time the book is more of a Shakespeareinflected travelogue, as Wilson-Lee tells us of his attempts to track down people and places involved with various Shakespearian productions. If you want to know about Shakespeare and East Africa this also means you have to plough through quite a lot of padding, with extensive musings on assorted Shakespeare characters, and descriptions of the places the author went to in the course of his research. Some of this is quite whimsical, and some definitely of tangential interest. I found myself skimming quite a lot of the flummery that brings the book up to 288 pages.

In a ‘Prelude’ that made my post-colonial Africanist soul twitch uneasily at the mention of ‘tribe’ and ‘a land … braved by white travellers’ (xi), I was then, as one interested in the history of theatre in Africa, rendered queasy when Wilson-Lee said he was looking for ‘the Holy Grail of Shakespeare Studies: an understanding of Shakespeare's universal appeal’ (xii). Surely scholarship has moved beyond ideas of a singular ‘universality’ in apprehending any cultural product. And surely Wilson-Lee must recognize that colonialism imposed the idea of Shakespearean exceptionality, and that the continued teaching of Shakespeare in certain African states says at least as much about colonized minds (See Ngugi's 1981 Decolonising the Mind) as it does about an Elizabethan playwright.

In this book, I have argued that translation, broadly defined, is central to the character of Merlin in the French and Italian Arthurian corpus. At the same time, I have maintained that the character of Merlin exemplifies a number of the features of translation as it was conceived in the Middle Ages. Merlin's activities and speech acts within the different narratives are comparable to translation, in that they constitute a conversion between two semiotically incompatible systems: his supernatural omniscience on the one hand, and the finite logic of the narrative on the other, which is bound by the rules of earthly time and language. I have compared this conversion to the medieval topos of translatio, which is envisaged as a displacement of one language and cultural context by another. Although it is most often used to describe the transfer of knowledge and power from the ancient world to the medieval present, translatio also functions in the more abstract sense of a transposition of meaning, which is comparable to the rhetorical function of a metaphor. Merlin's prophetic discourse displaces knowledge that is infinite and atemporal onto a limited, temporally-governed linguistic system, which can only support it in a fragmented form – just as vernacular versions of classical texts had to adapt and omit parts of the text that would not be acceptable or comprehensible to a medieval reader.

At the same time, this book has demonstrated that the transmission of the story of Merlin from Latin to French and Italian vernaculars offers an alternative model of medieval translation, and one that would not have corresponded necessarily to the medieval concept of translatio. As we have seen, translation between vernaculars does not work on the basis of displacement and substitution, which governs the logic of translatio studii and translatio imperii from classical literature. French and Italian dialects and texts were permeable, and not mutually exclusive; the possibilities for grammatical and morphological combinations between varieties of different vernaculars meant that linguistic displacement was a choice and not an obligation. The ethical and hierarchical relations of translatio imperii did not particularly apply to French and Italian cultures on the whole – Francophone texts circulated because they were popular and filled a generic niche, not because they were regarded as superior texts.

In the prose Merlin, a short narrative derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini tells of a cynical baron at Pendragon's court who questions Merlin's prophetic gifts. In order to prove the prophet wrong, the baron comes to Merlin on three occasions, each time in a different disguise, asking to know the cause of his death. When he receives a different answer each time, the baron believes that he has exposed Merlin as a fraud: he is told firstly that he will break his neck, secondly that he will be hanged, and thirdly that he will be drowned. A short time later, however, he is killed when he falls from his horse over a bridge. All three of Merlin's predictions come true, as he breaks his neck from the fall, drowns in the water, and is left hanging from the horse's reins. Despite having been proven a true prophet, Merlin's response to this event is far from triumphant. In an attempt to avoid a repeat occurrence of this interrogation, he vows only ever to speak of the future in obscure terms: ‘je ne parleroie plus oiant le pueple se si oscurement non que il ne sauront que je dirai devant ce que il le verront’ [from now on, I will only speak in public so obscurely that no one will understand what I say until they see it happen] (p. 678). His prophecies are in future only to be understood once they become a reality.

The obscurity of Merlin's words derives ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetiae Merlini, and was perhaps influenced by popular traditions deriving from presumed real-life prophets such as Joachim of Fiore. As we have seen, Merlin's omniscience accords him the status of a writer/translator, whose overview of the narrative can only be revealed bit by bit, within the sequential logic of the text. Here, the story of the baron's death exemplifies precisely the predicaments which occur when human beings are confronted with knowledge from beyond their own epistemological parameters. The baron is unable to understand that the three separate outcomes proposed by Merlin will happen at once; he is incapable of grasping the totality of time and meaning which is intrinsic to Merlin's omniscience – and to the idea of prophecy itself.

Otared, a novel by the Egyptian writerMohammad Rabie is set in conditions that resemble those inEgypt during the Arab Spring. The situation depicted in thenovel, however, is exponentially worse than how it wasduring the Arab Spring (Or maybe the author is revealingthings that were not apparent to many people about the ArabSpring). The novel is set in an Egypt that was militarilyinvaded by the armed forces of the Republic of the Knightsof Malta who have appointed a new prime minister, and who inhis turn formed a government. The occupation government ishowever not much of a government. The country, especiallythe city of Cairo is in utter chaos. All semblance of orderhas disappeared in large parts of the city. Murder andviolence are rampant. Basic services are non-existent.Mounds of trash are everywhere. The resistance to theoccupation is led by a shadowy group of former policeofficers whose strategy is based on two elements: one, toincrease the suffering of the civilian population to thepoint they become convinced that they have no alternativebut to side with the police in their efforts to drive theinvaders away, and perhaps then the killing of civilianswould end. Two, because members of the Egyptian military arepotential competitors for power in the future, the policeencouraged military personnel to engage in armed operationsin which the latter were very likely to die or be killed.The city of Cairo is divided into two sections. East Cairowhere the occupying army is mostly based and West Cairo. Allforms of violence whether it is physical, psychological orsexual has been unleashed. There is no credible authority.The morgues are full. Cairo lies in ruins. But thissuffering does not result in solidarity and cooperationbetween the people. Nor does it engender sympathy for thedenizens of Cairo. Instead Cairenes are held in contempt forwelcoming the invaders instead of resisting them.

This is apredatory world in which many of the characters seemunhinged. Distinctions between right and wrong, truth andlies, kindness and cruelty have disappeared. Hashish andother drugs are part of the daily intake of people. Casualsex and rape are prevalent. Unproven connections betweeneating raw meat and sex are invented.

This book is not a history of wrongdoing in Spain between 1800 and 1936, or even of its more narrowly defined form, crime. Its concern is with something akin, albeit different, namely the cultural construction of wrongdoing, and its legally defined manifestation, crime; and with the way in which such phenomena were experienced and understood in Spain of this period.

One of the most striking features of the cultural construction of wrongdoing in academic and criminological circles in Spain during this period is that there has been a predominant focus on the violent manifestations of wrongdoing. Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós, an early criminologist, in 1906 cited Spain as one of the highest on the list in Europe for the occurrence of violent crime (Bernaldo de Quirós 1906: 21). In intellectual terms, Bernaldo de Quirós was in dialogue with Durkheim, as evidenced by his 1904 pamphlet, ‘Una polémica sobre la normalidad del delito’, which was sparked off by Durkheim's Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1895) (Bernaldo de Quirós 1904: 9). In line with what is put forward in that text, Bernaldo de Quirós argues for crime being understood as ‘una inmoralidad’ which has incurred a penalty (Bernaldo de Quirós 1904: 11). As J. Carter Wood has noted (Wood 2004: ix): ‘law is only one of the social institutions that set the boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, and these lines are continuously contested and shifting’.

The focus on violence shown in the example of Bernaldo de Quirós was far from an isolated occurrence. The recent historical survey by Gutmaro Gómez Bravo in a collection of essays on ‘Heroes of Wrongdoing’ demonstrates that the focus has fallen less on wrongdoing in itself than on its manifestations through violence. Gómez Bravo's essay in that collection is a bold historiographical review, reflecting not simply the violence that existed in Spain's history, but the changing and evolving attitudes to how it should be represented, discussed and formulated in academic study. In his article ‘De las costumbres violentas de la sociedad española’ (Gómez Bravo 2017), he surveys the thematic importance of violence as a means of understanding Spanish history, but always with an eye to those constructing as well as to the object under (re)construction.

Damaged, fragmentary and lost monuments have featured in discussions throughout this book where we know enough about them to make valid comments, and in chapter one it was noted that we can never be sure how many monuments have been lost without a trace. It is the purpose of this chapter to attempt to build a picture of those losses and attacks, when they occurred, and under what circumstances. But this is not only a tale of destruction. It is also one of survival, and many of our remaining monuments have gone through periods of neglect or removal, followed by restoration and protection, or have simply been left where they are since the original reason for their existence was partially invalidated at the Reformation. They have been studied for different purposes, and successive generations, forgetting how to interpret them through medieval eyes, have spun tales about them and their subjects which in some cases have passed into local lore. These different forms of ‘afterlife’ are the subject of this chapter.

Loss of and damage to tomb monuments have traditionally been ascribed to two bouts of iconoclasm: the first in the mid sixteenth century during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Edwardian Reformation, and the second during the civil wars of the seventeenth century. Phillip Lindley has outlined the process by which medieval monuments became the targets of iconoclastic fury, and has written extensively about the destruction of the tombs at Abergavenny, an account which will not therefore need to be repeated here. The attacks occasioned by the Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536 to 1539 had a disproportionate effect on the memorials of the clergy and since, at this stage, it was the material value rather than the spiritual sensibilities of the monuments that sealed their fate, those of the laity that had received monastic burial were also plundered. The denial of the doctrine of purgatory in 1547 and the subsequent banning of prayers for the dead did away with the need for chantries, colleges and other intercessory institutions and introduced a doctrinal element into the onslaught on Catholic institutions.

The length of the North African coast from Morocco to Egypt spurned a number of independent and semi-independent Islamic naval states during the age of fighting sail. While the nature and command structure of some of the navies in this region may appear haphazard and confusing, there can be little question that the vast majority of those who sailed from the ports of this coastline, including those of the Maghreb, were operating under the full authority of the state from which they were operating. This is an important point, and one that needs to be made from the outset, since those who served in some of these navies have frequently been accorded the appellation of ‘pirate’ or ‘sea robber’. Here reference is made to Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, four Islamic territories where maritime forces, often privately financed, were conducting, on behalf of the state, an endless and unremitting war of commerce raiding – the Guerra de Corso. Collectively referred to by Europeans as the Barbary coastal states, the use of the term piracy in connection with their maritime forces is incorrect, a pirate being one who has no protection of the state. In terms of a correct definition, a pirate is a rogue operator at sea who, quite independently, attacks shipping of any nation or state for the purpose of committing violence or stealing cargo for personal gain. It suited those from within the Christian European states of the time, those whose shipping was most frequently attacked by ships emanating from those four territories, to make this claim, allowing them to assume the moral high ground. Furthermore, despite the lack of a continued need to apply the term, it is one used by a number of contemporary commentators whose writings are often directed at the popular market. Even the seemingly more neutral term of corsair is one that also needs to be questioned as to its veracity, originating as it does from corsaire which, in Middle French, also has the meaning of pirate. Of course, it could be suggested that ‘privateer’ is a more suitable term, this normally defined as sailing under the commission of a belligerent state, through the issuing of letters of marque which empowered the person or persons to which these were granted to attack and seize, at sea, vessels or other property of the enemies of that state.

Introduction

Oddr Snorrason used the literary genre of the saint's life to write about a legendary figure who was both royal and saintly, a Christian king and a missionary hero. Not all saga authors had – or perhaps wished for – such promising subjects. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, written in c. 1220–30, is the biography not of a saint, nor even of a Christian, but of a self-confessedly pagan poet, and it is associated with a school of saga-writing that Andersson describes as political and rationalist rather than moral and hagiographic. It has close links to Heimskringla and Snorra Edda, and may even have been composed by Snorri Sturluson. Hrafnkels saga, written c. 1280–1300, can be grouped with a small number of sagas concerned with issues of governance; whether it is moral or political in nature has been hotly debated, but it too sports a hero who is neither Christian nor saintly, whatever the rights and wrongs of his final killing.

These sagas make use of hagiographic conventions in much more antithetical ways than Oddr, setting up their protagonists in contradistinction to the model of the saint. Egils saga, it can be argued, draws on the biographical pattern of the vita to explore a poetic personality that is temperamentally unstable and profoundly amoral: while Egill shares some of his linguistic powers with saints, he is portrayed as both an older and a more complex figure, whose ancestry is rooted in Scandinavian prehistory, and whose poetic gifts distance him from conventional morals. Hrafnkels saga has at its focal point a torture scene or passio followed by the destruction of a pagan temple, both scenes readily familiar from Oddr's Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and other conversion þættir (‘short stories’). It is striking, then, that Hrafnkell rejects pagan gods only to embrace godlessness, which is at best only half a conversion from a medieval point of view. In this chapter, I explore to what extent a peripheral genre such as the sagas of Icelanders may challenge the world-view of a central one – the saint's life – resisting the kind of ‘interference’ one might expect to be the rule. These two highly literary sagas have not absorbed hagiographic conventions passively, but actively work with them: they promote their native saga heroes in conscious opposition to the Christian saint.

The contributions in this volume of Essays and Studies were inspired by the Stanford Text Technologies Collegium on ‘Distortion’, held in May 2015 at Stanford University. Funded by the Denning Gift, this three-day intensive collegium examined one of the key themes in the history of textual communication: how texts are distorted even as they are disseminated, sometimes as a result of accidental manipulation, or careful mediation; sometimes through wilful perversion or falsification. At the Stanford Collegium, we were delighted to host Benjamin Albritton, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Emma Cayley, Paul Fyfe, Tom O'Donnell, Sarah Ogilvie, Timothy Powell, Colin Reeves-Fortney, Giovanni Scorcioni, Elizabeth Tyler and Greg Walker, and each gave powerful and intellectually stimulating papers on very different topics, centred on the concept and practice of distortion.

We are grateful to be able to include the work of some of these original participants in this book, and other essays we have specifically commissioned for inclusion here. We are pleased to thank the attentive and engaged audience at the Collegium, whose informed questions and focused responses allowed invigorated discussion. We also wish to thank the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford; the Denning Fund for Humanities and Technology, which supports Text Technologies; the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), which hosted the Collegium; and Daeyeong Kim, who, as Text Technologies Graduate Administrator, organised the proceedings with great skill and professionalism.