IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE Abstracts

Loloi, Dr. Parvin, Independent Scholar, Swansea, The Image of the Safavids in English and French Literature of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Persia has always been a rich resource for European writers.  The publication of travel accounts relating to the Persia of the Safavids provided European authors with attractive, fresh material.  As early as 1511 Jean Lemaire de Belges introduced the founder of the Safavid dynasty to France. His L'Histoire Moderne du Prince Syach Ysmail, dit Sophy Arduelin translates the Italian of Giovanni Rota's La Vita del Sophi (1508).  Lemaire contrived to give an anti-papal twist to his history of the Persian king, thus setting a precedent for later European writers, of employing the Safavids to mirror the social and political life of the West.  From the late sixteenth century, oral transmission and published sources enabled dramatists such as Shakespeare to employ many references to the court of the Grand Sophy.  At the beginning of the seventeenth century the adventures of the Sherley brothers and the publication of Sir Anthony Sherley's Relations of Travels into Persia (1613) and Thomas Herbert's A Relation of Some Years Travaile (1634) prompted several plays, including Sir John Denham's The Sophy  (1642), Robert Baron's Mirza, A Tragedy ... (1647), William Cartwright's The Royall Slave (1639).  The lives of the Sherleys were also dramatised, as in Nixon's The Three English Brothers... (1607), John Day's The Travailes of the three English Brothers (1607), etc.

The travels of Robert Sherley and Persian envoys to Europe interested European kings greatly and prompted them to don Persian costumes on special occasions.  In fact Louis XIV, and Charles II competed with one another in richness of costume, as recorded by diarists as Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and Saint-Simon.  Later in the seventeenth century the works of French travellers, especially Tavernier's Voyages ... (1676) and Chardin's Voyages en Perse ... (1686), were published.  They enabled the publication of a novel on palace intrigues called Tachmas, Prince de Perse (1676), by Mme de Villedieu, and Delsome de Monchenay's play, Mezetin, Grand Sophy de Perse (1689).  Other pseudo-historical novels and plays in French were written earlier in the century; later works by such writers as Voltaire and Montesquieu employed contemporary Persian themes in order to comment on contemporary society. 

The works of both English and French writers, though often fanciful and far from the historical accounts transmitted by travellers and historians, are nevertheless, complex in character. They seek both to transmit cultural differences and similarities and also, through the use of Persian themes, to comment on contemporary events in Europe.

This paper will attempt to explore the influence of travel accounts on English and French writers, and the writers' employment of Safavid characters and Persian culture to revitalize the literature of their respective languages; it will also seek to compare and contrast the way the English and French writers have employed such materials.

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