Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/394

 86 Shakespearian Story in Serbian Folklore.

wife. Stojan stakes his wife, his castle and his possessions. Ivan stakes nothing. Equipped with Stojan's horse, clothes and ring, Ivan goes to seek Stojan's wife. But he does not wish to make a long stay with her, nor to seek proofs by mutilation. He intends to bring the wife in person, and show her to her husband, and to this end he pretends to have a message from Stojan. Stojan's wife causes a slave, who greatly resembles her, to take her place. Meantime she herself, disguised as a monk, goes to join both her husband and would-be lover. The conclusion is in quite a cheerful vein, and the ballad ends with the marriage of Ivan and the beautiful slave.

Thus we have three Serbian ballads which are very characteristic of the primitive form of the story of the wager. All of them closely resemble the Greek poem j indeed, they resemble it more closely than do the other five versions of this form, to wit — Taliesin, the Tiva Knights, etc. All three possess many archaic features. The men wager their heads, a slave is substituted, and there is the mutilation. The tale of Ibrahim and Marko possesses several features even more archaic than the Greek poem — for instance, the wife simply commands her slave to give herself. On the other hand the barbarous form of the mutilation in the Greek poem, where not only the hair but a finger is severed, constitutes a very archaic feature. We have three of these ballads, that is to say, more versions of the tale than exist in other languages, and all three are beautiful and interesting.

These three Serbian ballads are therefore undoubtedly valuable documents in the study of the cycle of wager- legends.

III. Macbeth.

And now I come to my third play, — the Scottish tragedy of Macbeth. I do not wish to imply that the history is found in our Serbian folk-lore, but two main elements of