The Lecher, the Coward and the Virtuous Woman

MEASURE FOR MEASURE has been one of Shakespeare's more controversial plays, the only one which the nineteenth century critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge confessed himself unable to enjoy. However, the twentieth century has appreciated its theme more than the preceding one did. It tells of a strait-laced official who has imprisoned a young man for getting his girl-friend with child, and condemned him to death. The prisoner's sister comes to plead for him, and the official conceives a passion for her. Putting aside his former strict principles, he proposes that if the woman will yield to him, he will release her brother. The woman tells her brother, who, in cowardly fashion and to her great dismay, urges her to comply. The ruler of the land, who has happily been privy to all this in disguise, proposes to exchange the woman for another lady whom the official had previously jilted but who still loves him. After having his way with this surrogate, not knowing her identity, he cruelly proceeds with his plan to execute the prisoner, but of course, the ruler is aware of all and virtue finally triumphs. This theme (entered in Stith Thompson's index, T 455.2) has two curious analogues in the Middle East of the twentieth century. One is a proverb in Iraqi Arabic, sufficiently common to be glossed in Woodhead and Beane's dictionary of Iraqi Arabic. If you wish to express the fact that someone has an amazingly beautiful sister, as they put it (Woodhead and Beene, 358), you can say &inda ?uxut tfukk ilmasluub 'he has a sister who could release a condemned man,' meaning that if her brother were in prison, her beauty would be a satisfactory bribe for the official responsible. People who use this are probably often unaware how this proverb comes to mean what it does, but it would appear to hark back to some such tale as is told in Measure for Measure. A story of this type occurs widely too in Middle Eastern Jewish sources. It is found in printed form in chapbooks, probably printed in Bagdad, telling the story of one Nathan Resista (Nathan the Crushed, or Contrite). It occurs too in the mouth of a Yemenite teller of tales (Noy, 165) and in the Israel Folklore Archives (No. 1357). An English version of this story is available in Micha Bin Gorion's collection of Jewish folktales Mimekor Yisrael (570-573). It is taken from a famous collection of tales compiled by the eleventh-century Jewish scholar from Kairouan entitled Hibbur Yafeh mehayeshua 'The Delightful Composition after Deliverance,' a work intended to cheer up those suffering from the depressive effects of some great loss or other traumatic experience. This story tells of one Nathan de-Susitha, rendered Nathan of the Radiance, who became enamoured of an impecunious, incomparably beautiful married woman called Hannah. He grew deathly sick from his love, and the physicians declared that only physical contact with her would cure him, but the sages would not permit it. Hannah's husband was later imprisoned for debt, and suggested to his wife to 'borrow' the money from Nathan. Hannah indignantly rejects this suggestion along with its indecent