The Translator’s Invisibility

The extremely elliptical quality of this allusion, especially compared to the explanatory statement that precedes the Seven Sleepers, indicates the enormous popularity of Sheridan’s character, even as late as 1833, when Shelley was writing her own tale. Published in 1767, a year after Sheridan’s death, The History of Nourjahad went through at least eleven British editions by 1830, including an illustrated abridgement for children, and it was twice adapted for the {178} stage, first as a “melodramatic spectacle” in 1802, then as a musical production in 1813 (Todd 1985:282–284). Having already published several tales in The Keepsake, Shelley knew that Oriental motifs were in vogue among its readers, she seems even to have assumed that the “fabled Nourjahad” was more familiar to them than the rather learned allusion to the Seven Sleepers, and so she needed merely to have her “mortal immortal” drop the character’s name to signify immortality punctuated by “deep sleep.”[4] Yet, for readers who know The History of Nourjahad, the reference is too abrupt and unqualified to stop resonating, so that it constitutes a disturbing point of indeterminancy in Shelley’s text, limited only by the cultural and social conditions under which it is read.

Sheridan’s Nourjahad is the favorite of the Persian sultan Schemzeddin, who would like to appoint him as “first minister” but must establish that he is worthy, innocent of the faults imputed to him by court advisors: “youth,” “avarice,” “love of pleasure,” and “irreligion” (Weber 1812:693). Schemzeddin tests Nourjahad by asking him what he would like if his every desire could be satisfied, and Nourjahad’s response confirms the advisors’ suspicions:

I should desire to be possessed of inexhaustible riches; and, to enable me to enjoy them to the utmost, to have my life prolonged to eternity, [disregarding] hopes of Paradise [in order to] make a paradise of this earthly globe while it lasted, and take my chance for the other afterwards.

(Weber 1812:694)

Nourjahad elicits the sultan’s rebuke, and that night he is visited by his “guardian genius” who fulfills his desire for wealth and immortality, although with the proviso that any vice he commits will be “punished by total privation of [his] faculties,” lasting “for months, years, nay for a whole revolution of Saturn at a time, or perhaps for a century” (ibid.:695). Nourjahad forgets this punishment, further alienates Schemzeddin by devoting himself to “nothing but giving loose to his appetites” (ibid.:698), and performs three immoral acts which are each punished by long periods of deep sleep. While indulging himself “with an unbounded freedom in his most voluptuous wishes,” Nourjahad, “for the first time, got drunk,” whereupon he sleeps over four years (ibid.:700); then he invents a “celestial masquerade” in which he orders “the women of his seraglio to personate the houris,” while {179} “he himself would needs represent Mahomet; and one of the mistresses whom he loved best […] Cadiga, the favourite wife of the great prophet,” for which “wild and profane idea” he sleeps forty years (ibid.:705); finally, when his “appetites palled with abundance,” he begins to delight in “cruelty” and brutally kills Cadiga, thereafter sleeping twenty years (ibid.:710). Upon waking Nourjahad reforms and embarks on a vast program of philanthropy, so profoundly regretting his wealth and immortality that his guardian genius reappears to take them away. It is subsequently revealed that Nourjahad’s “adventure […] was all a deception” (ibid.:719), he did not actually kill Cadiga, he was never wealthy or immortal, and only fourteen months have passed, not more than sixty years. Schemzeddin had invented everything to bring about his favorite’s moral reformation.