TAMING OF THE SHREW, IN THE FOLK-LORE OF THE UKRAINE.
BY PROFESSOR M. DKAGOMANOV.
The commentators upon Shakespeare have already demonstrated that the illustrious dramatist had taken the subject of his comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, from an Italian novel of Streparola, adding to it details found in analogous novels among Germanic peoples, and which the English writer might well have found in oral tales in existence during his time in England.
A short note upon the people of the Ukraine will not, we believe, be useless. The name Ukraine, or Little Russia, is given to the northern provinces of European Russia, from the river Kouban, at the foot of the Canege, as far as the left bank of the western Boug.
All these provinces are peopled, for the most part, by a Slavic race, belonging to the Russian branch, as the Muscovites or Great Russians, or the White Russians, but having its ethnographic peculiarities and its own original history. There may be as many as nineteen or twenty million Ukrainians. To this race belong also nearly three and one half millions of the population of Galicia, of the Bukovine and of Eastern Hungary, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Notes upon this same theme are found in old texts and in the folk-lore of various European countries; in Spain, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, as also in Slavic countries, in Russia and in Bulgaria. A German journal of 1829 published a translation of a Persian story with the same plot. It will be readily admitted, from numerous analogies, that the plot of the European stories on this theme has really penetrated into our country from Asia, which should be considered as the country of adages and misogynic tales. But
