A Narratological Approach to Nizami's Leyli-va-Majnoon and Skakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

With the aid of his genuine poetic imagination, Nizami Ganjavi created an everlasting masterpiece in Persian literature through a local story named ‘Leyli-va-Majnoon’. His fantastic achievement inspired many poets to follow his model. On the other hand, William Shakespeare picked the story of “Romeo and Juliet”, which was well-known in Elizabethan England, transforming it to a celebrated romantic tragedy. The assumption of the present paper is that by taking a naratological approach especially Griema's actantial model of narratology into account, the narratives of Nizami's Leyli-va-Majnoon and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet can be compared. It may be prudent to first intoduce the two narratives before specifying their narratological similarities along the axes of Griema's model. Simultaneously, the attitudes of the two works toward the woman will be discussed.