მივიწყებული წარსულის საიდუმლო
Mystery of the Forgotten Past

Summary/Abstract: This paper is a review on Elguja Khintibidze's monograph The Man in Panther- Skin in England in the Age of Shakespeare. A view - totally new for the history of Georgian culture – is advanced and argued in the monograph: Rustaveli's The Man in Panther-Skin was used in early seventeenth-century English literature. Two plays (A King and No King and Philaster) by dramatists contemporaries of and immediate successors to William Shakespeare – Beamont and Fletcher - whose plot source was believed to be unknown, were written through modification of the love story of Nestan and Tariel of The Man in Panther-Skin. Firstly the story of A King and No King unfolds at the royal court of Iberia or Georgia, secondly the name of a main character of the play, princess, Panthea points to Nestan’s symbolic name “panther”; The love story plot of The Man in Panther-Skin in Fhilaster evinces certain characteristic features of the MPS love (the inordinate hypebolization of love; the love, which is somehow intertwined with the desire of lovers to inherit the throne; the disclosure of love comes from the woman; lover seeks refuge in dense forest; woman’s letters to her love etc.). Hence the establishment of such involvement of the MPS in early-seventeenth century English literary life opens up new prospects for future Rustaveli studies. Rustaveli's work call for a study in the developmental process of medieval and Renaissance literary-philosophical and social thought – both in the area of oriental and Western cultural peripeteias – not only from the typological angle, but along the line of direct contacts as well. This unexpected emergence of the MPS in the centre of Europe’s social and literary life may not have been an entirely accidental and isolated development. Long-term research is needed in this direction.

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