RICHARD HOLE

Richard Hole (1746-1803) was an English poet and antiquary. He was born in Exeter and was educated at Exeter College, London, where he graduated in 1771, after which he was ordained in the Anglican Church. In 1792 he became Bishop of Exeter. From an early age Hole wrote poetry and he continued writing during his studies. In 1789 he published his long poem ‘Arthur, or the northern enchantment’, in seven books. He was the first literary critic to dedicate a book-length essay to the Thousand and one nights to assess its merits. It was published in 1797 under the title Remarks on the Arabian nights’ entertainments; in which the origin of Sindbad’s voyages and other Oriental fictions is particularly considered.

The fragments:

The aim of Richard Hole’s essay Remarks on the Arabian nights’ entertainments is to discuss the literary value of the Thousand and one nights as an exotic work of literature. Hole begins with observing that the work is often depreciated as trivial and even obscene, but he subsequently argues that it deserves a place among the great pieces of literature in the world, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and the Vedas. To support this evaluation he especially discusses the cycle of ‘Sindbad of the sea,’ to examine the motifs which resemble either similar motifs in Homer’s work (the episode of the Cyclops), or observations recorded by ancient travellers an historians. This verisimilitude in ‘Sindbad’ is used as an argument to state that the Thousand and one nights should be considered a genuine and serious literary work among the other ‘classics’. It is remarkable that Hole seems to have a vision of a ‘world literature’, that is a type of literary works which may be disparate in subject and form, but should still be evaluated as being of equal quality and as belonging to a corpus which represents the heritage of a global literary tradition. This idea was also, more explicitly, expressed by Wieland and Goethe.

Remarks on the Arabian nights’ entertainments; in which the origins of Sindbad’s voyages and other Oriental fictions is particularly considered, T. Cadell/W. Davies, London 1797, pp. 1-99.