The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act

By James Branch Cabell and Mint Editions

The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act (1921) is a comic fantasy play by James Branch Cabell. Set in a world where history and fantasy collide, where a loyal Count can rise to defy the Duke he so diligently serves, The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. “Am I to be welcomed merely for the sake of my gems? You were more gracious, you were more beautifully like your lovely name, on the fortunate day that I first encountered you … only six weeks ago, and only yonder, where the path crosses the highway. But now that I esteem myself your friend, you greet me like a stranger.” Roaming the hills on the outskirts of Florence, Graciosa, the lovely daughter of Balthazar Valori, encounters the jewel merchant Guido. Examining his wares, she is drawn to a magnificent set of pearls intended for Count Eglamore, a man who informed on her cousin Cibo, a man her family has sworn an oath to kill. Set in a fictionalized Tuscany of the Renaissance era, The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act is a captivating tale of jealousy, revenge, and the lengths to which a man will go for love. Cabell’s work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act, however, is to understand that the issues therein—the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women—were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. This edition of James Branch Cabell’s The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513297255

James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.

Book preview

The Jewel Merchants

A Comedy in One Act

James Branch Cabell

The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act was first published in 1921.

This edition published by Mint Editions 2021.

ISBN 9781513295756 | E-ISBN 9781513297255

Published by Mint Editions®

minteditionbooks.com

Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens

Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger

Project Manager: Micaela Clark

Typesetting: Westchester Publishing Services

CONTENTS

The Author’s Prologue

Original Cast

Begin Reading

THE AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE

Prudence urges me here to forestall detection, by conceding that this brief play has no pretension to literary quality. It is a piece in its inception designed for, and in its making swayed by, the requirements of the little theatre stage. The one virtue which anybody anywhere could claim for The Jewel Merchants is the fact that it acts easily and rather effectively.

And candor compels the admission forthwith that the presence of this anchoritic merit in the wilderness is hardly due to me. When circumstances and the Little Theatre League of Richmond combined to bully me into contriving the dramatization of a short story called Balthazar’s Daughter, I docilely converted this tale into a one-act play of which you will find hereinafter no sentence. The comedy I wrote is now at one with the lost dramaturgy of Pollio and of Posidippus, and is even less likely ever to be resurrected for mortal auditors.

It read, I still think, well enough: I am certain that, when we came to rehearse, the thing did not act at all, and that its dialogue, whatever its other graces, had the defect of being unspeakable. So at each rehearsal we—by which inclusive pronoun I would embrace the actors and the producing staff at large, and with especial (metaphorical) ardor Miss Louise Burleigh, who directed all—changed here a little, and there a little more; and shifted this bit, and deleted the other, and tried out everybody’s suggestions generally, until we got at least the relief of witnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my manuscript was enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge of legibility, as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten yesterday, the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the gist but not the phrasing of what was meant) delivered naturally.

This process made, at all events, for what we in particular wanted, which was a play that the League could stage for half an evening’s entertainment; but it left existent not a shred of the rhetorical fripperies which I had in the beginning concocted, and it made of the actual first public performance a collaboration with almost as many contributing authors as though the production had been a musical comedy.

And if