Pick the small ones

Marina Warner

• Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from around the World by Mineke Schipper
  Yale, 422 pp, £35.00, April 2004, ISBN 0 300 10249 6

Dryden and D’Avenant’s debonair travesty of The Tempest pairs the innocent heroine, Dorinda, with Hippolito, a male juvenile lead of equal springtime guilelessness. While Miranda knows only Prospero and Caliban, and barely remembers her mother, neither Dorinda nor Hippolito has ever seen any other member of the opposite sex. Hippolito finds that Prospero left behind a single book, overlooked when he drowned his library. It’s a manual of proverbial wisdom, and Hippolito eagerly begins to read the adages and maxims, hoping to discover what a young man in his position should look for in a female partner, what he can expect from their relation, and how he should treat her. As Gramsci observed, ‘creating a new culture is not just a matter of individuals making “original” discoveries but also, and above all, of disseminating already discovered truths.’ Proverbs contribute to this process: they are repositories of ancient lore. A proverb used to be called a ‘gnome’, until the garden variety usurped the word, and ‘gnome’ comes from the same root as know.