Şahidî Beg’s Dīvān :|a transcription and textual analysis

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is the Dīvān written in Turkish by Şahidî Beg, one of the Ottoman poets who is thought to have lived in the second half of the sixteenth century and possibly in the first years of the seventeenth century. The main goal of this study is to give information about Şahidî Beg’s life, his work and literary personality as far as possible and to analyse his Dīvān. Accordingly, I have read the only located manuscript copy of the Dīvān and made the transcription of it. After a short introduction, I give information about Şahidî Beg’s life, his work and literary personality only by means of the information that I was able to gain from the manuscript copy, and then I examine the Dīvān in terms of form and content. First, I introduce the manuscript copy of the Dīvān and I present information about the verse forms that were used in the Dīvān and their distribution in the Dīvān, as well as the other structural features such as meter and rhyme. Afterwards, I put forward the characteristics of the language and spelling of the Dīvān and I exhibit the contextual features of the Dīvān by giving examples from the poems. In the final part, I give preliminary information about the methodology that I used in the transcription and the transcription chart, and then I present the transcription of the manuscript copy. I have prepared a small index for proper nouns. I also provide a facsimile of the manuscript copy at the end of my study. (See Appendix A for an extended abstract.)