Frames

The Arabian Nights is a collection of stories within stories, also known as "frames." One narrator's story contains or frames another narrator's story. The outer or first frame is the story of the King who, in revenge for the infidelity of his first wife, marries a new maiden every night, takes her virginity, and slays her in the morning. This frame contains the second frame of Scheherazade's story. In order to preserve her life, Scheherazade tells a seemingly endless story, and in her story, characters begin to tell their stories (additional frames). The convention of having a narrator tell the story of other narrators telling stories is seen in such works as Dante's Divine Comedy, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Medieval or Archaic Language

Burton's translation is especially characterized by an ornate, archaic language style that he developed in order to imitate the medieval Arabic in...