Shakespeare's Folktale Sources

By Charlotte Artese

Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources argues that seven plays—The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline—derive one or more of their plots directly from folktales. In most cases, scholars have accepted one literary version of the folktale as a source. Recognizing that the same story has circulated orally and occurs in other medieval and early modern written versions allows for new readings of the plays. By acknowledging that a play’s source story circulated in multiple forms, we can see how the playwright was engaging his audience on common ground, retelling a story that may have been familiar to many of them, even the illiterate. We can also view the folktale play as a Shakespearean genre, defined by source as the chronicle histories are, that spans and traces the course of Shakespeare’s career. The fact that Shakespeare reworked folktales so frequently also changes the way we see the history of the literary folk- or fairy-tale, which is usually thought to bypass England and move from Italian novella collections to eighteenth-century French salons. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography listing versions of each folktale source as a resource for further research and teaching.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Jun 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781644530443

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Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources

Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources

Charlotte Artese

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2015 by Charlotte Artese

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-043-6 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-044-3 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Artese, Charlotte, 1973-

Shakespeare’s folktale sources / Charlotte Artese.

            pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.Shakespeare, William, 1564—1616—Sources. 2. Tales—Influence. 3. Folklore—Influence. I. Title.

PR2952.A76 2015

822.3'3—dc23

2015008717

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Like the old tale

Chapter 1: Tell thou the tale

Chapter 2: They will not intercept my tale

Chapter 3: Have I encompassed you?

Chapter 4: You shall not know

Chapter 5: From point to point this story know

Chapter 6: Rely upon it till my tale be heard

Chapter 7: Take pieces for the figure’s sake

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I have accumulated many debts in writing this book. Phyllis Gorfain was an insightful and incisive reader, and the book is incalculably better for her advice. I would also like to thank Julia Oestreich for her careful attention to the manuscript, and an anonymous reader for the University of Delaware Press. Valerie Wayne provided priceless counsel from very early in the project’s development, and generously shared her expertise on Cymbeline in particular. Jim Hirsh, Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Melissa Walter, and Dennis Britton all encouraged and guided this work at crucial junctures. Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt was instrumental in getting me started in folktale studies, and has been a vital support ever since. Jan Harold Brunvand kindly responded to my article on The Taming of the Shrew and its folktale sources, work I could not have done without his prior research and analysis.

The annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America and the American Folklore Society, as venues for presentation and discussion, were essential to this book’s development. At AFS, Bill Hansen, Wolfgang Mieder, Isaac Lévy, and the members of the Medieval and Early Modern Folklore Section were all exceptionally helpful and collegial. I am indebted to SAA seminars led by Jennifer Low, Carolyn Sale, Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn Gajowski, Melissa Walter and Dennis Britton, and Nandini Das and Nick Davies. Seminar members who read and commented on my essays were dedicated and perceptive without fail: Suzanne Gossett, Nichole DeWall, Elizabeth Sturgeon, Andrew Griffin, Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Brooke Conti, Tina Romanelli, Joan Pong Linton, and Susanne Wofford. Jerry Singerman lent his expertise both during and after his SAA workshop, for which I am very grateful. I also benefited greatly from a Folger Institute Faculty Seminar, The Orality/Literacy Heuristic, led by Adam Fox and Paula McDowell.

The community at Agnes Scott College supported me amply as I worked on this book. The college funded a sabbatical leave and travel to the Folger Shakespeare Library. My colleagues, past and present, in the English department are a consistent source of encouragement, inspiration, and wisdom, and many of them have read and commented on portions of this work: Christine Cozzens, Jim Diedrick, Amber Dermont, Steve Guthrie, Waqas Khwaja, Esther Lee, Jamie Stamant, Nicole Stamant, Peggy Thompson, Willie Tolliver, Rachel Trousdale, and Cindy Wu. One of the joys of teaching at a small college is that colleagues in other departments have also read my work as part of a faculty writing group: Jim Abbot, Tracey Laird, Yael Manes, and Jim Wiseman. There is hardly a member of our library staff who has not gone out of her way to help me at some point, by giving me special access to materials or through heroic feats of interlibrary loaning. I have been fortunate to teach a course on Shakespeare and the Folktale regularly, and my students are always opening my eyes to new aspects of Shakespeare’s folktale adaptations. Nicole Gnecco and Gwen Smith served as unofficial student research assistants. My former student Kristin Hall invited me to lecture at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern, which was tremendous fun.

This book did not begin its life as a dissertation, but I received careful training in my graduate program in English at Northwestern University. Wendy Wall, Jeff Masten, and Martin Mueller guided me though my dissertation and taught me skills and habits of mind that I needed for this quite different project.

I deeply appreciate the reliable moral support and good humor of the Caloric Intake Seminar, with special thanks to its convener, Alan Koch. I’m also grateful for the interest that members of the Biblioene Book Club, namely Hod Nalle and Bill Schwartz, have taken in my research.

I could not have finished or even begun this book without my family. Brian Artese, a brilliant colleague as well as a sustaining husband, has spent untold hours over the years talking with me about my work and commenting on what I have written. He has helped me through the highs and lows of this project. Our son, Leo, has graciously shared his mother with this book for most of his life. My parents, Jack and Cynthia Williams, have been unstintingly generous in every possible way, my whole life long. To them I am bound for life and education, as Desdemona says. My brother, Jason, has always had a lively curiosity about my work, and his interest and energy have been inspiring. My family on the Artese side—Shirley, Phil, Lillie, Gina, Jan, Valerie, James—have provided unflagging support and encouragement.

A version of chapter 1 was previously published as "‘Tell Thou the Tale’: Shakespeare’s Taming of Folktales in The Taming of the Shrew," Folklore 120 no. 3 (December 2009): 317–26, c. 2009 by The Folklore Society. It is reprinted in expanded and altered form here by permission of the Taylor and Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com.

A version of chapter 4 was previously published as "‘You Shall Not Know’: Portia, Power, and the Folktale Sources of The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare 5 no. 4 (2009): 325–37, c. 2009 by Charlotte Artese. It is reprinted in expanded and altered form here by permission of the Taylor and Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com.

I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of these journal articles.

All faults in this book remain my own, needless to say, but there would have been many more of them if not for the people mentioned above.

Introduction

Like the old tale

Folktales are part of the mental furniture of Shakespeare’s characters. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick quotes a refrain from Mr. Fox, an English variant of Bluebeard in which a woman escapes marriage to a serial killer: Like the old tale, my lord: ‘It is not so, nor ’twas not so: but indeed, God forbid it should be so,’ a fitting allusion in a play largely about the fear of marriage.¹ In King Lear, Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, intones, Fie, foh and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man. The audience knows what follows in Jack and the Beanstalk: Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll have his bones to grind my bread.² The line thus fits into a network of references to cannibalism in the play, such as Lear’s stated affinity with he that makes his generations messes / To gorge his appetite and Albany’s fear that Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep.³ Mad Ophelia epitomizes a folktale about a baker’s daughter who begrudged the disguised Christ a piece of bread, and so was changed into an owl:⁴ They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Ophelia immediately provides a moral of both the tale and Hamlet: Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.⁵ Shakespeare seems to have expected his audience to be familiar enough with these tales to recognize them given only brief references. None of these allusions resonates fully unless the audience knows those stories. Audiences, readers, and scholars today, in most cases, do not. But if we learn the traditional tales Shakespeare knew, we can see aspects of his plays otherwise largely invisible to us now. By reconstructing a play’s folktale contexts, we gain a heightened awareness of the play as an interaction between the playwright and his envisioned audience, a negotiation that occurs because the folktales belong to both of them.

Shakespeare’s use of folktales goes far beyond the one-liners quoted above. Plots of seven of his plays, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline, derive directly from folktales. The parallels are specific and clear, and in several cases folktale scholars have named the folktales after the plays, as in the cases of the Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure folktales. The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity was known simply as Cymbeline in earlier versions of folktale type indexes.⁶ These seven plays form a group, even a genre: the folktale plays. Like the chronicle history plays, this genre is defined by its source material.⁷ The folktale plays, moreover, can engender a specific kind of audience response, one based on the audience’s belief that they already know the story. An audience knowledgeable about English history might have a similar relationship to the chronicle history plays, one based on presumptive foreknowledge, as might someone watching Othello who knows its novella source. When the source story is traditional, however, the playwright can assume, or imagine, that most or all of the audience already knows it. If the play’s source is common rather than specialized knowledge, if it circulates orally as well as in print and manuscript, if it transcends geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries—that is to say, if it is a folktale—the playwright is free to believe that anyone and maybe everyone in the audience might recognize it whether literate or illiterate, urban or provincial, native-born or foreign, rich or poor. The author can construct a play to engage with the audience’s anticipation of specific events, to fulfill or defy or flirt with their expectations.⁸

In reconstructing Shakespeare’s folktale sources, however, we encounter a major methodological difficulty: We do not and cannot know exactly what versions of each folktale circulated orally in Shakespeare’s day. John Miles Foley notes the melancholy fact that when scholars reconstruct a traditional oral context, we remain ‘on the outside looking in,’ where indeed we must forever remain.⁹ Until the nineteenth century, researchers did not systematically record narratives from the mouths of informants. (Even the Brothers Grimm preached this more than they practiced it.¹⁰) As Adam Fox notes of the Mr. Fox allusion in Much Ado, An ‘old tale’ it may have been in the 1590s, but it was not transcribed from oral tradition until 1821.¹¹ We do, however, have literary versions of the folktales Shakespeare used that predate or only slightly postdate his own literary adaptations of them.¹² Shakespeare scholars often know one or another of these literary variants as a play’s source rather than realizing that the published version is only one iteration of the folktale tradition on which the play draws. For example, Giovanni Fiorentino’s story from Il Pecorone, regarded as the source for Merchant of Venice, is but one variant of A Pound of Flesh folktale. Shakespeare in fact seems to have had Il Pecorone before him when writing, but even earlier literary versions of A Pound of Flesh show that it did not originate with the Italian novella. Many oral renditions of the folktale from a wide geographic range from India to Ireland have been recorded since the nineteenth century, which suggests that they do not derive from the pre- and early modern European literary versions, but rather from an older oral tradition. The conservative nature of traditional narrative, that it can remain recognizably itself throughout centuries of transmission, can be seen when Shakespeare cites folktale formulas in nearly the same forms as Joseph Jacobs recorded them in nineteenth-century England: Fee-fi-fo-fum and It is not so, nor it was not so. And God forbid it should be so.¹³

The working assumption of this project, in attempting to excavate the folktale traditions that Shakespeare was working within, is that if multiple literary versions prior to and contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s plays and multiple oral versions postdating (necessarily) the plays exist, then the story was traditional and likely circulated in both written and oral forms in early modern Europe, some of which were apparently accessible to Shakespeare and members of his audience. As G. K. Hunter pointed out in a 1971 essay on Shakespeare’s Reading, the playwright seems to have been especially attracted to narratives available in multiple forms, even more so than other Elizabethan writers:

the wisdom of the Elizabethans was nearly all traditional wisdom; the point in that tradition that the modern critic selects as source is often arbitrary and tendentious. . . . The source-hunter is faced with an embarrassing wealth of potential sources, and only minutiae (often untrustworthy) can suggest preferences. Sometimes indeed the author seems to have been well aware of the variety of tellings to which the tale was liable and to have used the dialectic that is thus set up as part of the imaginative world of the play. . . . It is worth noting that Shakespeare seems to have been more assiduous in collecting variant sources than were his fellows.¹⁴

We can now extend this observation beyond reading to include hearing by arranging the evidence that remains available to us about the folktales Shakespeare adapted as they circulated orally as well as literarily. By doing so, we gain a fuller sense of the tradition in which the author was working, and that he shared with his audience. Peter Burke defends the inevitably speculative enterprise of reconstructing certain aspects of early modern culture: These more elaborate rituals have left too few traces for the historian to reconstruct them with any degree of accuracy. However, the attempt must be made because a picture of traditional popular culture without ritual would be even more misleading than a historian’s reconstruction.¹⁵ We are more fortunate in recovering the folktales Shakespeare drew upon, because they have left quite a number of traces, not only in premodern and early modern literary versions, but also in later descendants of the same tradition recorded from oral informants. Bruce Smith points to the fact that we know the ballad The Fair Flower of Northumberland from Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1597), and then from an oral performance by Elizabeth Beattie in 1826. He notes that, "The way from Jack of Newbury to Miss E. Beattie is literally uncharted territory."¹⁶ It may always be uncharted and unrecoverable, the path of transmission between the early modern literary version and the oral version collected in the nineteenth century, but we can still connect these two kinds of evidence.

When we reconstruct the tradition in which an individual work participates, what we gain is the invoking of a context that is enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself, that brings the lifeblood of generations of poems and performances to the individual performance or text, as John Miles Foley puts it.¹⁷ Albert Lord, in his classic study of traditional oral epic, explains the project and process:

Each theme, large or small—one might even say, each formula—has around it an aura of meaning which has been put there by all the contexts in which it has occurred in the past. It is the meaning that has been given it by the tradition in its creativeness. . . . The communication of this supra-meaning is possible because of the community of experience of poet and audience. At our distance of time and space we can approach an understanding of the supra-meaning only by steeping ourselves in as much material in traditional poetry or in a given tradition as is available.¹⁸

In this book, I hope to set forth readings that are steeped in traditional narratives, in an effort to understand the community of experience of poet and audience from our distance in time and space.

The logic of attempting to reconstruct the oral traditions of Shakespeare and his audience becomes clearer as we recognize that the culture of early modern England was very much oral as well as literate,¹⁹ as were the folktales, and as was the theater itself. Plays began as written texts, memorized and publicly performed, and sometimes later printed and circulated.²⁰ This theater is an example of what folklorists call semiliterate and semi-oral practices, in which, for example, one person reads aloud to a gathered group.²¹ Puzzling over how Shakespeare obtained a copy of Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, we might do well to keep in mind the possibility that someone who had read the story then told it to the playwright, as Leo Salingar has suggested.²² Such a hypothetical scenario already takes us a small step away from a book-centered notion of sources. While some folktale scholars still wrangle over whether particular stories are truly literary or oral,²³ Stith Thompson articulates a sensible middle path:

If the use of the term folktale to include such literary narratives seems somewhat broad, it can be justified on practical grounds if on no other, for it is impossible to make a complete separation of the written and the oral traditions. Often, their interrelation is so close and so inextricable as to present one of the most baffling problems the folklore scholar encounters. They differ somewhat in their behavior, it is true, but they are alike in their disregard of originality of plot and pride of authorship.

Nor is a complete separation of these two kinds of narrative tradition by any means necessary for their understanding. . . . Frequently a story is taken from the people, recorded in a literary document, carried across continents or preserved through centuries, and then retold to a humble entertainer who adds it to his repertory.²⁴

Traditional narrative, like early modern culture, and particularly the theater, is a thorough imbrication of the written and the oral.

By recognizing that the line of division between literary and oral cultures is permeable both for the folktale and within early modern culture (and really, all culture), we can see how Shakespeare’s adaptations of traditional stories spoke to a variety of audience members, and not just those few who would have known, say, Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, which as far as we know was not translated from the Italian in Shakespeare’s time.²⁵ Adam Fox warns: Any crude binary opposition between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ culture fails to accommodate the reciprocity between the different media by this time; just as any crude dichotomy between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ fails to illuminate a spectrum of participation.²⁶ We can easily imagine how literate members of an audience might have known both written and oral versions of source stories, as Shakespeare himself seems to have. Mary Ellen Lamb points out that the sources and contexts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream allow it to [p]lay[] its music simultaneously in learned and popular keys and demonstrates a fluidity of identification possible for middling and elite groups alike.²⁷ Particularly tantalizing, however, is the possibility that reconstructing the oral circulation of Shakespeare’s source stories will allow us insight into members of his audience about whom we have little evidence. Bruce Smith suggests that, The intersection of voice, media, and community offers a way of recovering the subjective experience of people who did not have direct access to print. These are people whose voice-based cultures are available to us only if we come at them by indirections.²⁸ Even looking at the range of pre-Shakespearean literary versions of a source story, as a number of studies have done,²⁹ results in losing our access to that portion of the audience who could not have known those versions. Everyone may have been exposed to the oral versions, only a relatively small percentage to the written.

Seeing that a wider range of Shakespeare’s audience might already have known his plots directs attention toward the audience and not simply toward the author in this source study. The reason Shakespeareans have come to regard one literary version of a folktale as the source of a play, with any others demoted to analogues or disregarded, is that source study traditionally has been author-centered. If the aim of source study is to see exactly how Shakespeare transmuted his leaden sources into the gold of his plays, then of course it needs to locate the exact text that he read. For Geoffrey Bullough, whose Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays remains indispensible, the point of such study is to re-create the mind of the author. He defines the critic’s task as entering into the imagination of the poet, so to recreate the moment of vision and the process of composition so as to apprehend the work in its totality.³⁰ In order to occupy Shakespeare’s brain (much as in Borges’ story Shakespeare’s Memory), the critic must determine exactly which version of a story the poet drew on. The traditional nature of many of Shakespeare’s sources has been obscured by this attempt to determine which particular version of the narrative the author used. This approach is epitomized in the comment of Kenneth Muir, another scholar of Shakespeare’s sources, on the many versions of the plot of Measure for Measure: Other versions of the story need not be listed as they appear to have had no influence, direct or indirect, on Shakespeare’s play.³¹ These other versions, however, may have influenced the audience or offer evidence about the story as it circulated orally. More recent approaches, exemplified in the 2009 collection Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne, employ a less linear, hierarchical, and essentialist model of source study, and I hope my work on folktale sources contributes to this project.

Recognizing the folktale sources of these plays also adds to our sense of the literary folktale’s or fairy tale’s history. This history is usually taken to begin with Giovanni Francesco Straparola, to continue with Giambattista Basile, and then to move to France with Charles Perrault and the fairy tale–writing salonistes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The literary tale is generally thought to have skipped over Britain in this progression. As Fox writes,

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was scarcely any development of the literary evolution of the fairy-tale. There was no British equivalent of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697), which recorded stories from the mouths of the French peasantry in the seventeenth century. Instead, we are left with partial and fragmentary references in the drama and other writings of the period from which to speculate on the features of the English tradition.³²

The argument of this book is that Shakespeare goes well beyond partial and fragmentary references to folktales. Shakespeare adapts folktales found both in Straparola’s collection, which predates his work, and in Basile’s, which postdates it, placing him very much in the mainstream of the literary folktale.³³ Jack Zipes sees Shakespeare and other key figures of English literature as taking the first steps toward an English literary fairy tale that proved abortive:

England, another powerful maritime country [like Italy], was the other nation that began cultivating a literary fairy-tale tradition. There are fairy-tale elements in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1386–1400), in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–1596), and, of course, in many of Shakespeare’s plays such as King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest, all written between 1590 and 1611. However, due to the Puritan hostility toward amusement during the seventeenth century, the fairy tale as a genre was not able to flourish in England.³⁴

A word about terminology: The term fairy tale is usually considered to include only those tales involving magic. Straparola and Basile, however, also recount non-magical or realistic folktales, which, as I will discuss later, are precisely the kind Shakespeare favors. If we think in terms of the literary folktale, then Boccaccio’s Decameron would predate Straparola, and Shakespeare treats two of the folktales included in that collection. Shakespeare’s folktale plays, and perhaps the early modern London theater as a whole, then become an English link in the history of the literary folktale. Shakespeare does differ from the other writers in this history because he wrote plays, not prose fictions. Although he wrote literary works, like the tale writers, these texts were performed by actors in a public space, a connection with storytellers’ oral performances of folk narratives.

Methodology

While this book treats seven plays with folktale sources, only one of them, The Taming of the Shrew, is among the four Shakespeare plays that Zipes mentions as containing fairy-tale elements. I also do not consider what is probably the most famous example of a folktale in a Shakespeare play, Love Like Salt (ATU 923), in which a daughter is expelled for giving an unsatisfactory account of her love to her father, in King Lear. I do not treat Lear in this study because I have here limited myself to plays based directly on versions of a folktale. The story of Lear and his daughters ultimately derives from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of England, which incorporates the Love Like Salt tale. Hamlet and Macbeth are likewise based on legendary histories that include folktale types and motifs. Three more plays, As You Like It, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale derive from literary romances that also adapt folktales or motifs. Even plays that seem securely based in classical literature have some relation to the folktale. The Comedy of Errors’s source, Plautus’s Menaechmi, bears affinities to the international folktale The Twins or Blood-Brothers (ATU 303);³⁵ Romeo and Juliet is a version of Pyramus and Thisbe (ATU 899A), which belongs to the folk tradition as well as to Ovid. Other plays have plots that are roughly analogous to folktales or contain folktale motifs, but do not bear the close resemblance of the plays studied in this volume: Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing (to The Innocent Slandered Maiden, ATU 883A), Twelfth Night (to A Young Woman Disguised as a Man Is Wooed by the Queen, ATU 514**), and The Tempest (The Magic Flight, ATU 313). I hope to address in later work those plays that include folktales and folktale elements but cannot be said to directly derive from folktales. Even from this quick overview, we can see that more of Shakespeare’s plays than not belong in some way to the literary folktale tradition.

Literary scholars are sometimes guilty of speaking imprecisely about folktales: for example, seeing Helena from All’s Well That Ends Well as an inversion of the fairy-tale hero winning his princess bride, rather than viewing her as an entirely typical heroine of the folktale The Man Who Deserted His Wife. Fortunately, more of us are becoming aware of the excellent tools generated by folklorists to identify and classify folktales. The most important for this study is the catalog The Types of International Folktale. This three-volume, comprehensive typology is the third generation of this tool, first created by Antti Aarne, revised and expanded by Stith Thompson, and most recently redone in 2004 by Hans-Jörg Uther. Each tale type is given a number, referred to as ATU numbers after Aarne, Thompson, and Uther. The Man Who Deserted His Wife, for example, is ATU 891. This index briefly summarizes each folktale, and a bibliography follows. Having folktales so clearly delineated is, of course, a tremendous help in identifying a story and finding its analogues. The catalog—by listing common combinations with other folktales, and by including the folktale motifs that constitute the stories—recognizes that folktales are found in innumerable forms that sometimes resist tidy classifications. Folktale performance studies also offer a useful complement to this kind of structuralism by reminding us that a folktale only exists in each individual iteration.³⁶

Stith Thompson’s 1958 Motif-Index of Folk-Literature classifies folktale motifs. A key motif, for example, in The Man Who Deserted His Wife is the smaller plot unit, the departing husband’s charge to his virgin wife to bear him a child, Motif H1187, a significant element of All’s Well That Ends Well. I will identify folktales and motifs using these standard references throughout, and use the ATU definitions as my own.³⁷ (Numbers from Thompson’s revision of Aarne’s catalog are labeled AT or Aa-Th.³⁸ I occasionally refer to an older, AT tale type.) I do so in part for methodological rigor, avoiding any tendency to create my own typologies that correspond neatly to Shakespeare’s plays, and also to optimize dialogue with folktale scholars. While Geoffrey Bullough commendably recognizes the role of folktales in Shakespeare’s works, he makes no attempt in his discussion of them in the General Conclusion of Narrative and Dramatic Sources to connect them with folklorists’ terminology and systems:

As we have seen in these volumes it is not difficult to find analogues to the basic situations in many of Shakespeare’s plays. What is surprising, and significant, is that so much of his source-material contains strong folk-elements which anthropologists have traced in oral story and legend. Among these we may