Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories

Abstract

Charlotte Artese's new anthology Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories is a companion to her 2015 collection Shakespeare's Folktale Sources. As in her prior book, Artese points to folktale sources for several of Shakespeare's plays, noting how previous Shakespeare scholars have neglected the folktale. This volume encompasses eight plays: The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Cymbeline, and The Tempest.By focusing on folktales as inspirations and sources for the plays, Artese draws parallels between oral traditions and stories performed theatrically. In so doing, she engages with Shakespeare's texts as his audience might have—starting from a common knowledge of tales and tropes to establish a shared story language and to enter more deeply into the play world. Artese has curated a selection of tales to provide readers with a spectrum of stories, pushing beyond the Eurocentric into Asian, North American, and South American narratives. Providing a variety of tales subtly reinforces the frequently touted “universality” and endurance of Shakespeare's plays. Including tales collected and published after the plays’ own origins reinforces the fluidity of influences. There is no definite proof of origin or encounter, but rather an opportunity to explore beyond the texts.The introduction to the volume provides a reader's guide and answers the great question of how useful are folktales that were collected 300 years after the play's first performance. Although not absolute source texts, the folktales provide an intriguing way to approach both the plays and the oral traditions with which Shakespeare and his audiences might have been familiar. As Artese explains, “birds and alligators help us to imagine their ancestors the dinosaurs” (p. 2), and so, too, might we imagine the stories told in sixteenth-century England. With this in mind, Artese's book invites us to look backward and sideways for influences, and not to the future to inform those interpretations. To this end, she introduces each play in the collection with an overview of sources, demonstrating how each tale type is found in the plot.This is not a consistent approach, as not all of the plays allow for such robust readings; some plays have three or four potential folktale sources, while others have only one. There are also imbalances in the presence of folktales in both primary plot lines and subplots. Notable is the inclusion of the framing device at the top of The Taming of the Shrew, often excised from performance: Artese gives the “Lord for a Day” (ATU 1531) equal weight to “The Taming of the Shrew” (ATU 901) and “The Wicked Queen Reformed by Whipping” (ATU 905A). Similarly, The Merchant of Venice gives a small nod to the Three Caskets decision motif driving the subplot of the marriage of Portia, while giving heavier focus to the “Pound of Flesh” (ATU 890) tales that are obviously more connected to the main story. Having just one example of a subplot tale makes one wish for a deeper exploration of these parallel tales and how they might work together in the creation of the wider play narrative. Because motifs, rather than an obvious tale, often drive these subplots, Artese's approach starts to feel limiting. Focusing on only one motif, or on only one tale that exemplifies the motif chosen, narrows the view.Cymbeline is the most robustly explored play in this anthology, with three folktales identified: “The Wager on the Wife's Chastity” (ATU 882), “Snow White” (ATU 709), and “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” (ATU 790A). Although not surprising that Cymbeline contains so many potential sources, seeing such a broad range of tales influencing this play is a reminder that multiple tales may be found in multiple plays. It would be wonderful to see the interconnectedness of plays and tale types across both volumes of Artese's work, to begin to understand the web of stories that she is building as a pathway into Shakespeare's texts.At the same time, The Tempest relies on a singular tale, “The Magic Flight” (ATU 313), which almost undermines its own inclusion. As Artese points out, the plot of The Tempest follows the gradual then sharp loss of magic. Although she provides ample examples of magic flights as possible sources of Miranda and Ferdinand's romance, it feels as though something is missing to engage with the rest of the text. We see another example of this in Titus Andronicus; the source material is explicitly classical, which might argue for its exclusion from the anthology, if the story of Lucretia was not so overly “Maiden without Hands” (ATU 706). As with some of the plays in the collection, secondary plots and characters serve as the entry points for finding the folktales’ influences.The anthology stays away from some of the more obviously popular or supernatural of Shakespeare's works and does not touch on the histories. This emphasis on some of the more “troublesome” plays in the canon opens this collection to perhaps its greatest weakness: the emphasis on particular themes or story lines forces some plays into fitting with particular tale types and opens the question of what we might see if more pieces and stories were featured. As Shakespeare so rarely cared for narrative fidelity, could it be helpful to more deeply explore the specific motifs that are present without relying on a stable narrative? The consideration of folktale sources is a useful and novel approach, but the inclusion of a concise list of specific motifs along with the tales and their bibliographic information may be of greater value. When the tales and the plays seem misaligned or not fitted as neatly as we might wish, seeing specific motifs might help fill the gaps.Shakespeare's plays exist at the intersection of scholarship and performance; selling them to the public requires constantly proving the relevance of their themes and seeking inspiration for interpretation. With no question of copyright, Shakespeare's plays may be rewritten and interpreted to fit the needs of the age, the audience, and the community. Artese's anthology reinforces and opens the mind to another way to meet those audience needs, starting with the stories of the people. It invites speculation of what a theater company could do with this anthology as the starting point. This volume is a wonderful companion for any scholar or practitioner of classical theater, and it embraces the crossroads of study.