Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories ed. by Charlotte Artese

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories ed. by Charlotte Artese Sara Cleto (bio) Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories. Edited by Charlotte Artese, Princeton University Press, 2019, 373 pp. In 2015, Charlotte Artese published her groundbreaking text Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, in which she demonstrated how folktales profoundly shaped and influenced Shakespeare’s plays. While scholars had previously noted connections between folktales and Shakespeare’s plots and characters, these observations were largely restricted to motif spotting. In Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, Artese argued that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are deeply entwined with folklore and, more specifically, that seven of the plays have plots that are derived directly from folktales. Furthermore, she illuminated the ways in which the network of Shakespeare’s plays and their narrative elements function much like folktales themselves. Artese’s new book, Shakespeare and the Folktale, is the logical and welcome extension of her previous project. In this anthology, she has collected [End Page 383] and edited the folktales that are the backbone of her argument: the folktales that animate Shakespeare’s plays. As she explains in her introduction, “[T]his anthology aims to augment our knowledge of Shakespeare’s sources and influences by supplying examples of his folktales’ sources rather than revisiting his acknowledged literary ones,” which are already generally recognized and are readily available in other texts (3). The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, a bibliography, and an extensive index. Each chapter addresses one Shakespeare play, including a brief discussion of that play’s sources followed by the full text of five to eight related folktales. In Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, Artese considered seven plays: The Taming of the Shrew (1592), Titus Andronicus (1592–93), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597/1602), The Merchant of Venice (1596–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1598–1608), Measure for Measure (1603–04), and Cymbeline (1611), each of which features one or more plots drawn directly from a folk-tale. The contents of Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology overlap with but do not replicate those found in the earlier book. The new anthology includes a chapter on King Lear (1606), which “adapts a legendary history that includes folktales and folk narrative motifs,” a chapter on The Comedy of Errors (1594), which has a classical Roman source as well as a folktale source, and a chapter on The Tempest (1610–11), “whose dependence on the ‘Magic Flight’ folktale is partial and incomplete but fascinating nonetheless” (7). Artese does not include chapters on The Merry Wives of Windsor or Measure for Measure because of the lack of relevant folktale versions available to print in English. There is a significant methodological challenge to Artese’s project, which is, simply put, that we do not know exactly which versions of each folktale circulated in Shakespeare’s day, let alone which ones he personally encountered. The very nature of oral tradition makes a perfect reconstruction of Shakespeare’s folktale sources impossible. However, this does not make Artese’s project any less worthwhile. We know that the folktale plots that underpin Shakespeare’s plays existed before he ever set pen to paper because medieval versions survived (2). Though we will never know exactly which versions Shakespeare encountered orally, “folktales collected in the modern world (the nineteenth century and after) can give us insight into the stories Shakespeare and his audience might have known” (2). The folktales that Artese has assembled are, therefore, not Shakespeare’s exact sources but instead “later members of the genus of his sources” (2). Because we cannot know the exact sources—and because Shakespeare himself may likely have been working from several different oral versions—Artese has included several examples of each folktale type in the collection to provide a sense of possible variations. “Attending to the folktale in its many guises can [End Page 384] give us a clearer sense of the story tradition available to Shakespeare, although we cannot reconstruct it exactly” (3). Because the anthology represents an educated and creative reconstruction rather than a precise replica of Shakespeare’s sources, Artese’s primary criteria for selection was how closely a folktale resembled the Shakespeare play...