Shakespeare and Folktales

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You probably know where Shakespeare got the ideas for his plays. The Histories come from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Caesar and other Roman plays depend on Plutarch’s Lives. The Comedy of Errors comes from Plautus’s Menaechmi. Troilus and Cressida borrows from the Illiad. The Winter’s Tale repackages Robert Greene’s Pandosto. But what if we told you that a number of his plays draw inspiration from folktales, versions of which exist not only in England, but all over the world? Charlotte Artese’s new book, Shakespeare and the Folktale, anthologizes some of the folktales that made their way into Shakespeare’s plays. For example, Lear includes elements of a story sometimes called “Love Like Salt,” part of a larger tradition of Cinderella stories. The Merchant of Venice plays out much like a Chilean folktale called “White Onion.” Wacky tales of twins predate not only Shakespeare, but also Plautus. We talk to Artese about some of these stories and about how she became interested in folklore’s influence on Shakespeare (it involves Led Zeppelin). She is Chair of the English Department at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Shakespeare and the Folktale was published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Artese is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 18, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “The Strangest Tale That Ever I Heard,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical helped from Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Kevin Rinker at public radio station WABE in Atlanta, Georgia.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you're someone who studies Shakespeare, I'd bet you're confident about where Shakespeare got the idea for King Lear.
0:07.1	But what if I said this instead?
0:10.1	You can draw a straight line between the story of King Lear and Cinderella.
0:17.8	Do I have your attention?
0:26.4	Music Do I have your attention? From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:31.1	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.
0:34.1	Plutarch, Ovid, Hollandshed's Chronicles, those are the widely accepted sources of many of Shakespeare's plays and characters.
0:42.6	But they're not the only ones.
0:44.3	There are researchers who, over the years, have found another source of Shakespeare's plays.
0:50.3	And that source is folk tales.
0:54.1	Stories passed along, mostly by word of mouth, over the centuries.
0:59.2	The parallels these scholars find are remarkable.
1:03.1	Between Symboline and a folktale called the Wager on the Wife's Chastity,
1:08.2	between All's Well it ends well and the Sultan's camp follower. And, as we said,
1:15.3	between King Lear and Cinderella. Charlotte Artis, chair of the English department at Agnes Scott
1:21.5	College in Atlanta, is one of these folktale researchers. Her new book, Shakespeare and the Folktale, is an anthology
1:29.6	that draws these parallels as vividly as you could want. We invited her in to talk in a
1:35.1	podcast that we call The Strangest Tale That Ever I Heard. Charlotte Artis is interviewed by
1:42.7	Barbara Bogave. What do we know about fairy tales in Shakespeare's time, how commonly they were told, and what ones he was likely familiar with?
1:52.0	There's some interesting clues in Shakespeare's plays. So in Hamlet, for example, Ophelia in her madness, says,
1:59.0	They say the owl was a baker's daughter.
2:01.6	And this doesn't mean much to us now, but there was a folk tale in which Jesus and St. Peter went walking around on earth disguised.
	...

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