Shakespeare and the Folktale

An Anthology of Stories

Charlotte Artese, Charlotte Artese

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691197920
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

An international collection of the traditional tales that inspired some of Shakespeare's greatest plays Shakespeare knew a good story when he heard one, and he wasn't afraid to borrow from what he heard or read, especially traditional folktales. The Merchant of Venice, for example, draws from "A Pound of Flesh, " while King Lear begins in the same way as "Love Like Salt, " with a king asking his three daughters how much they love him, then banishing the youngest when her cryptic reply displeases him. This unique anthology presents more than forty versions of folktales related to eight Shakespeare 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. These fascinating and diverse tales come from Europe, the Middle East, India, the Caribbean, and South America, and include stories by Gerald of Wales, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Giambattista Basile, J. M. Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, Italo Calvino, and many more. Organized by play, each chapter includes a brief introduction discussing the intriguing connections between the play and the gathered folktales. Shakespeare and the Folktale can be read for the pure pleasure these lively tales give as much as for the insight into Shakespeare's plays they provide.

VII.CYMBELINE

Cymbeline is Shakespeare’s most magisterial combination of folktale materials. In this late play, he combines one folk-tale plot, “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity” (ATU 882), with another, “Snow White” (ATU 709). Their point of connection in the play is a motif both tales share, the moment when the villain or villainess sends an agent to kill the heroine, but the agent instead allows her to go free and fakes the required evidence of her death. In the Grimms’ “Snow White,” this compassionate executioner is the huntsman who abandons Snow White in the forest and gives her stepmother a boar’s liver and lungs to eat rather than the child’s. The “Snow White” tale is closely related to another set of folktales that have also left their mark on Cymbeline, tales in which a sister leaves home, finds her long-lost brothers in the wilderness, and keeps house for them (as Snow White does for the dwarves) until disaster strikes.

“The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity” folktale commonly begins with a marriage, often between a rich man and a poor woman. A man challenges the husband to a large-stakes bet that he can seduce the husband’s wife. The man finds a way to fake carnal knowledge of the heroine. He either sneaks into her bedroom and spies on her or has a female accomplice do so. He then is able to report to the husband details of the woman’s appearance, most damningly a mark on some private part of her body, and he often also presents some stolen personal possession of hers, such as a ring. The husband, emotionally and financially stricken from losing the bet, either sends an agent to kill his wife, or attacks her and leaves her for dead himself. The wife survives her husband’s attempt on her life or is released by his agent. She then finds work, often disguised as a man and in a masculine profession. Eventually she is reunited with her husband, and is able to summon the villain and reveal the truth to everyone. The husband and wife resume their marriage.

Cymbeline follows the “Wager” plot closely. The play begins not with the marriage of the heroine, Imogen, but with the fallout from her marriage. Her father, King Cymbeline, is enraged by her marriage to Posthumus, “a poor but worthy gentleman” (1.1.7),^* and has found occasion to banish him. Class disparity features in this marriage, as in many of the folktales, but here it is the bride who out-ranks the husband. Posthumus, having taken refuge in Rome, makes a wager with the villain Iachimo, who claims he can seduce Imogen with no more than a letter of introduction. Imogen roundly rejects Iachimo, but allows him to store a chest in her bedchamber. Iachimo conceals himself in the chest and emerges after Imogen is asleep. (The villain uses the same ploy in a Scottish version of the folktale not included here.^†) He observes a distinctive mole beneath her left breast and steals a bracelet Posthumus gave Imogen as a love token before his departure. Posthumus, convinced and devastated by these false proofs, orders his faithful servant Pisanio to lure Imogen into the countryside and kill her. Pisanio instead supplies Imogen with boy’s clothes and a plan—in the folktales the heroine takes care of these matters herself. Pisanio gives Post-humus a bloodied cloth as evidence of Imogen’s death. The plot then becomes parallel to “Snow White,” as I will discuss later, but the cross-dressed Imogen eventually enters into the service of the Roman ambassador to Britain, according to Pisanio’s plan. When the Romans are captured by the British, with whom they are at war, Imogen finds herself back at her royal father’s court, along with Posthumus and Iachimo. The truth comes out, Imogen and Post-humus are reconciled, and Iachimo is forgiven his misdeeds. Shakespeare most likely knew Boccaccio’s version of “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity” in The Decameron (second day, ninth story). The “Wager” story also circulated in chapbooks (cheap printed editions) both before and after Cymbeline, and was a popular subject for medieval French romances.

The Chilean story here, “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity,” has several notable parallels to Cymbeline. The heroine’s gruff father is outraged by his daughter’s marriage, much as King Cymbeline is. This paternal opposition doesn’t last, however, and is due to the fact that his daughter is much poorer than his prospective son-in-law, the reverse of Princess Imogen’s marriage to orphaned, impoverished Posthumus. The folktale husband enters into a wager with the would-be seducer of his wife, who uses an accomplice’s wiles to steal the lady’s ring and nightgown, and note a mole on her leg. The husband is convinced, as is Posthumus, by Iachimo’s theft of Imogen’s bracelet and knowledge of her mole. The folktale husband orders his employee to kill his wife, but this compassionate executioner instead lets her go and gives the husband false evidence of his wife’s death, as does Pisanio. The heroine disguises herself as a man and finds manly work with a king whose son is fascinated by and attracted to her androgyny. Similarly, when Imogen is taken in by three outlaws, one declares, “Were you a woman, youth, / I should woo hard, but be your groom in honesty” (3.6.66–67). The folktale heroine eventually becomes king, and uses this power to locate her husband and uncover the truth. She retains her elevated status even when she becomes a wife again. After her identity is revealed, she is still called a king, in contrast to Imogen, who loses her status as royal heir at the end of the play because of the return of her long-lost brothers. “Oh, Imogen, / Thou hast lost by this a kingdom,” says Cymbeline (5.5.371–72).

“The Innkeeper of Moscow,” a German folktale, also begins with a poor woman marrying a wealthier man. In this case, the son of a rich merchant marries the family’s maidservant of seven years. Posthumus, somewhat similarly, is a familiar figure to Imogen and her household, having grown up with her as a royal ward. The folk-tale’s villain, to win his bet with the husband, hides under the heroine’s bed at night, just as Iachimo hides in a trunk in Imogen’s room. He steals her wedding ring and notes a mole beneath her breast, the same distinguishing mark that Imogen possesses and Iachimo exploits. When the heroine of the folktale misses her wedding ring, she has a duplicate made, which later makes her look guilty. The object that symbolizes her married chastity is not unique, pointing to its unsuitability as proof of fidelity, just as Desdemona’s handkerchief, the loss of which convinces Othello that she has slept with another man, is twice intended to be copied (3.3.300, 3.4.178). Cymbeline deliberately recalls Othello, Shakespeare’s earlier play about a woman framed for adultery, by giving Cymbeline’s villain the name Iachimo, a diminutive of the name Iago, the villain in Othello. “The Innkeeper of Moscow” takes place during wartime, just as much of Cymbeline unfolds during a war between the British and the Romans. The folktale wife disguises herself as a man, joins the army, and rises through the ranks to become a colonel and her husband’s commanding officer. From this vantage point, she is able to uncover the villain’s wrongdoing.

I have included Italo Calvino’s “Wormwood” because it overlaps to some extent with the “Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” tales, which may also have left their mark on Cymbeline and are here represented by the Norwegian story “The Twelve Wild Ducks.” “Wormwood” begins with a king who threatens to kill his unborn child if it proves to be a girl, as he has only daughters and wants a son. “The Twelve Wild Ducks” begins with a queen who says rash words because she wants her next child to be a girl, since she has only sons. The heroines of both “Wormwood” and “The Twelve Wild Ducks” grow up to be framed for infanticide. “Wormwood” is at root a chastity wager story, however, and another one in which a wealthy man marries what seems to be a poor girl, although she is, unbeknownst even to herself, a princess. The heroine, Wormwood, in this regard is much like Imogen’s brothers, who are raised by a hermit in the wilderness, unaware that they are princes. As happens with Imogen and the heroines of the Chilean and German folktales, the villain who enters into the wager with Wormwood’s husband is able to find out about her hidden mole. The famously convoluted ending of Cymbeline, an extravaganza of revelations so offensive to the playwright George Bernard Shaw that he rewrote it,^* has nothing on the final scene of “Wormwood” for sheer strangeness. A talking lantern and oil cruet bring all secrets to light, and three men claim the heroine as their own: her father, her husband, and the man who rescued her when her husband left her for dead. This seems quite similar to the ending of Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, in which Lucrece’s husband and father argue over to whom Lucrece, now dead, belongs. Ultimately, a third man, Brutus, claims Lucrece as a means to incite revolt against her rapist, Tarquin’s, family.^† I mention the parallel because Lucrece begins with something of a chastity wager, described in the poem’s introductory Argument—men away on military duty fall to boasting about whose wife is most virtuous, and so decide to visit the women unannounced. Lucrece turns out to be the most virtuous, but the contest results in Tarquin conceiving a passion for her and ultimately raping her. Iachimo, spying on the sleeping Imogen, explicitly compares himself to Tarquin (2.2.12). “Wormwood” is one of several chastity wager stories in Calvino’s excellent collection Italian Folktales. One of them, “The King of Spain and the English Milord,” involves a heroine who is “white as ricotta and rosy as a rose,” an overlap with Snow White’s red and white beauty.^*

The final chastity wager tale comes from a travelogue by J. M. Synge, the Irish author most famous for his play The Playboy of the Western World. Synge describes hearing a story told by an old man in the Aran Islands. This variant combines “The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity” with a folktale Shakespeare used as a source for The Merchant of Venice, “A Pound of Flesh” (see chapter 4). An English ballad, “The Northern Lord,” is another example of such a combination.^† If Shakespeare was aware of the combination of the chastity wager and pound of flesh stories, perhaps it might have helped to inspire his combination of “Wager” with another folktale, “Snow White.” “Wager” and “Snow White,” however, do not seem to have been combined in folk tradition. Synge’s version bears two particular resemblances to Cymbeline: a poorer man marries a wealthier woman, causing some trouble, and the villain conceals himself in a box that is then placed in the heroine’s bedroom.

Cymbeline’s other folktale plot derives from “Snow White,” presumably the most familiar of all the folktales in this book for most of its readers. The version of the story we know best is the Brothers Grimm’s, on which Walt Disney’s 1937 animated film is based. The dominance of the Grimms’ version can actually conceal Cymbeline’s resemblance to the folktale, as the play lacks a talking mirror, seven dwarves, and a poisoned apple. “Snow White,” however, is a folktale found in many different countries and cultures, and while certain core elements define it, the details of the stories vary considerably. Again and again in “Snow White” stories, we see the heroine persecuted by a jealous female relative and forced to leave home. The villainess sends an agent to kill the heroine, but this compassionate executioner takes pity on her, allowing her to flee into the wilderness. There she encounters a group of men who live on the margins of society, because they are criminals, giants, dwarfs, djinn, and so on. These men take her in, and she acts as their housekeeper. The villainess learns that the heroine is alive and poisons her, perhaps several times, until she falls into a deathly unconsciousness. The heroine’s adopted family does not bury her because she remains beautiful, and eventually she is found by a man who falls in love with her. She awakes from her death-sleep and marries him, and her persecutor is punished.

Cymbeline contains all of these episodes. As with some other Snow Whites, Imogen is reunited with her husband rather than married during the resolution of the plot.^* Like Snow White, Imogen is persecuted by a jealous stepmother, the Queen, a practiced poisoner. Imogen flees her royal home, escaping into the wilderness. Pisanio has been given orders to kill her, but instead mercifully releases her. Imogen wanders, lost, until she comes to the home of three men who live as outlaws in a cave. They take her in, and she acts as their housekeeper. Eventually, she takes a poison concocted by the Queen, which Pisanio gave her in the mistaken belief that it was medicinal. Imogen appears dead, but her adopted family does not bury her. She wakes from her death sleep and is reunited with her husband, Posthumus. The Queen, her plans thwarted, goes mad and dies.

Cymbeline in fact may be the earliest literary version of “Snow White.” Elements of the folktale exist in earlier texts such as Xenophon of Ephesus’s ancient Greek novel An Ephesian Story and Marie de France’s medieval lai Eliduc, but these texts do not include all of the episodes listed in the preceding summary. Cymbeline is both earlier and more complete than Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century novella “The Little Slave Girl” (second day, ninth story), which includes a number of “Snow White” motifs. Martin Butler, one of Cymbeline’s editors, writes that “‘Snow White’ was not written down until the eighteenth century, but its resemblances to Cymbeline tempt one to speculate that it must have...