Folklore and Shakespeare
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8931377 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kenneth Muir (0000-0001-6429-988X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1981 |
| Volume | 92 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 231-240 |
| Publication date | 1981-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Folklore (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0015-587X • E-ISSN: 1469-8315 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0015587x.1981.9716211 |
| OpenAlex | W1978330147 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
IN a recent number of the Mississippi Folklore Register (X, 1976), which was devoted to Shakespeare, there was a useful bibliography compiled by Philip C. Kolin, containing nearly 300 items. I came across this after I had prepared this lecture and I was slightly embarrassed to discover that I had read less than a hundred of these. If therefore you find me mentioning things which you have seen elsewhere, I hope you will ascribe this to the fact that I had too little time to track down the remaining 200 items in the bibliography. Folklore now covers a multitude of fields, any one of which could keep one busy for a lifetime-folktales in many languages, proverbial wisdom, folk-plays, witches, ghosts, fairies, seasonal festivals, anthropology, flora and fauna, magic, sports and pastimes, popular medicine, jest-books, totem and tabu, even religious ritual, both pagan and Christian. It stretches from The Golden Bough to Freud and Jung. If one reads the pioneering book by Thistleton Dyer, published nearly a century ago, or the recent book by Roy Palmer on The Folklore of Warwickshire (which includes incidents from the reign of Elizabeth II as well as Elizabeth I) one will be convinced that anyone brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon in the middle of the sixteenth century would have come into contact with a wide variety of folk customs and superstitions. What is also clear is that any dramatist writing in the last two decades of the sixteenth century could rely on his audience being equally familiar with the same body of material. Even entertainments written for the Court or the aristocracy could make use of folklore, in the knowledge that it would be understood. I am thinking of such things as the Herne the Hunter scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor or the sheep-shearing feast in The Winter's Tale performed before Princess Elizabeth and her betrothed, or the account of the wet summer in A MidsummerNight's Dream
Art · Folklore · Literature · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,38 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2023 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |