ABSTRACT
The overlap between the genres of myth, legend, folklore, and fairy tales has exercised many scholars (Sale 1978: 23). The well-known story of Robin Hood, for example, moves at various times from exhibiting the conventions of legend to serving as local folklore, while also invoking the witches and fairies from fairy tale (Knight 2003). Fairy tales, with their interest in dysfunctional family structures and personal and civic rites of passage, have much in common with their mythological counterparts. All these forms have also been interpreted from the varying standpoints of anthropology, social history, cultural studies, structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and psychology. What they offer are archetypal stories available for re-use and recycling by different ages and cultures. Fairy tale and folklore do, however, possess a very specific set of signifiers and symbolic systems that are worth examining in their own right. Shakespeare, a prime example, as we have already seen, of a cultural repository of archetypal characters and plotlines, dipped into the folk genre of fairy tale as a stimulus for his drama: King Lear and Cymbeline, for example, both have roots in this form. Cymbeline reconstitutes the figure of the wicked stepmother, while Lear reworks a folklore storyline of a father and his three daughters, two malign or ‘ugly’ sisters, and one good and virtuous child.
