ABSTRACT
T h e first eight decades of scholarship on The Old Wives Tale left us with a play that is a naive and pleasant conceited comedy, or a satire of romantic comedies, or a flawed representation of the language, methods, and ethos of folk literature.1 However, in 1978, John Cox established as central to the play two related themes: the use of Eumenides’ prophecies by some of the charac ters who, through the practice of charity, bring about the defeat of the evil conjurer Sacrapant.2 Cox’s article led directly to the most fruitful period of scholarship on the play at the beginning of the 1980s when four major articles by Marx, Viguers, Renwick, and Cope appeared, which have not as yet been supplanted. In these works, the play emerged as a unified festive comedy in which the induction is related in theme and method to the framed play, the various plots are carefully coordinated and presented through developed stagecraft, and the characters form a hierarchy based on their relationship to the providential order.3
