ABSTRACT
I N RECENT YEARS critics have celebrated the folk narrative of The Old Wives Tale. In a country where many folktales of magic and “faierie” disappeared before nineteenth-century collectors could find them, Peele’s play offers some of the earliest English evidence of these oral folk tradi tions, 1 and commentators have suggested that modem audiences “suc cumb to . . . [the plays] fairy-like atmosphere” and enjoy the "naive” spell of old and powerful stories: of a young man compelled to assume a bear’s form at night, of Golden Heads who rise from a well to reward two daughters, one selfish, the other kind; and of a hero who generously gives all he owns for a stranger’s burial and is then guided by a magic helper. 2
1. Katharine M. Briggs, Introduction to A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language (Bloomington, Ind., 1971), I, A, 4.
