William Shakespeare is often described as the greatest writer of all time. However, this view was not shared by all of his contemporaries, as illustrated by the quotation above, attributed to Robert Greene (1558–1592). Greene's comments were made before Shakespeare had authored his classics, such as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Othello. Nevertheless, they show contemporaneous reluctance to grant Shakespeare singular authorship of the stories and characters associated with his name. We may dismiss Greene's anti-Shakespeare comments as jealousy—after all, Greene was a rival dramatist and both were commoners who competed in the upper echelons of Elizabethan society. However, Greene's remarks exist, and they have specificity. Greene also accuses Shakespeare of being a “crow” who “ape[d]” and “imitate[d]” others. In modern vernacular, Greene is suggesting that Shakespeare is a plagiarist: “passing” literary work “off as [his] . . . own.” (Oxford Dictionary of English [1997], 1344). These kinds of dispersions on the originality of Shakespeare's work have persisted from Greene up to scholars of the present day. Charlotte Artese's edition, Shakespeare and the Folktale, adds a new dimension to this question of authorship. Artese's work is an anthology of edited folktales that suggest Shakespeare was the master of reinvention, not the singular genius that imagined “brave new world[s]” (The Tempest, V.i.204.).

Artese contextualizes Shakespeare's work within Renaissance storytelling and shows how his writings are only a version of the stories we have come to know. In a way, Artese's anthology is a very effective attempt at questioning Shakespeare's genius, but not by claiming that he was some other man, such as Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550–1604). Nor does Artese include conspiracies such as those voiced by the enigmatic Ohio-born New Englander Delia Bacon (1811–1859). In The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857), Bacon suggested that “Shake-speare” was merely a nom de plume, a code word to describe her namesake Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who, she wrote was part of a “little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and organize popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise. . . Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another” (Bacon, 15). Artese sidesteps these conspiracies and lets the myths and folktales speak for themselves. Artese focuses on the universality of storytelling in eight of Shakespeare's 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. Ultimately, this anthology of folktales makes Shakespeare's plots and narratives part of a continuum of early modern storytelling. But this is done in a highly digestible way, so that even those who advocate Shakespeare as an autodidact genius will be engaged. For example, through Artese we learn how the characters of The Taming of the Shrew echo those of folktales from around the world. For example, Katherina (Kate) is eventually duped, tricked, and harangued into becoming a “good wife” for Petruchio.

But the plot of the Taming of the Shrew was rehearsed in many countries’ poems, plays, and nursery rhymes before it was ever played on a London stage. To prove this, Artese includes Svend Grundtvig's retelling of a Danish fairy tale, Angus Macellan's Irish myth, and Rachel Harrriette Busk's Italian legend, “The Wicked Queen Reformed by Whipping by a Cobbler.” What we can deduce from these diverse stories is that Shakespeare may have written the Taming of the Shrew, but he was not the first to conceive of the intricacies of such a story. So Artese's work is an invaluable resource for those who seek to recontextualize Shakespeare's work as folk or myth. But the limitation of this book is that we do not hear enough about the origin of these other stories. Sometimes we are left wanting to know more about who these authors were and what precisely they wrote. On reading Shakespeare and Folktales, historians may feel frustrated that this book includes the narratives of these stories but not the relevant scholarship to enable the reader to quantify the significance and impact of these fables on Shakespeare's work or Renaissance plays in general.

Nevertheless, Artese's work reinforces the notion of the universality of storytelling and the characters that populate them—some of which we colloquially call “Shakespearean.” And even though Shakespeare is regarded as a literary titan because he popularized the madness of King Lear, the jealousy of Othello, or the tragic fate of Romeo and Juliet, he was only part of a spring of Renaissance writers who borrowed from the art of their own and earlier times. The Bard is cited as writing more than thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets, but Greene reminds us that the art of making these classics may owe their origins to the ingenuities of other English contemporaries: Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), and William Painter (1540–1595), as well as foreign wordsmiths. As the American novelist Joseph C. Hart (1798–1855) observed, Shakespeare wrote about Venice, Verona, and Rome but never left England. Perhaps he did not need to, as long as his contemporaries Marlowe, Spenser, and Painter brought their stories from there to him. Great artists live and share the emotions of their age, and are part of the cumulative consciousness of past memories. Artese's anthology helps us understand this.