Dressing Up as a Franklin's Housewife: Native Sources for Shakespeare's Cymbeline

Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is one of his most medieval works. Its plot, setting, and thematics refashion Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, which provided Shakespeare with both raw material and structures of dramatic feeling. To understand the relation of these two texts, we must revise our definition of source, attending instead to the larger array of thought and practice behind literary composition.