A favorite theme in the romantic literature of the Middle Ages was that of the wife who, in spite of misunderstandings and often of hardship and abuse, seeks her husband and at last finds him after many adventures. The tales vary only in the nature of the undeserved sufferings of the wife and of the circumstances under which the husband is recovered. They appear not only in medieval literature, but in that of the Renaissance as well; not only in the romances, but in the novelle and later in the drama. Eventually these literary tales were adapted to the purposes of the oral story-teller, though they have never become popular and cannot in any sense be thought of as a product of folklore.

Two of them are interesting because Shakespeare has written plays about them. In Cymbeline he tells the story of The Wager on the Wife's Chastity (Type 882). The merchant who wagers with the ship captain that he can seduce the captain's wife secures through treachery a token of her unfaithfulness. When the captain, believing her false, leaves home, she follows him, disguised as a man, and is eventually able to show him his mistake. This story, more than the others of this group, is known in the folklore of a number of European countries. Sporadic examples have been also picked up in Sumatra, in the Philippines, and from Cape Verde Islanders in Massachusetts.

The other Shakespearean play which uses this general motif is The Merchant of Venice, but the dramatist has actually used only the Pound of Flesh incident which gives title to the tale (Type 890). Though the literary history of the story is interesting, it is not to our purpose here. [124] In oral form, however, it seems to be current in the folklore of Norway and Iceland and not to be dependent upon Shakespeare's treatment. As told in Norway, it concerns a merchant who buys a bride in Turkey for her weight in gold. In order to get the money, he gives as security a pound of his own flesh. After they are married he is away from home and three merchants seek the love [p. 110] of his wife. She deceives them all and gets much money for keeping the matter secret. She decorates the house for her husband's homecoming, but he misinterprets her act and casts her out, either into the sea or onto an island from which she is rescued by a ship. She clothes herself in men's clothing and arrives in Turkey where she finds her husband in prison and brings about his release. His creditor demands the pound of flesh, but she appears as a judge and frees him.

The other tales [125] of this group belong so definitely to the literary tradition and their appearance in folklore is so restricted that they can hardly be thought of as folktales at all. For some reason the only peoples who have admitted such stories into their oral repertories are the Finns, the Lithuanians, and the Russians.