The Tale of Sleeping Beauty Acrostic History
The Sleeping Beauty by Colin Wakefield
Salisbury Playhouse, 1994
Stories that we know as fairy tales were told around the firesides of homes for hundreds of years before anyone thought to write them down. Different versions of the same tales were told all over the world.
Like The Sleeping Beauty, for example. We know that part of it was in an Icelandic saga, and other versions were well known as early as the 14th century. One famous collection of stories from Italy known as Il Pentamerone was published in the 1630s and includes the story of Princess Talia who gets a splinter in her finger spinning and falls dead, to be revived by a young King.
Eventually the story took the form we know today when it was written down by Frenchman Charles Perrault in 1697. Perrault was an unusual person: at the age of nine he decided not to go to school anymore because he didn’t get on with his teacher! It didn’t do him any harm because he became rich and powerful, involved in selecting the architects who designed the Louvre Museum and the palace at Versailles.
Even though he built a serious reputation at court, Perrault always kept an interest in folk tales. He married late in life and was greatly involved in the upbringing of three children – quite unusual for a man at the time. This may have prompted him to write the stories down for others to enjoy.
Perrault’s stories were an instant success. We have him to thank for the definitive versions (if ever there can be such a thing) of some of our favourite fairy tales: The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood. They came to England in 1729 as Mother Goose’s Tales, and that was the start of that now legendary teller of stories and nursery rhymes.
In his versions of the stories, Perrault kept the spirit of the fireside tales. He did tag on a little moral (or two) at the end of each story, but many of these seem like an afterthought – maybe to please the grown-ups.
None of the sources of Perrault’s stories were recorded. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, on the other hand, carefully preserved the name of the teller and the region of the stories they wrote down. The brothers were born in Germany at the end of the 18th century and were trained as lawyers, but they are much more famous for their Children’s and Household Tales.
Germany was not a single country at the time of the Brothers Grimm but a lot of smaller states. Jacob and Wilhelm were determined to pull together all the regional dialects and variations to write a learned book on the German language. Part of their work also included their collection of German folk tales. They wanted to show that Germany had its own special mythology every bit as rich as Ancient Greece or as mysterious as the Arabian Nights. It included a story about a sleeping princess.
Beauty became ‘Rose-Bud’ in the Grimms’ fairy tale, but the story owes a lot to Perrault – even though Jacob and Wilhelm insisted that it was a German story. Rose-Bud has the ending we all know best: the Princess awakens and marries the Prince. Perrault’s story, though, continues with a wicked stepmother (who else?) who turns out to be an ogress and who tries to eat the Princess’s children. That bit doesn’t turn up in many pantomimes today!
English translations of Grimms’ Fairy Tales appeared almost immediately. The first had pictures by the most famous illustrator of the day, George Cruikshank, and was championed by Sir Walter Scott – well known himself for preserving Scottish folklore.
An important result of the Grimm Brothers’ approach was that children’s stories became fashionable and acceptable as literature. Their work inspired the ‘new’ stories of Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Kingsley (The Water Babies), Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and George MacDonald. People started to collect the folk tales of their own countries and write them down.
Until recently, the fairy tales have kept pretty close to the originals. In the last fifty years we have seen all sorts of new versions which change the stories to suit our times. Disney have often used fairy tales as the basis of their films, including Sleeping Beauty made in the 1950s. Pantomimes too have kept the stories alive.
The Sleeping Beauty was one of the first stories to be made into a pantomime. A spectacular production by Planché was presented at Covent Garden as early as 1840.
You wouldn’t recognise much of that production in this show, but the simplicity and magic of the story of The Sleeping Beauty still enchants children and grown-ups alike to this day. As with all good fairy tales, it is timeless.