tale,” or a diverting entertainment, largely for the amusement of women, children, and the old. A mid-sixteenth-century author wrote of “old wives fables and winter tales” (John Olde, Walther's Antichrist, translation 1556) as if they were versions of the same, and Lady Macbeth belittles her husband's lack of resolution by observing scornfully that “these flaws and starts, / … would well become / A woman's story at a winter fire” (3.4.62–64).
