FAIRIES RE-FASHIONED
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2008)
There are many strands to Shakespeare’s fairy lore, as Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper reveals.
In 1584, some eleven or twelve years before Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, the engineer and polymath Reginald Scot published his Discoverie of Witchcraft.
Scot’s treatise, which made an important contribution to the wave of post-Reformation, antisuperstitious literature, attempted to dispel any popular beliefs that deflected from the true
nature of the supernatural, which he maintained was exclusively divine. Scot dismissed belief in
fairies as absurd and relegated it to the trivial domain of domesticity and lower-class rurality. He
argued that such figures only resided in people’s imaginations and were used by nurses and old
wives to ‘frighten children into obedience’.
Scot’s treatise may have remained at the centre of philosophical and theological
discussion of the supernatural for many years (in 1597 Britain’s most famous demonologist,
James VI and I, launched a sustained attack on Scot in print), but it seems to have had little
impact in the sphere of imaginative literature. Many English 16th and 17th-century poets and
playwrights, including John Lyly (in his Endymion), Edmund Spenser (in his Faerie Queene),
Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick drew upon existing literary constructions of fairy lore. But it was
Shakespeare whose contribution to fairy literature was perhaps the most original, suggestive and elusive.
Shakespeare demonstrates this originality in his refashioning of the folkloric figure Robin
Goodfellow or Puck (a Puck, or ‘pouke’, being a term ascribed to a particular class of demon
or devil), who is introduced to us by the Fairy in Act 1: (Enter a Fairy at one door, and Robin
Goodfellow at another)
FAIRY
. . . you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Called Robin Goodfellow.Are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villag’ry,
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn,
Mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that ‘hobgoblin’ call you, and ‘sweet puck’,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck.
Are not you he?
This passage describes the traditional Puck who haunts the domestic domain of Scot’s nurses
and old wives, a country prankster who would sweep doorways in exchange for a bowl of
cream. He was child-sized, armed with a broom or threshing flail and his chief occupations were
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sweeping, spinning rough hemp and grinding mustard. Popular ballads written well into the 17th
century depicted him wearing animal skins and headgear (antlers, animal ears etc.) that invoked
festive rituals. He was often accused of theft, of pinching maidens or house servants and causing
them to drop things or fall over; he was also a shape-shifter and was notorious for leading
travellers astray (wandering aimlessly or getting lost was often referred to as ‘being led by Robin
Goodfellow’). But Shakespeare’s Puck is unusual, because in his role as an assistant to Oberon,
he is also a royal attendant who can ‘put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes’. As a
creature of a rural, domestic sphere and an obedient servant to a king, he is a unique hybrid.
This passage also implies that Puck is to be distinguished from the species known as Fairy. And
in fact there are two traditions of fairy lore present in this play: one deriving from the medieval
folk or popular narratives and the other from the courtly narrative being fashioned by 16thcentury writers, including Shakespeare, which draws upon classical mythology and chivalric
literature. The picturesque descriptions of the Fairy Queen and ‘all her elves’ who dance ‘ringlets
to the whistling wind’ contrast with the description of Puck. Both invoke nature, but while the
popular or folk tradition is rural, the classical or courtly is pastoral. The novelty of Shakespeare’s
fairies arises from the fusion of the popular and courtly traditions.
In 1930, the Shakespeare critic Minor White Latham argued that Shakespeare’s fairies
were ‘benevolent’ and ‘completely identified with buds and blossoms, dew-drops and butterflies’.
This reading attempts to rescue fairies from the medieval idea that they were dangerously
mischievous, demonic or evil. Convenient scapegoats, fairies had traditionally been linked with
crime, sexual indiscretion and even violence. Shakespeare, who seems also to have been the
first to miniaturise them, deliberately refashioned fairies to deliver them from their traditionally
sinister associations. Not only does he appear to create a new breed of ‘benevolent’ fairy, but,
in his depiction of the pastoral court of Titania and Oberon, he also contributes to the emerging
trend among poets of elevating fairies. What might have been Shakespeare’s motivations?
Perhaps one motive was a desire to join the chorus of voices in praise of Queen Elizabeth I, who
is frequently identified as Titania (‘Titania’ was another name for Diana, the goddess of the hunt,
and ‘Diana’ was a name often ascribed to the Queen in the poetry of the court). The culture
of praise surrounding the Queen constructed her image as a mythological being. Sometimes
she is figured as a giant monarch holding or standing on top of the Globe, as in the Armada
and Ditchley portraits, or ‘as a tiny aristocrat engaged in conspicuous consumption’, as in
Shakespeare’s play. What is clear is that the courtly representations of the Queen were engaged
in legitimating aristocracy and the emerging mercantile economy.
The complex status of the play’s ‘changeling child’ gestures toward the mercantile
culture of Elizabethan England and to both traditions of fairy lore. The attribution of infant
abduction to fairies was a commonplace in medieval and Elizabethan fairy mythology. The
changeling child was sometimes substituted for a newborn baby who had not been looked after
properly: as a punishment to the neglectful parents, fairies would leave behind a child who
was deformed. This myth belongs to a number of mysterious occurrences that were attributed
to fairies, such as the disappearance of husbands for days or weeks and the theft or damage
of goods. The allusion to fairies in instances such as these was designed to keep housewives,
mothers and servants attentive to their duties; it was part of a domestic-moralistic discourse.
The changeling child in Shakespeare’s play, however, is the sought after Indian boy, who is at
the centre of a custody battle between the king and queen of the fairies. The boy has not been
stolen; instead, as Titania eloquently describes,
His mother was a vot’ress of my order,
And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking th’embarked traders on the flood.
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Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.
The changeling child is the desirable object, the exotic import in the play that symbolises the
consumerist impulses of the Elizabethan aristocracy. The critic Marjorie Swann observes that
‘as England shifted from a rural, household-based mode of production to an urban, commercial,
and increasingly mercantile economy, fairy lore became a particularly apt vehicle for mystifying
the profound socioeconomic changes of the early modern period’. While Shakespeare’s play
refigures fairy lore by creating a new breed of ‘benevolent’ fairies, he also uses the two traditions
of fairy mythology as a platform for exploring and interrogating the emerging mercantile
economy and the aristocratic preoccupation with acquisition and display.
© 2013 The Shakespeare Globe Trust. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only.
Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.