J
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES
ENGLISH FAIRY POETRY
FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BY
FLORIS DELATTRE
LONDON, HENRY FROWDE, Amen Corner, E.C.
PARIS, HENRI DIDIER, 6, Rue de la Sorbonne.
MCMXII.
32?>0 ^
ENGLISH FAIRY POETRY
DESCRIPTION
Of the King and Queeneof
K^r/Vij their habir,farc,theit
abodc,pompc,and (late*
Bccing very delightfull to the fcn/c^arja
fullofmirch. iL'''A- '^ .
LONDON,
Printed fori? /VW^H4rp^r,and arc to befoli
ac his i)iop,at the BolpUalJ gate, xtl^o
(BODLEIAN LIBRARY : L 78 ART.)
ENGLISH FAIRY POETRY
FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BY
FLORIS DELATTRE
LONDON, HENRY FROWDE, Amen Corner, E.G.
PARIS, HENRI DIDIER, 6, Rue de la Sorbonne.
MCMXII.
«
PR
AND
MY DAUGHTER
PREFACE
No more has been attempted in the following
^ essay — which may be considered as a by-chapter
\ to the present writer's study on Robert Herrick ^ —
^ than to examine the fairy mythology of the British
Isles in its connection with, and influence on,
English poetry. It aims at tracing the various
phases of its development, from the earliest folk-
^ beliefs, still rough and undefined, to the elaborate
U productions of the XVIIth century, with which
English fairy poetry practically came to an end.
The estimate of the aesthetic value of such
literature has been purposely left aside to give
more room for a critical survey of the progressive
formation, the modifications, and the decay of
the fairy themes, for an historical account of the
successive steps that led up from popular tradition
to the poetry of art. The matter may seem, at
first sight, somewhat trifling : let it be remembered
however that some of the greatest English poets
have thought it worth their while to expend no
small amount of time and labour on the descrip-
* Robert Herrick, Contribution ct I'itude de la poisie lyrique en
Angleterre au XV W sihle. Paris, F. Alcan, 1912.
8 PREFACE
tion of Fairyland, and have even made it the
subject of several of their unquestioned master-
pieces. Having thus cleared the ground, we may
be able to go deeper into our research, and to
enquire more closely into the important question
of the dependence of poetry, of the individual
poetry of art, upon folk-lore, that is upon the
original beliefs, superstitions and customs of the
whole race.
Separate aspects of the subject have already
been treated at length by many others, and 1 beg
to acknowledge my indebtedness to my predeces-
sors, of whose writings, as will be easily detected, I
have made free use. At the same time, no attempt
has yet been made to establish the existence of a
common tendency between the various fairy
themes, and to trace the historical evolution which
they underwent in English poetry from the origins
to the XVIIth century. It is hoped that some-
thing may be gained by bringing together the
hitherto scattered parts of the question ; and that
the following essay, strictly limited to the essentials
as it is, will throw some new light on a few points
which, by themselves, would appear but common-
place topics to the literary student.
It must be added that no statement has been
taken at second hand, but has always been scrupu-
lously verified. The quotations have been bor-
rowed, whenever possible, from the earliest editions
and I have thought it desirable to adhere faithfully
PREFACE 9
to the original texts. I have also given in an
appendix a complete transcript of A Description of
the King and Queene of Fayries, a short pamphlet
of some interest which, published in London in
1635, has never been reprinted; one copy only
is known to exist, and is now preserved in the
Bodleian Library.
Lastly, I wish to express my sincere thanks to
those who have helped me : to the officials of the
British Museum and of the Bodleian Library,
who have always shown me the utmost courtesy ;
to Professor R. Huchon, who has examined my
manuscript ; and to my friends Ch. Fleurant
and J. K. Rooker who have, with the greatest
kindness, gone over the proof sheets, and offered
many valuable suggestions.
F. D.
CONTENTS
Page
Preface 7
CHAPTER I
Elves, Fairies, and Fays 13
CHAPTER II
Early Fairy Poetry 29
CHAPTER III
Elizabethan Fairies 61- .
CHAPTER IV '
'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' /^I'STls
CHAPTER V
Post-Shakespearean Fairies no
CHAPTER VI
From Drayton to Herrick 147
Conclusion /^4
Appendix I: J Description of the King and Queene
of Fayries igr
Appendix II: Bibliography 221
Index 2
31
CHAPTER I
ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS
The fairy belief is a very ancient one. It
belongs to pre-historic times, to that unrecorded
past over which hangs an all but impenetrable
haze. It seems to have been widely spread, if
not general, among the so-called Aryans. It con-
sists of such mythical elements as lie at the root
of all history. Primitive man, in his attempt to
explain the natural phenomena around him, was
apt to regard all objects as animate, as instinct
with a life akin to his own, even as possessed of
a conscious personality. These beings, haunting
hill or forest, dwelling in the caverns of the earth
or in the deep waters, appeared all the more
awful to him as they were the more mysterious.
They were no doubt far more powerful than men,
hence they must be feared, paid homage to, made
friends with if possible, that they might perform
those services which the peasant expected at
their hands ; or they must be appeased by
some rites, lest they should visit the offender
with dire punishment. These traditions may
14 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [CHAP.
have been strengthened in the minds of the
people by the surviving memory of the Iberians,
short, stumpy, dark-haired and dark-eyed men
dwelling underground, who occupied Europe
before they were subdued by the Aryans, Or
these supernatural beings may be associated with
the spirits of the dead coming back again to the
earth. In any case, the fairy belief formed no
little part of popular religion, of that occult
system which, to the peasant's simple mind, con-
trolled the world. It is found throughout Europe,
its outline being only qualified by the particular
characteristics of each nation. In Greece, for
instance, these mysterious spirits were fair maidens
named according to the different parts of nature
which they represented : 'QKeavl^eg, Nr/jOstSec, or
NrjtaSfC) those of the watery element, whether of
the Mediterranean or of the springs and rivers ;
'OpctaSec, the nymphs of mountains and grottoes ;
'AXam^eg, 'XXi}(opoi, AvXojviadig, the nymphs of
forests and groves ; ApuaStc, ' Apadpva^tg, the nymphs
of trees ; and all these * nymphs,' vvfx<})ai, were young
and gracious, easily pleased with such petty
sacrifices of goats, lambs, milk, or oil as were
offered them by their rural worshippers. In the
northern countries of Europe, on the other hand,
where life wears a gloomier aspect, there entered
into the conception of the fairy-world less the idea
of beauty than that of fear, and even dread. Its
inhabitants were harder to please, more fond of
I.] TEUTONIC ELVES 1 5
darkness and solitude, cross-grained and, at times,
deliberately harmful, though a few of them proved
not incapable of some clumsy kindness. In
England especially, and long before English
literature began, three kinds of supernatural beings
were to be met with, originally and essentially
identical, no doubt, but marked with such distinct
traits as will warrant a separate treatment : name-
ly the Elves of Teutonic mythology ; the Fairies
of Celtic tradition ; and the Fays of Arthurian
romance.
I
The Ehes^ who appear in the northern mythol-
ogies under various names and guises : hobgoblin,
brownie, nix, kohold, dwarf, bogle, troll, kelpie,
belong especially to the folk-creed. They are
tiny beings in human shape, only a few inches
high, and of a somewhat shrunken aspect. They
form two well-defined classes : the light elves, or
elves of the light and sky, " brighter than the
sun, " and the dark ones, " blacker than pitch, "
who dwell in the woods, or in the mountain-caves.
The former are white, but frail and dainty ; some
of them are of dazzling beauty, and are often
seen combing out their long golden hair in the
moonlight. The latter are misshapen, almost like
' A. S. celf,ylj-; akin to M. H. G. alp, nightmare, incubus.
1 6 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [CHAP.
dwarfs in outward appearance, and, with their
club-heads and hunch-backs, decidedly ugly.
Both the light and the dark elves live in large
companies. They are fond of carolling and
dancing at midnight in the meadows. The grass
grows rank where they have stood, in " green
sour ringlets whereof the ewe not bites. " Woe
to him who treads upon such places, as he may
be struck blind, or pine away in some mysterious
sickness. Again, the elves are much given to
spinning and weaving overnight, and the gossamer
that is found on the dewy leaves at break of
day is the fruit of their labour. Their intercourse
with man does not always run smooth. They are
fond of teasing him and worrying him out of his
wits. As they can make themselves invisible,
they play all sorts of tricks upon him, skulking
into the dairy and stealing his cheese, milking his
cows dry in the meadows, robbing him under
his very nose, pinching him black and blue. That
love of mischief not seldom drifts into downright
malice when the " good people, " or " good
neighbours, " as they are called in a conciliatory
way, either kidnap some buxom girl, snatch un-
baptized children from their cradles, leaving in
their stead their own unshapely brats, or visit
with diseases both man and beast. More often,
however, they appear less evil-minded. They
live on peaceful terms with the country people,
and are quite ready to help them as best they
I.] TEUTONIC ELVES 1 7
can, especially with the household duties. Many
a hobgoblin is attached to a particular family, on
whom he will bestow all manner of good offices.
Stealing at night through a chink into the stable,
he despatches the work of the farm-boy : he rubs
down the horses, combs their manes, fetches the
hay from the loft, draws water from the well. In
the kitchen, as nothing is more loathsome to him
than slovenliness, he washes the plates and dishes,
sweeps the floor, gets the fire ready, toils at the churn
till the maid, on coming downstairs in the early
morning, finds her milk already one solid lump of
butter. In requital of his pains a trifling wage is
all he asks for : a wee potful of cream, for instance,
to be left on the window-sill, or on the bottom
step of the stairs. Should the servant forget it
but one night, the goblin would immediately leave
the house, nor would he fail to tweak the
neglectful wench out of her heavy sleep.
And yet, light and dark elves alike, whether
those who haunt the streams in the shape of be-
witching maidens, singing wild weird songs to men
and luring them into the fatal depths ; or those
who dwell in the woods, walk up to the wood-
cutters and beg them for a scrap of dinner, which
they repay sooner or later after a fashion of their
own ; or those who, red-haired and red-bearded,
with a red pointed hat and its tinkling bells, are
drudging in the house in the most obliging and
neighbourly way, all of them, however harmful or
1 8 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [cHAP,
merely tricksy, stand somewhat in awe of man,
whose enormous height and strength, as compared
with their own dwarfish stature, fill them with no
little reverence. They will call upon him on certain
occasions to borrow baking and brewing vessels, or
to assist their wives in travail. Their disposition
towards him displays on the whole an odd combi-
nation of good and evil, of kindness and duplicity,
a sort of hostile shyness, one might almost say,
together with something heathenish, which makes
it so hard for them to deal plainly with Christians.
They partake of that sad, sombre outlook on life
which is the main characteristic of Teutonic myth-
ology. Through the whole elf belief there runs
an under-current of morose gravity, a bitter sense
of fate and doom, just as though the unsightly
sprites were spitefully resenting their lowly con-
dition, if not their kinship with the malignant
demons.
II
The Celtic Fairies ^ resemble in some respects
the Teutonic Elves. Both Celts and Teutons,
who belonged to the same primitive race, the
Aryans, shared in the same mythological beliefs ;
and when the Picts, Jutes, Saxons, Danes or other
' O. F. Faerie, Faierie : the land or home of the fays ; hence a
collective term for the inhabitants of fairyland ; and afterwards a
name for every individual member of the fairy tribe.
I.] CELTIC FAIRIES 1 9
sons of the North invaded England, the hardy
paganism which they brought with them blended
readily enough with the fairydom of their Celtic
neighbours and subjects. Thus the fairy creed of
the British Celts bears some resemblance to the
elf belief of Teutonic mythology. Fairies, like
elves, dwell underground and are fond of the green
meads, where they indulge in their midnight revels,
although in Wales a lake often takes the place
of the Irish " fairy hill. " Both usually assume
the human shape, and are like men in not a few
respects : they marry, and bear children, the female
fairies, however, beautiful as they are, only giving
birth to an ugly, ailing brood which they exchange,
whenever they are given a chance, for healthy
babes. Both love order and neatness. Both, and
Celtic fairies especially, are quick at taking offence,
and, often enough, lay the peasant or his cattle
under a spell. The English Hobgoblin or Robin
Good-Fellow is called puck, or more accurately
pwcca in Wales, pooka or puca in Ireland, poake in
Worcestershire, pixy in the West of England. He
is chiefly an evil spirit, leading travellers astray into
the bogs, taking all sorts of shapes, that of an ass for
instance, when he beguiles some foot-sore passer-
by to mount upon his back, of which the poor fellow
soon repents. Another fairy connected with Teu-
tonic elfdom, but quite peculiar to Ireland, is called
the Lepra-caun. He is an old, withered, solitary
goblin who makes shoes for the fairies, which, when
20 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [cHAP.
dancing, they wear out in no time ; he has grown
very rich, but, an arrant curmudgeon, must be
threatened, if not fairly cudgelled, into showing to
the "little people" the mysterious places where his
treasures lie hidden.
Besides these inferior, somewhat gross and
barbarous, divinities of fairy mythology common
to the peasant belief of Teuton and Celt alike, the
Celtic fairy- world includes a good many denizens
peculiar to and justly representative of the race.
"Sentimental," wrote Matthew Arnold in his
famous essay so keenly interpretative, despite its
superficial knowledge, " if the Celtic nature is to
be characterised by a single term, is the best term
to take." And further on : " For good and for
bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstan-
tial, goes less near the ground than the German."'
Thus, instead of the bustling crowd of stumpy,
dwarfish elves, homely, practical, hard-working,
so uncouth with their sturdy looks and rough,
grotesque humour, there appear among the Celts
whole families of fairies, graceful, restless, open-
hearted, passionate, sensitive to joys and sorrows
alike. In some parts of Ireland, the fairies,
according to the peasant belief, were a number
of the fallen Angels who, being less guilty than
the rest, had escaped their brethren's dreadful
fate, and were allowed to remain on earth. Or
they belonged to such divine tribes as the Tuatha
' On the Study of Celtic Literature, pp. 100-2.
I.] CELTIC FAIRIES 21
de Danann, of the Gaelic myth, or their kin, the
Welsh gods of the Mabinogion ; they were the
" givers of life, " deathless therefore, and the
bestowers of fruitfulness ; but being no longer
worshipped they had dwindled away in the popu-
lar mind, till they were only remembered as fairies.
Such was Finvarra, the Irish king, who with his
queen Onagh ruled over Fairyland. They lived
ina"sidh, " a barrow or hillock which was the
entrance to the other-world, an Elysium of sen-
suous delight according to the Celtic imagination,
planted with apple-trees always in fruit, and over-
flowing with never ebbing streams of wine or
mead. Every fairy is for the Irish peasant, even
to the present day, a " Fer-Sidhe," ^ that is a man
of the hill, and every goddess a " Bean-Sidhe," a
woman of the hill, hence the "banshee " of popu-
lar legend, that ominous deity attached to the
oldest agricultural families, who makes an appear-
ance only to foretell the death of one of their
members.
The contrast between Teutonic elves and Celtic
fairies widens when we turn to their relations with
men. Fairies are to be met with in most early Celtic
myths. They do not, as a rule, share the tiny size
of their northern kindred. In genuine folk-tales,
they are generally described as of at least human
stature ; and they play an important part in Celtic
romance, that body of imaginative fiction produced
Pronounced Far-shee.
22 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [CHAP.
between the Vllth and the Xllth centuries, the
themes of which were drawn from the heroic
traditions of the race. They are chiefly women,
wondrously fair with their pale long faces, and
flowing hair " like red gold, or the flowers of the
bog in summer. " They dwell on " the blue
verge of the sea, " on the shores of " the Land of
Youth, " or in the " Island of the Blest, " They
take a keen interest in forwarding man's love,
helpina; him in his quest after the lady of his heart,
unless, as may happen, they refuse to share it
with another. They contribute to Celtic lore that
mysterious agency of sorcery and magic, that
aerialness which we have come to consider as one
of its essential features. They already suggest,
with their infinite, aimless desires or their wistful
regrets, the feminine ideal of Chivalry. The
Celtic fairy-world never admits such dreadful
fights or blood-thirsty vengeances as are so
frequent in the Teutonic Eddas or the Niebelung-
enlied. It is the realm of " beauty and amorous-
ness," where the stout warrior makes it his duty
both to deal with his foe in a knightly way, as we
see in the story of Cuchulinn and Ferdiad, and to
treat the woman he loves, as is displayed in the
wooing of Emer, with the most submissive deli-
cacy. The difference was very small indeed
which still separated the "good people" of the
Celtic folk-belief from the magic maidens of the
Romantic bards.
I.] ^ ROMANTIC FAYS 23
III
As the Celtic fairies glided away from their
popular origins into the province of romantic
fancy, and, from a pre-Christian, purely mytholog-
ical conception of peasant-lore, came to be looked
upon as one of the favourite themes of the more
enlightened class of lords and ladies, their magic
" amorousness " was made more and more con-
spicuous, and they soon came into contact with
the fays of French romance.
One is struck, in wandering through the mazes
of Arthurian romance, by the many characteristics
which were already to be found in, if they were
not actually borrowed from, the older Celtic
world. The very word may be French. ^ The
romance may have been produced on the Continent,
written in French, popularized through England
under that outlandish garb, the French language
still being generally known on the other side of the
Channel in the Xllth and XII 1th centuries, when
the Arthurian legend was most in vogue : the
spirit is quite different from that which informs
the " matter of France, " that is to say the cycle
of Charlemagne and of his Paladins. The latter
was chiefly historical, grounded on actual fact
and worked on a very simple plan : the direct
^ Romance, as is well known, first meant a tale told in Romance,
the French language of the Xlth or Xllth century, instead of in
Latin.
24 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [CHAP.
protection of God, a guardian angel, for instance,
constantly watching by the side of the mighty
emperor. The " matter of Britain " on the
contrary is essentially mythical. It gathers round
the figure of the British hero-king all sorts of
legends more or less connected with his character.
It may be, as has been tersely put, " a complex
mixture of Celtic tradition and French genius, "
it is instinct, above all, with that " romantic "
feeling which we generally miss in the genuine
works of the Charlemagne cycle.
The romance of Arthur and of the Knights of the
Round Table is the very land of Faery. Every-
thing there is dim, misty, elusive, weird. The
horizon merges into ancient Celtic heathendom,
or is lost in early, mystic Christianity. The fays,
a countless host, symbolize supernatural existence.
They are thus described in an often quoted pas-
sage from the romance of Lancelot du Lac :
A celui tens estoient apel6es f^es totes iceles qui
savoient d'anchantement et de charaies ; et moult en
estoit en celui termine en la Grant-Bretaigne plus que
en autres terres. Eles savoient la force des paroles et
des pierres et des herbes, par quoi eles estoient tenues
en jovenet6 et en biaut6, et en si granz richeces com eles
devisoient ; et tot fu establi au tanz Merlin lo prophete. ^
The fays may be traced back, as the word
Roman 'van Lancelot, Ed. W. J. A. Jonckbloet. The Hague,
1849, P- X.
I.] ROMANTIC FAYS 2^
indicates,^ to the ancient idea of Fate, and as such,
like the classical Parcae, the " Weird sisters," they
spin the thread of man's life, preside over his
birth and rule his destiny. They are women of
fascinating beauty, bestowing their love upon the
most valorous knight, and urging him on to the
boldest adventures. They carry him away to the
other-world where, ever in their enchanting pres-
ence, he soon forgets all things mortal and passes
entirely under their magic spell. Even if they
allow him to return to earth, they never again release
the hero whose love they have once beguiled.
Three powerful fays, as is well known, are
portrayed in the " matter of Britain. " The first
one, Morgan le Fay, sister to Arthur, is essentially
*Vthe_ Fairy queen of Arthurian legend." Her
attributes are manifold. She is described as the
lady of the mist-enclosed island of Avalon, as the
magic maiden who heals the King's wounds after
the battle of Camlan ; as the slighted mistress
who seeks dire revenge upon her lover ; as
endowed also with the gifts of prophecy, with the
power of shape-shifting, and even of changing the
appearance of mortals. Again, she is the mother
of Auberon, the little king of Fa^ry who dwells
in a wood, which his wizard power makes it
perilous for any one to pass through, and who.
1 Fay: O. F.:fae,fa'le; Pr. and Vg.-.fada; Sp. : hada ; It.: fata;
Latin -.fata, the Fates, misconstrued as a feminine singular.
26 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [CHAP.
like herself, is possessed of a truth-testing drink-
ing vessel :
Auberon, le petit roi sauvaige,
Que tout son tans conversa en boscage.
Chil Auberons, que tant ot segnoraige,
Sachi^s k'il fu ficus Juliien Cesare...
Jules ot feme une dame moult sage,
Morge ot a nom, moult ot cler le visaige;
Cele fu mere Auberon le sauvaige ^...
The two other fays. La Dame du Lac and
Niniane, have less numerous legends attached to
them than those of the Morgan Saga. Neither
of them is found outside the strictly Arthurian
romances. La Dame du Lac is the guardian of
Lancelot, who is brought up in Fairyland. She
trains him up in arms and brave exploits. She
fits him for the task that awaits him when he shall
be a man, whereby the youth shall win the right to
her love ; for her protection is only due to
her having chosen Lancelot for her lover, after
he shall have attained manhood and proved
himself a hero. Niniane, lastly, or Vivien as she
is more familiarly known, is the beguiler of Merlin
the enchanter, whom she meets in the forest, who
imparts to her his skill in magic, is eventually
charmed into an endless sleep, and confined within
an air-bound prison by the very spells he himself
has taught the malicious maiden. All the other fays
Huon de Bordeaux, vv. 6-17.
I.] ROMANTIC FAYS 2']
of the Arthurian cycle are stamped more or less with
the same characters. Being themselves exceedingly
fair, they give their love to a hero for his valour.
They lure him to their mysterious abodes by
sorcery. And he stays with them for ever, either
in willing thraldom or in complete oblivion, in
the far-off land
From whence there's never a return.
Such are, restricted to their essential features,
the various aspects of the fairy creed, as it appears
in the mythology of the British Isles. The belief,
of course, admits of no hard and fast division, and
these bare outlines aim at nothing more than
singling out its leading conceptions. Reality is a
far more complex matter, that reality especially
which deals with popular legends handed down
by oral tradition from one age to another. Thus
the Celtic fairies, as has been seen, have no little
in common with the elves of Teutonic mythology,
while, on the other hand, they had a share in the
evolution of the love ideal in the romances of
Chivalry. Again, in the French romance, Huon
de Bordeaux aided by Auberon, the fairy king,
a Teutonic dwarf who, strangely enough, is the
son of Julius Cssar and Morgan le Fay, en-
counters some wonderful adventures, performs
many valorous tasks which closely resemble those
28 ELVES, FAIRIES, AND FAYS [cHAP. I.
of the Arthurian heroes. But whether we study
the supernatural beings of the folk-belief in their
primaeval aspects or in their later stages, after
they had undergone different influences, that of
Court-life, for instance, or after they had been
degraded, by the introduction of Christianity, into
inferior, half-devilish powers, we find that they
all spring from one main source : that natural
desire of man which leads him to people his
surroundings, and to construe a symbol out of
everything. Under their blended forms, in which
the student endeavours to discriminate several
phases of development — the word fairy being in
course of time indifferently applied to all the
spirits of a lower order, to the full-sized y%yj of
romance as well as to the dwarfish elves that haunt
the woods and the streams — the fairies represent
the primitive mythology of mankind, at a time
when faith and imagination still reigned uppermost,
in a twilight world not yet " dispeopled of its
dreams. "
CHAPTER II
EARLY FAIRY POETRY
The fairy belief which, from the most ancient
times, had thus been prevailing in the mythology
of the British Isles was bound to find its way into
early English literature. The oral tradition,
so widely diffused among the people, set working
the fancy of individual songsters who found in the
legends of their race a wealth of material that
wanted very little indeed to assume an artistic
shape. Even if we leave aside such prose-writers
as Geoffrey of Monmouth who, in his Historia
Regum Britanniae^ composed about 1 130, gathered
all the floating traditions concerning Arthur into
a connected narrative, drawing not a little besides
upon his own imagination, and exalted the then
virtually unknown king into the national British
champion and the acknowledged prince of Fairy-
land ; or, on the other hand, Gervase of Tilbury
who, about a century later, recounted in his Otia
Imperialia many particulars of the fairy belief of
the time, yet we find in the early poetry ot
England a good many allusions to the elfin world.
30 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
Short and occasional as they are, they none the less
indicate what an important part the fairies, looked
upon and believed in as supernatural beings, were
still playing in the minds of men. Let us suc-
cessively examine from this point of view the
Popular Ballads, the Teutonic Epic, the Metrical
Romances translated from the French, the work
of Chaucer, and of the Chaucerian poets.
I
The Popular Ballads, as was to be expected,
are " fulfild of fayerye. " They represent the
literature of a pre-literary period, the poetry of
the crowd not yet bearing the individual touch.
They narrate in a very simple way what was then
uppermost in the minds of the common folk, so as
to suit an unlettered audience that could only be
interested in what was true to human nature, and
expressed in the plain words of every-day lan-
guage.
Fairy-lore constitutes, with war and love, one
of the leading motives of the ballads. The
twilight of primaeval beliefs and superstitions
which was hanging over man could not but be
reflected in his song, just as were his rough passion
for hunting and raiding, his love thwarted or
treacherous, his revengeful hate only quenched by
death. The technical characteristics of the ballad
itself, which was originally intended to be sung.
II.] THE POPULAR BALLADS 3 1
or at least chanted, and to accompany the dance
of the crowd : its absolute objectivity, its terseness,
its leaping without the slightest transition from
narrative to dialogue, its many incomplete or
unexplained suggestions, all rendered it particu-
larly fit for a representation of the fairy-world.
Thus Young Tamlane has been carried off "when
a boy just turn'd of nine " by the Elfin Queen :
Ae fatal morning I went out
Dreading nae injury.
And thinking lang, fell soun asleep
Beneath an apple tree.
Then by it came the Elfin Queen
And laid her hand on me ;
And from that time since ever I mind
I 've been in her companie.^
It is only the ordeal of Fair Janet waiting on the
gloomy heath at Miles Cross, on All-hallow eve
"when the fairy folk will ride," and holding her
lover fast through all his awful changes of form,
that saves him from being given away to the fiend
of Hell, and that can win back the "elfin grey, " her
child's father, to earth and human shape, while
the " Queen of Fairies " exclaims :
" But had I kenn'd, Tamlane, she says,
A ladye wad borrow'd thee,
I wad ta' en out thy twa grey een.
Put in twa een o'tree."
1 Child's Ballads, 26. Text G.
32 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
" Had I but kenn'd, Tamlane, she says,
Before ye came frae hame,
I wad ta' en out your heart o' flesh,
Put in a heart o' stane." ^
In another ballad a woman has been carried away
to the nether-world, to suckle the elf-queen's off-
spring. The latter however proves, this time,
far more humane :
*' O nurse my bairn, nourice," she says,
" Till he Stan' at your knee.
An ye's win hame to Christen land,
Whar fain it's ye wad be." ^
In the Elfin Knight^ a woman again overcomes the
unearthly spirit :
The elfin knight sits on yon hill.
He blaws his horn both lowd and shrill...
"I wish that horn were in my kist, chest
Yea, and the knight in my armes two,"
She had no sooner these words said.
When that the knight came to her bed. '
But the maiden baffles her lover by setting him a
preliminary and all but impossible task, more
disheartening even than " sewing a sark without a
seam. " As a rule however, the fairy folk are not
to be so easily thwarted. They are malicious, if
not wholly evil-minded. Allison Gross had been
' Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The Young Tamlane. —
» Child's Ballads, 40.—' lb. 2, Text A.
II.] THE POPULAR BALLADS 33
" trysted up " one day to the bower of" the ugliest
witch in the north-country, " and humoured with
" monny fair speech. " Then, on his refusal to
be her leman,
She's turn'd her right an' roun' about
An' thrice she blaw on a grass-green horn,
An' she sware by the meen and the stars abeen
That she'd gar me rue the day I was born.
She eventually changed him into an ugly worm
crawling about a tree ;
But as it fell out on last Hallow-even,
When the seely court was ridin' by, fr^'>'y
The Queen lighted down on a gowany bank, daisied
Nae far frae the tree where I wont to lye.
She took me up in her milk-white han',
An' she's stroak'd me three times o'er her knee ;
She chang'd me again to my ain proper shape.
An' I nae mair maun toddle about the tree. ^ must
Clerk Colvill was even less fortunate : entreated
by the gay lady he had just married never to
return to a certain haunted stream, he visited it
again, and found the fairy waiting for him :
" Ye wash, ye wash, ye bonny may, maid
And ay's ye wash your sark o'silk. " shirt
" It's a' for you, ye gentle knight.
My skin is whiter than the milk. "
1 Child's Ballads, 35.
34 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
He's ta'en her by the milk-white hand,
He's ta'en her by the sleeve sae green,
And he's forgotten his gay ladie,
And he's awa' wi' the fair mayden. ^
At the end of the ballad, we see him riding home
to his mother, a dying man : he has been struck
to the heart by the mermaid's baleful kiss.
The fairies, such as we see them pictured in the
popular ballads, ^ that is such as they were con-
ceived of by the common folk, were on the whole
more to be dreaded than to be loved. They were
alluded to as the "good people," the "gude neigh-
bours," the "men of peace" in a propitiatory way
only, just as the Greek Furies were called the
" Eumenides. " They formed an uncanny,
peevish, vindictive tribe, dangerous alike to rely
upon and to disregard. In their intercourse with
men they would act in the most compelling way,
the mortals feeling their bewildering influence
and unconsciously, but perforce, yielding to it.
Above all they were real creatures, portentous
beings in the flesh for those who spent the long
winter nights reciting their misdeeds. Being ever
invisibly present, they must be spoken of with no
little reverence, and in as few words as possible.
Both the minstrel and such as listened to his lay
' Child's Ballads, 42. — - See some other illustrations in The Oxford
Book of Ballads, chosen and edited by A. Ouiller-Couch (Oxford, 19 10),
the first Book of which (pp. 1-142) deals with Magic, the " Seely
Court," and the Supernatural.
II.] THE TEUTONIC EPIC 35
knew better than to pry too closely into the
manners of those shadowy beings, and tarry too
long in their weird country, by bracken bush and
wan water, under " the lee licht o' the mune. "
II
The ballad was a narrative in verse, with a tra-
ditional theme, and of unknown authorship ; a rude
piece of poetry of popular origin that passed down
from generation to generation, and caught from
each some fresh colour. The epic is a narrative
usually longer, and dealing with heroic actions
and characters ; it evinces a tendency to aggregate
all the details into a synthetic, harmonious whole ;
it is written by a single professional poet who
stamps it with his own personality ; and is destined,
no more to be chanted or recited, the rustic
chorus singing the refrain, but to be read as a
book. Lastly, while the ballads, such as we
possess them now, were only collected and written
down within the last two centuries, the English
epic goes back to far-off ages, and has woven into
its poetical stories some of the most ancient
beliefs and superstitions of the race, long before
the Saxons left their Germanic shores and con-
quered Britain. ^
1 It has been kindly suggested to us that there appeared to be
some anachronism in thus placing the Teutonic Epic after the
Popular Ballads, the versification and language of which are but of
comparatively recent date. The reasons for the plan here adopted
36 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
The oldest epic poem, Beowulf^ supposed to
belong to the Vllth century, wherein are narrated
the fights of the Teutonic hero, still on the cont-
are briefly these. The problem of the origin of the ballads, a very
complex one, has not yet been finally solved. While some
critics hold them to be " usually a pr/cis of a romance, " (W. J.
Courthope) or " a part of the literary debris of the Middle Ages, "
(G. G. Smith), no less scholars than the late Professor Child, in his
monumental edition, A. Lang, F. B. Gummere, and G. L. Kittredge
incline to the theory that ballads are " the legacy of a long oral
tradition, " and prefer to regard them as Volkdieder, or as popular
M&rchen in rhyme, that is as springing mainly from the people.
" What marks them as popular, writes A. Lang, is their wonder-
fully wide diffusion, their close resemblance to prose Marchen
(which are found all over the world, and are certainly not of literary
authorship), with their folklore incidents, based on universal
superstitions and customs. " {Chambers's Cyclopedia of English
Literature, new edit., 1903. Vol. I. p. 521). Mr. Henderson himself
(Scottish Vernacular Literature, 1898), who defends individual
authorship, and is strongly opposed to the theory of communal
origin, is fain to admit that " in many ways the ballads bring us
into immediate contact with the antique, pagan, savage, superstitious
elemental characteristics of the race. " It will now be easily
understood why, being chiefly concerned, in this essay, with the
influence of folk-lore, and especially of fairy-lore, upon individual
poetry, we have thought it advisable to place the Ballad, in which
we hear the voice not of any single poet, but of the multitude, or
at least of the " blind crowder, " before the Epic, the deliberate
work of a poetical artist couched in " an ambitious, self-conscious,...
aristocratic and accomplished style." (W. P. Ker : Epic and Romance,
1908, pp. 123-24). See, on this much debated question, the
bibliography in The Cambridge Histo)y of English Literature, Vol. II,
1908, pp. 492-95, to which must be added a recent monograph
by W. M. Hart : Ballad and Epic. A study in the de'velopment of
the narrati've art (Boston, 1907), where the writer endeavours
to show that the Ballad forms a step from popular poetry to the
poetry of art, at the beginning of which stands the Epic.
II.] BEOfVULF 2y
inent, with the monster Grendel, its mother, and
the Dragon, contains one distinct allusion at least
to the fairy belief. Here of course we meet with
the Teutonic elves, the gloomy, malignant spirits
who are nearly related to the blood-thirsty fiends
of the sea-caves, and reflect the crude heathen
colouring of the whole. On the other hand, the
poem, which has come down to us in a manuscript
of the Xth century, bears evident traces of a revi-
sion dating from after the introduction of Chris-
tianity into the British isles. This may be easily
accounted for : if the Saxons, even after their
formal adhesion to the new faith, clung on to their
heathen ways of thought, and never ceased to
believe in the existence and power of the elves,
the Catholic preachers made it a part of their duty
to turn the national faith to their own use. The
elves, they professed, were fallen Angels who
"without openly joining Satan in his rebellion
gave it no opposition, " ^ and were condemned to
wander over the earth till Doomsday. Or else they
were the descendants of Cain, the first murderer,
who had been changed into evil monsters, who
were dwelling on dreary moors or by dismal lakes,
whose only occupation was to scare and scourge
mankind. Thus we read in Beowulf :
jjanon untydras ealle onwocon,
eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas,
1 See the note of Prof. Ker on " The Craven Angels, " in The
V^odern Language Re'vie^w, Vol. 6, Jan. 191 1.
1 ii)
38 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
swylce gigantas, ]>z with Gode wunnon
lange ]?rage ; he him )?aes lean forgeald/
the second couplet being doubtless a later inter-
polation.
The elves play a more important part in Laya-
mons Brut (c. 1205), which embraces the more
or less legendary history of all the British kings
from the destruction of Troy and the landing of
Brutus to the beginning of the Vlllth century.
They continue, as in the purely Teutonic Beowulf^
to plague the poor mortals and to haunt the wilds.
Layamon thus describes a lake in Scotland :
Jiat is a seolcuM mere :
iset a middelaerde.
mid fenne ^ mid raeode :
mid watere swiMe braede.
mid fiscen ^ mid feo3elen :
mid uniuele J^ige.
J)at water is unimete brade :
nikeres J^er badieM inne.
Jjer is eeluene plo3e :
in atteliche pole.^
• 11. 111-114. "Thence monstrous births all woke into being:
— Jotuns, and el'ves and ghosts, — as well as giants, which strove
against God — for a long time ; he for that paid them their reward."
(Translation by Thom. Arnold). — - Layamon s Brut. MS. Cott.
Calig., A. ix. 11. 21,740-49. "That is a marvellous lake, set in
middle-earth, with fen and with reed, with water exceeding broad ;
with fish and with fowl, with evil things ! The water is immeasurably
broad ; nikers therein bathe j there is play of elves in the hideous
pool." (Translation by Sir F. Maiden.)
II.] layamon's brut 39
Layamon is a true-born Saxon, and his Brut is
professedly a patriotic epic. Taking up the fab-
ulous history of Geoffrey of Monmouth written
in a dignified, rhetorical Latin style, and the
Anglo-Norman Brut of Wace, so redolent of the
courtly French romance, he infuses into them the
darker and more sturdy Teutonic spirit. He is
proud of Arthur, whose story he thoroughly
saxonizes. He praises him into the ideal
British king. He not only adds freely to his
originals : for the mysterious glamour with which
the French romancers had enshrouded Arthur's
name, he substitutes a robust manliness, well
worthy of his countrymen's veneration. Thus,
instead of connecting him only with such enchan-
tresses as Morgan le Fay, Layamon places his
hero in the company of the elves, who so charac-
teristically belong to the general stock of the
Teutonic saga. The elves presided at the birth
of the king, welcomed him into the world, and
presented him with various gifts :
]?e time co J?e wes icoren :
Jja wes Ar^Aur iboren.
Sone swa he com an eorthe :
aluen hine iuengen.
heo bigolen ]7at child :
mid galdere swithe stronge.
bed 3eue him mihte :
to beon bezst aire cnihten.
heo 3euen him an other J^ing :
40 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
]>at he scolde beon riche king.
heo 5iuen hi Jiat ]jridde :
}?at he scolde longe libben.
heo 3ifen him J^at kine-bern :
custen swithe gode.
]7at he wes mete-custi :
of alle quikemonnen.
y\s ]>e alue him 3ef :
and al swa J>at child ij^aeh. ^
His arms, his " burne, " or cuirass of steel, and
Caliburn his sword had been wrought for him by-
elvish smiths :
And he warp on him :
one brunie of stele.
]7at makede an haluis smil? :
mid his wise crafte...
Cali burne his sweord :
he sweinde bi his side,
hit was i-wroht in Auylun :
mid witfolle crafte. ^
1 Brut. MS. Cott. Calia:., A. IX. 11. 19, 253-269. " The time
came that was chosen, then was Arthur born. So soon as he came
on earth elves took him ; they enchanted the child with magic
most strong ; they gave him might to be the best of all knights ;
they gave him another thing, that he should be a rich king ; they
gave him the third, that he should live long ; they gave to him the
prince virtues most good, so that he was most generous of all men
alive. This the elves gave him, and thus the child thrived. " {lb.).
— - Brut. MS. Cott. Otho, c. XIII. 11. 21,130-141. "And he
threw on him a burny of steel that an elvish smith made, with his
wise craft... Caliburn his sword, he hung by his side ; it was
wrought in Avalon, with witful craft. " (lb.).
II.] layamon's brut 41
At his passing away, Arthur declared he would
repair to Avalon, the island of the "elf most fair, "
Argante, who would " make him hale " and enter-
tain him till he returned to his beloved British
kingdom :
And ich wulle uaren to Avalu :
to uairest aire maidene.
to Argante j^ere quene :
aluen swithe sceone.
y heo shal mine wunden :
malcien alle isunde.
al hal me makien :
mid halewei3e drechen.
And seothe ich cumen wulle :
to mine kineriche.
and wunien mid Brutten :
mid muchelere wunne. ^
Argante is of course Morgan le Fay, and these
several episodes may be directly borrowed from
French romance : their colouring is however
distinctly Saxon. They bring home to us the
national import of the priest-poet's work, and
how, on the banks of the Severn at least, people,
early in the Xlllth century, were already beginning
to recover from the effects of the foreign conquest.
1 Brut. M.S. Cott. Calig., A. IX. 11. 28,610-622. "And I will
fare to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante, the queen,
an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound ; make
me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come
to my kingdom, and dwell with the Britons with mickle joy."
(lb.).
42 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
Finally, let us mention The Fision of William
concerning Piers the Plowman^ by William Langland,
another Saxon epic, as perhaps we might call it,
which, although written about a century and a
half after the Brut, still preserved all its homely
vigour. Here, amidst the intricate allegories of
a Dream, a device no doubt imitated from the
Roman de la Rose, comes out in bold relief the
sturdy personality of an unsophisticated country-
man, who earns his living by chanting psalms and
requiems for hire, who speaks his mind bluntly
and gives free vent to all his discontents, who on
the other hand firmly believes in the supernatural,
as the first lines of his work testify :
...Bote in a Mayes morwnynge* on Maluerne hulles
Me bi-fel a ferly^ z feyrie^ me thouhte ;
I was weori of wandringe* and wente me to reste
Vndur a brod banke* bi a bourne syde...^
But Langland is a thorough, if somewhat restless
and indignant. Christian, who sees in life a con-
stant struggle between man's natural passions and
the will of God, between the social forces and his
own conscience ; who expresses, by means of his
allegorical personifications, his thoughts on religion
and the Church, on Truth and Falsehood, on the
Deadly Sins, as Envy, Covetise, Gluttony, all
ministers to the foul fiend ; who besides associates
' A wonder. — ' A strange thing of fairy origin. — ' Tlie Fision...
A. Prologue, 11. 5-8.
II.] LANGLAND 43
the elves haunting the hills with the wicked
little imps of Hell, the poukes^ as he calls them :
...ne helle pouke hym greue,
Neither fuyr, nother flod* ne be a-fered of enemye ;^
...ne brynge ous out of daunger,
Fro the poukes poundfalde...
Crist is bus name
That shal delyuery ous som day out of the deueles
[powere ; -
Thenne palle^ ich a-downe the pouke' with the thridde
[shoryere, *
The which is Spiritus sanctus...^
These several allusions, this scheme of expressing
the most earnest and sacred beliefs by means of the
commonest superstitions, go a long way to prove
how persistently the Teutonic elves had been
haunting people's minds, how deftly also they had
been adapted to the changes of thought, the old,
deep-rooted popular belief only developing in
harmony with the new ideal of the time, and the
personal temper of each writer.
Ill
When the Metrical Romances, which were in
such high favour in France during the Xlllth and
XlVth centuries, came over to England, they met
with distinct success. The supernatural elements
' lb. C. Passus, 16, 11. 164-65. — - lb. C. Passus 19, 11. 281-84. —
' I knock, I strike. — * Prop. — * lb. C. Passus 19, 11. 50-51.
44 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
they contained being of course influenced by the
national behefs, there arose a very confused fairy
mythology, made up of all sorts of discrepant
fragments, the popular creed always entering into
and qualifying the foreign, aristocratic, and purely
literary ideas.
The romance of Sir Launfal, by a certain
Thomas Chestre, affords us an example in point.
It is an amplified version of a short lay
by Marie de France, the translation containing
some three hundred lines more than the original.
The story may be summarized as follows : Sir
Launfal, a handsome youth and a steward at
Arthur's Court, had brought home the king's
bride, Gwennere, who, soon after her marriage,
caused him to leave the palace. He fell into
poverty and deep distress. One day, as he sat
under a tree, "yn sorrow and sore," two "gentyll
maydenes," with faces "whyt as snow on downe",
wearing kirtles of Indian silk and green mantles,
suddenly came in sight. They led him to the
rich pavilion of their lady :
The kynges doughter of Olyroun,
Dame Tryamour, that hyghte ;
Her fader was kyng of fayrye,
Of Occient far and nyghe,
A man of mocheli myghte. ^
' Ancient English Metrical Romances, Ed. Edm. Goldsmid,
Edinburgh, 188+, 11. 278-82.
II.] SIR LAUNFAL 4^
The damsel, who was :
... as whyt as lylye yn May,
Or snow that sneweth yn wynterys day, ^
gave the young knight a warm and even passionate
welcome :
Swetyng paramour,
Ther nys no man yn Cristente
That y love so moche as the,
Kyng, neyther emperour. ^
"They went to bedd, and that anon," but when
she dismissed him on the morrow, she imposed
one express condition :
...of o'thyng, syr knyght, I warne the.
That thou make no host of me...
And yf thou doost, y warny the before
All my love thou hast forlore...^
Sir Launfal returned full of joy and hope. He
now prospered in everything. He grew very rich.
He achieved brilliant victories in tournaments,
as far afield as Lombardy, till he roused the tnyy
of " all the Lords of Atalye. " His reputation
reached the ears of King Arthur, who recalled him
to his court. The handsome knight had not been
there very long when queen Gwennere began
to entice him by soft words, and, one day, actually
confessed her passion. Faithful to his elfin
mistress, who was visiting him overnight, Sir
' 11. 292-93.—* 11. 303-06.—' 11. 362-66.
46 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
Launfal rebuked her sharply, going, unhappily, so
far as to betray his secret :
I have loved a fayryr woman
Than thou ever leydest thyn ey upon,
Thys seven yer and more. ^
The queen was not long in devising her revenge :
I spak to Launfal yn my game,
And he besoghte me of my schame
My lemman for to be, "
she went and told her husband, who condemned
the pretended seducer to die if he could not,
by a certain day, bring his mysterious mistress
before the court ; even then, if she did not out-
shine in beauty the queen herself:
He schud be hongede as a thef. ^
The appointed time was drawing near, and Sir
Launfal, who, since he had broken his bond, had
been deprived of his wondrous paramour's presence,
was ready to pay with his life for his supposed
felony, when the Lady Tryamour, having at last
relented, rode into the castle-court in the most
gorgeous apparel :
Gentyll, jolyf, as bryd on bow^e, *
When in the presence of King Arthur, she told
him the plain truth about his treacherous wife.
She then leapt again on her palfrey, and carried
off her knight into Fairyland :
> 11. 695-97.—' U. 716-18.—^ 1. 804.—" I. 932.
II.] SIR ORFEO ^J
Fer ynto a jolyf ile,
Olyroun that hyghte...
Thus Launfal, wythouten fable,
That noble knyght of the rounde table,
Was take ynto the fayrye. ^
When compared with the original of Marie de
France, this beautiful romance almost reads as a
new poem. To the facts which he had borrowed
from the French authoress, the English translator
has imparted some strange glamour, a sort of magic
light that reminds one of the weird mystery of
Celtic fancy. The courtly lay was thus brought
nearer to the popular beliefs which, in times past,
may have given it rise ; and it seems as though
Thomas Chestre had been dealing with his own
national fairies.
This process of suffusing the foreign stories'^
with the supernatural light of English mythology/
thereby adding to them considerably, is exemplified
again in the romance of Sir Orfeo (c. 1320). Here/
the old classical fable, the French original of which
has not been preserved, was turned into an
English fairy tale pure and simple. Like the
ballad of Toung Tamlane^ it tells of the retrieval
of a lover lost in Fairyland, with this difference,
however, that this time a lady is won back. Queen
Heurodis fell asleep at noon, under the shadow
of " a fair ympe-tree," in the palace orchard where
she had gone " to see the floures sprede and
' 11. 1023-37.
48 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
spring." She was in a wild frenzy when she
awoke, and told her distressed husband that she
needs must leave him the next day to go and live
with the Fairy King, under whose spell she had
fallen. Orfeo repaired to the "ympe-tree" on the
morrow, together with a thousand knights " ich
yarmed stout and grim," resolved to attempt her
rescue at any cost. But they had scarcely arrived
on the spot when she was of a sudden snatched
away from among the whole company.
King Orfeo left his kingdom. He retired to
the wilderness where, with his harp, he subdued
all sorts of beasts and birds :
Oft in hot undertides
J>e king o'Fairi wij> his rout
com to hunt him al about. ^
One day he espied in the distance a bevy of
fairy damsels, among whom, on his drawing nearer,
he recognised his lamented queen. He followed
them a long time, and thus reached the gate of
the fairy castle, "rich and reale and wonder heighe."
He presented himself as a wandering minstrel,
desirous to solace the lord with " his harp so miri
of soun ; " and his melodies proved so delightful
that he was promised whatever he should ask for.
He of course demanded Heurodis, and led her
back to his kingly town of Winchester, which he
had left under the care of an old steward. But,
' Ed. O. Zielke, Breslau, 1880, 11. 280-82.
II.] SIR ORFEO ^Q
unlike the classical hero, he was able to regain his
authority, for :
}>e steward him wele knewe...
and fel adoun to his fet...
now king Orfeo newe coround is,
and his quen dame Heurodis,
and Hved long afterward
and sej)]7en was king ]?e steward. ^
In fact, the romance of Sir Orfeo is a thoroughly-
English poem, and, of the Greek legend of
Orpheus and Eurydice, only the bare outline has
been preserved. Orfeo was " a king in Inglond,
who abode in Traciens, " that is Winchester.
He was himself in some way related to the fairy
tribe, as :
His fader was comen of king Pluto, ^
and Hell being, in folk-lore, closely connected with
Fairyland ; while, on the other hand, the castle he
arrived at in Faerie was situated beneath the
ground, like the classical Infernus no doubt, but
also like the abode both of the Teutonic elves and
Celtic fairies. The general terseness of the piece,
moreover, so different from the lonp--windedness
of French romances, puts one in mind of the rapid,
direct style of the popular ballad; and Prof.
Child has actually found one, in Shetland, with a
very similar motive.^
The same subject, as is the case with Thomas the
' 11. 575-94- — ' 1- 29- — ^ Balladi, I, 215.
50 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
Rhymer, sometimes appears both in ballad and
romance. Which was the earlier form of the two
is not easy to determine, though the ballad is
generally supposed to be a remnant of the metrical
romance. Both relate the journey of Thomas of
Erceldoune to Fairyland, a man much renowned
as a " rymour, " that is as a poet and prophet, in
the beginning of the XlVth century :
True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank ;
A ferlie he spied wi' his ee ;
And there he saw a ladye bright,
Come riding down by the Eildon tree.
Her shirt was o' the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o'the velvet fyne ;
At ilka tett of her horse's mane, lock
Hung fifty siller bells and nine.^
She dared him to kiss her lips :
" Novir, ye maun go wi' me," she said ;
" True Thomas, ye maun go wi' me ;
And ye maun serve me seven years.
Thro' weal or woe as may chance to be." ^
She mounted on her milk-white steed with true
Thomas up behind, and they both rode away
towards Elfland. They heard the roaring of the
sea, waded through crimson streams of blood, and
at last reached a garden green, where he had to stay
for seven years. Here the ballad comes to an end.
' Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Thomas the Rhymer, Part
first.—' lb.
II.] THOMAS THE RHYMER fl
In the romance, we learn how the kindly queen of
the Fairies, who would not allow Thomas to run into
danger, hurried him back to earth the day before
the foul fiend of Hell came among her folk and
chose his fee, the " teind, " or " kane " due to him,
at the end of every seven years, by the people
of Fairyland. And it was at the moment of parting
that the Elfin queen bestowed upon Thomas the gift
of soothsaying, in remembrance of his perilous love.
Various elements are to be' discerned in this
traditional story. The legend of a mortal's jour-
ney to the nether-world, a commonplace in popular
belief, is also the exact counterpart to the visit of
Ulysses to Hades, or of Tineas to the Infernus.
Several religious traits may be found. When
Thomas, like Ogier the Dane, first catches sight of
the Elfin queen, he mistakes her for the Virgin :
" All hail, thou mighty queen of heaven !
For thy peer on earth I never did see." ^
His seven years' sojourn in the subterranean
region is not unconnected with the Christian
notion of Purgatory, while :
...the path of wickedness,
Though some call it the road to heaven,
is contrasted by the enchantress to :
...the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae. ^
Again Thomas' finding favour with the Fairy
\ lb. — ■> lb.
52 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
queen, and being taken by her to her weird country,
is but another version of the Arthurian legend in
which Morgan le Fay carried off Ogier the Dane
to live with her at Avalon for two hundred years,
which seemed to him as twenty. Finally, the
general atmosphere of the story, both in its scenery
and incidents, is entirely of a popular character,
the ballad being, so to speak, but the re-vulgarisa-
tion of the literary romance.
So much then for the Metrical Romances that
deal with fairy-lore. They show the stage which the
fairy mythology had arrived at in the later Middle
Ages. They combine the earnestness of the folk-
belief with the sweet vagaries of romance. They
represent the courtly version of the people's simple
faith. They exemplify the constant intercourse
between the popular and literary elements in
poetry. Or, more precisely, the fairy-lore in
these romances gives us some insight into the
state of mind of an ordinarily cultured English-
man in the Xlllth and XlVth centuries. He
has almost thrown off the primitive superstitions
of his race, and the dread of the monsters of
old. He has been acquainted, by the priests and
monks, with the tenets of Christianity, and, through
the Latin poets, with some of the wealth of classical
mythology. Though he still believes in super-
natural beings, he begins, however, to embellish his
faith, and even to make it the subject of some of
his most fanciful poems.
II.] CHAUCER ^3
IV
Chaucer, the " Father of English Poetry," that
is the first writer whose personality pervaded his
whole work, and informed it with a strong sub-
jective element always lacking in earlier authors,
paid no little attention to the "good people."
Not that he entertained about them any definite
notions. On the contrary, the very vividness
of his style brought out into bolder relief the
unsettled conceptions then prevailing with regard
to fairy mythology. Thus, as was his wont, he
first " rehearsed " some ideas, and a good many
phrases, current at the time. Following the
Metrical Romances, Chaucer identified the fairies
with the inhabitants of the classical Hades :
Pluto, that is the king of fayerye...
... Pluto, and his quene
Proserpina, and al his fayerye. ^
Again, in Sir Thopas, he placed the entrance to the
subterranean land of Faery in the wilderness :
In-to his sadel he clamb anoon,
And priketh over style and stoon
An elf-queen for t' espye,
Til he so longe had riden and goon
That he fond, in a privee woon,
The contree of Fairye
So wilde ;
For in that contree was ther noon
' TAe Marchantes Tale, 11. 983, 794.-5.
54 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
That to him dorste ryde or goon,
Neither wyf ne childe...
Heer is the queen of Fayerye,
With harpe and pype and simphonye
Dwelling in this place.. .^
Elsewhere Chaucer associated Elfland with the
story of Arthur, and even seemed to regard the
fairy character of the hero-king as the only feature
worth remembering, quite apart from the fervour
of mystical faith and from the ideals of knight
errantry which had given the British romance its
essential aspect. The passage, in The Tale of the
JVyf of Bathe ^ is a well-known one :
In th' olde dayes of the king Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede ;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede.
I speke of manye hundred yeres ago ;
But now can no man see none elves mo.
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitours and othere holy freres.
That serchen every lond and every streem,
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,
Blessinge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,
Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,
Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes.
This maketh that ther been no fayeryes.
1 11. 86-105.
II.] CHAUCER ^^
For ther as wont to walken was an elf,
Ther walketh now the limitour himself
In undermeles and in morweninges,
And seyth his matins and his holy thinges
As he goth in his limitacioun.
Wommen may go saufly up and doun,
In every bush, or under every tree ;
There is noon other incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem but dishonour. ^
Here we detect the sly humour of the great
poet. He will no longer believe, of course, in
those superstitions " of manye hundred yeres ago."
Our sceptic is not of " the olde opinion." A
satirist besides, he is laughing in his sleeve when
he ascribes the disappearance of the elf-people to
the meddlesomeness of those holy monks and
friars who, somehow, have taken the offices of the
fairies into their own hands. Again, Chaucer's
own tale of Sir Thopas is but a parody of romance
in general. It turns into ridicule both its aristo-
cratic tone and its straggling prolixity. It evinces
a perfect knowledge of its usual themes, and of
the Faery in particular :
" Me dremed al this night, pardee.
An elf-queen shal my iemman be,
And slepe under my gore.
An elf-queen wol I love, y-wis,
For in this world no womman is
' 11. 857-881.
56 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP.
Worthy to be my make
In toune ;
AUe othere wommen I forsake,
And to an elf-queen I me take
By dale and eek by doune ! " ^
This is Chaucer's vein throughout his work.
Yet, a cheerful humourist as he was, and decidedly
bent on making fun, in a very quiet, graceful way,
of romance, he was too much of a poet to deprive
himself of the mysterious charm afforded by the fairy
themes. We meet, in The Marchantes Tale^ with :
Pluto, that is the king of fayerye.
And many a lady in his companye,
Folwinge his wyf, the quene Proserpync. ^
The fairy couple devote themselves to the exegesis
of Scripture, discuss at length the moral character
of Solomon, and, to avenge the wrong done by
the " fresshe and gentyl " May to old January's
honour, give him again his sight, and make him
see "as wel as ever he mighte. "^ In The Tale of the
Man of Law e^ the queen is compared to an elf,
that is, in this case, to a sort of witch :
The moder was an elf by aventure
Y-come, by charmes or by sorcerye,
And every wight hateth hir companye.*
We find again, passim:
" What ! Nicholay ! what, how ! what ! loke adoun !
Awake, and thenk on Cristes passioun ;
' U. 76-86.—' U. 983-85.— » 1. 1112.—" 11. 754-56.
II.] GOWER 57
I crouche thee from elves and fro wightes." ^...
Maius, that sit with so benigne a chere,
Hir to biholde it scm^d fayery'e'}....
Greet was the prees, that swarmeth to and fro,
To gauren on this hors that stondeth so...
It was of Fairy e^ as the peple semed. ^
To sum up, Chaucer, though a scholar and a
courtly poet, may have looked with mild irony,
nay with genial pleasure, on the popular super-
stitions of his day. Besides, he was too accurate
a painter of his own time not to have made room
in his tales for the fairies, though he himself felt
sure, as he roguishly declared, they had been
extinct for centuries. Lastly, he was too anxious
for anything that could attract his ordinary readers
to leave aside one of the favourite, if subordinate,
themes of popular imagination.
With the most famous contemporary of Chaucer,
the correct and "moral" Gower, the fairies make
a much less picturesque figure. They have
dropped all connection with the lively national
elves. They appear as some pale transcriptions
of the fays of French romance, savouring not a
little of literary artifice. Thus, in the Tale of
ConstancCy the king, on his being entreated to get
rid of his wife, says to his father :
For every man it hath supposed
How that my wif Constance is faie ;
' The Milleres Tale, II. 291-93. — * The Marchantes Tale,
11. 498-99. — * The Squieres Tale, 11. 189-201.
58 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [CHAP.
And if that I, thei sein, delaie
To put hire out of compaignie,
The worschipe of my Regalie
Is lore.^
The same French meaning o^ fay as an enchantress,
a treacherous woman who beguiles men into loving
her, occurs frequently in Gower's poems, in The
Tale of hlarcissus^ for instance :
He sih the like of his visage
And wende ther were an ymage
Of such a Nimphe as tho W3.s faie^
Whereof that love his herte assaie
Began... ; •
or in T/ie Tale of Jason and Medea, where the latter
is depicted as a woman initiated into the mysteries
and marvels of magic :
Sche semeth faie and no womman ;
For with the craftes that sche can
Sche was, as who seith, a goddesse,
And what hir liste, more or lesse
She dede... '
Nor did Lydgate himself, one of the most prolific
XVth century writers in Chaucerian metres, fail to
make a rapid allusion to Arthur, the romantic
hero. It is to be found in The Fall of Princes,?), long,
shambling version of Boccacio's De Casibus Illus-
trium Virorum, which contains above thirty thous-
and lines :
' Confessio Amantis : II. II. 1018-23. — ^ I. II. 2315-19. —
^ V. 11. 4105-09.
II.] LYDGATE 59
He is a king ycronnid in Fairie ;
With scepter, and sword, and with his regally,
Shall resort as lord and soveraigne
Out of Fairie and reigne in Britaine,
And repaire again the old Round Table... ^
On the whole, up to the XVth century, the
fairies — and under that comprehensive name
were indiscriminately mingled all those spirits of
a subordinate order which, for evil or for good,
held any intercourse with men — entered but
occasionally, and at distant intervals, into English
literature. Forming one of the primaeval myths
of the race, and one of the most deeply rooted in
the common people's minds, it was only little by
little that they were granted admittance into the
poetry of art. They appeared now as the mis-
chievous, if not malignant, elves of Teutonic
mythology, now as the inhabitants of the pagan,
classical Hell, both of them equally loathed and
relentlessly fought against by the Catholic priests,
after the introduction of Christianity into England.
They were moreover influenced by the romantic
tales of Chivalry, and also perhaps, after the
Crusades, by the gorgeous traditions of the East.
A great confusion reigned among these different
conceptions of the fairy-world, and the poet was
' Book VIII. ch. 24. Quoted by T. Warton, Observations on
the Faerie Queene of Spenser. Edit. 1754, p. 43.
60 EARLY FAIRY POETRY [cHAP. II.
yet to come who, grasping hold of these floating,
unsettled traditions, would weld them into an
harmonious whole. Or, may be, the fairy belief
was still too lively and too potent a superstition
to be made to fit in easily with a mere imaginative
story, and to be 'looked upon as the subject-matter
of a simple literary tale.
CHAPTER III
ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES
The Elizabethan period is the golden age of
English fairy poetry. At no time did the poets
come in closer contact with the people, or weave \
into their works a greater number of common
beliefs, from the most spirited patriotic ideal to
the humblest superstitions. It is a period unique
in the rolls of English history, when men, just
freed from their religious troubles and from the
dread of foreign invasion, gave way to their intense
imagination, to the passionate dreams of golden
islands set in the distant seas, as well as to the
hearty enjoyment, unchecked by any discipline, of
their daily life, so gross, so turbid, doubtless, but
all teeming with full-blooded energy. The poets,
lyrists and dramatists alike, could not but share
in the national enthusiasm. Let us examine what
became of the fairy mythology during the reign
of " the most high, mightie and magnificent
Empress Elizabeth," how it first affected the
literature of the people, was next taken up by
different poets, and resorted to, lastly, both by the
6l ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
chivalrous and aristocratic Edmund Spenser, and
by such University Wits as John Lyly or Robert
Greene.
I
The Reformation, which had done so much to
enfranchise the popular mind, proved unable to
overthrow the strongholds of superstition. The
dim, awful twilight of Mediaevalism lingered on
for many years afterwards, and religion, leaving
aside the earnest controversies and stubborn
antagonisms of theologians, still consisted, for the
ignorant masses, in something sad, grim, and
ominous. " The Reformation," wrote Sir Walter
Scott in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border^ "swept
away many of the corruptions of the church of
Rome ; but the purifying torrent remained itself
somewhat tinctured by the superstitious impurities
of the soil over which it had passed. The trials
of sorcerers and witches, which disgrace our
criminal records, become even more frequent
after the Reformation of the church ; as if human
credulity, no longer amused by the miracles of
Rome, had sought for food in the traditionary
records of popular superstition." ^ The fairies did
not enjoy better credit under Elizabeth than in
the days of Chaucer and the Catholic priests.
They were still regarded as actual demons, as
' p- +55-
III.] R. SCOT 63
members of that tribe of devils which had been
denounced by theologians.
You bastards of the Night and Erebus,
FiendSy fairiesy hags, that fight in beds of steel !
exclaimed one of the characters in The Battell of
Alcazar^ a play by George Peele.^ Those who
pretended to hold intercourse with them were
looked upon as sorcerers, and not unfrequently
condemned to die at the stake.
That the fairies, together with the witches and
other supernatural beings, were no trifling matter
for the Elizabethans, there are plenty of documents
to prove. Thus the well-known book of Reginald
Scot : The discouerie of witchcraft^ wherein the lewde
dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie
detected, the knauerie of conjurors, the impietie of
inchantors, the follie of soothsaiers . . . Heereunto is
added a treatise upon the nature and substance of
spirits and divels, (London, 1584), in which the
atrocious dealings of the witch-finders are boldly
exposed, affords much information on the super-
stitions of the day, and about the fairies in parti-
cular. The following passages may be considered
as a nearly complete summary of the current folk-
belief concerning them :
The Fairies do principally inhabit the mountains and
caverns of the earth, whose nature is to make strange
apparitions on the earth, in meadows, or on mountains,
' 1594, Act. IV, sc. 2.
64 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
being like men and women, soldiers, kings, and ladies,
children and horsemen, clothed in green, to which pur-
pose they do in the night steal hempen stalks from the
fields where they grow, to convert them into horses, as
the story goes... Such jocund and facetious spirits are
said to sport themselves in the night by tumbling and
fooling with servants and shepherds in country houses,
pinching them black and blue, and leaving bread, butter
and cheese sometimes with them, which, if they refuse
to eat, some mischief shall undoubtedly befall them by
the means of these Fairies ; and many such have been
taken away by the said spirits for a fortnight or a month
together, being carried with them in chariots through the
air, over hills and dales, rocks and precipices, till at last
they have been found lying in some meadow or mountain,
bereaved of their senses and commonly one of their
members to boot... '
Indeed your grandam's maids were wont to set a bowl
of milk before him and his cousin, Robin Goodfellow, for
grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at
midnight ; and you have also heard that he would chafe
exceedingly, if the maid or goodwife of the house, having
compassion of his nakedness, laid any clothes for him,
besides his mess of white bread and milk which was his
standino; fee. For in that case he saith : What have we
here? Hemton hamton, here will I never more tread nor
stampen... ^
We must also quote another curious paragraph
about the generality and many-sidedness of the
belief :
> Ed. B. Nicholson, London, 1886. Book III, chap. IV.— =* lb.
Book IV, chap. X.
III.] TARLTON 65
...But in our childhood our mothers' maids have so...
fraid us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves,
hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, fauns, sylens. Kit with the
canstick, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars,
conjurors, nymphs, changelings, Incubus, Robin Good-
Fellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oak, the
hell wain, the fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thumb,
hobgoblin, Tom tumbler, boneless, and other such beings,
that we are afraid of our own shadows. ^
In 1589, George Puttenham, in his Arte of
English Poesie, mentioned it again as an opinion of
the nurses that fairies used to steal unbaptized
children and to leave ugly changelings in their
stead. ^ A short time after the death of the
famous comic actor, Tarlton, there came out a
tract entitled Tarlton s Newes out of Purgatorie
Published by an old companion of his^ Robin Good-
fellow^ (London, 1590), in which we may read :
" Think me to be one of those Famtliares Lares
that were rather pleasantly disposed than endued with
any hurtful influence, as Hob Thrust, Robin Goodfellow,
and such like spirits, as they term them, of the buttery,
famoused in every old wive's chronicle for their mad,
merry pranks. Therefore, sith my appearance to thee
is in resemblance of a spirit, think that I am as pleasant a
goblin as the rest, and will make thee as merry before I
part, as ever Robin Goodfellow made the country
wenches at their creambowls. " ^
Thomas Nash, finally, the now bitter, now good-
J lb. Book VII, chap. XV.— ^ Arber's Rpt., p. 144.— ^ Ed.
Shakespeare Society, p. 55.
66 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
humoured satirist, made, in the course of one of
his dullest pamphlets : Terrors of the Nig{ht\ or^ A
Discourse of Apparitions^ (London, 1594), another
allusion to the fairies, very acute indeed in its
comparison with ancient lore :
The Robin-good-fellows, Elfs, Fairies, Hobgoblins of
our latter age, which idolatrous former days and the
fantastical world of Greece ycleped Fauns, Satyrs, Dryads
and Hamadryads, did most of their merry pranks in the
night. Then ground they malt, and had hempen shirts
for their labours, danced in rounds in green meadows,
pinched maids in their sleep that swept not their houses
clean, and led poor travellers out of their way notoriously.'
Popular poetry was sure to make use of such a
widespread belief, and the fairies played an im-
portant part in the broadsides, those coarse, face-
tious, often obscene street-ballads, which were
written expressly for the amusement of the lower
classes, sung to a popular tune, and hawked in the
most frequented thoroughfares. ^ Here is the
beginning of one :
Tom Thumb is not my subject
Whom Fairies oft did aide.
Not that mad spirit Robin
That plagues both wife and maid.^
Now, Tom Thumb, one of the numerous goblins
who, according to Scot, made people afraid of
' Th. Nash's fTorks, Ed. Grosart, III. p. 223.— ^ Ci. passim.- Ph.
Stubbes : The Anatomie of Abuses ; Robert Laneham's Letter. — ' A
Book of Roxburghe Ballads, Ed. J. P. Collier, London, 1847, p- 35-
III.] BALLADS AND CHAP-BOOKS 67
their own shadows, seems to have been very well
known. He was mentioned, for instance, in some
verses prefixed to Thomas Coryate's Crudities,
(1611):
Tom Thumbe is dumbe, until! the pudding creepe
In which he was entomb'ed, then out doth peepe,
and made the subject of two little chap-books,
one in prose and the other in verse, which, though
the only copies known to exist date from the
XVIIth century, were very likely in existence
when R. Scot wrote his Discoverie of Witchcraft^
namely : The History of Tom Thumbe the Little^ for
his small stature surnamed King Arthurs Dwarfe...
Imprinted at London for Tho : Langley, 1621 ;
and Tom Thumbe, his Life and Death : fVherein
are declared Maruailous Acts of Manhood, full
of wonaer, and strange merriments : which little
Knight liued in King Arthur s time, and famous in the
court of Great Brittaine. London, printed for John
Wright, 1 630.^ In the latter, Tom Thumb, whose
stature was :
...but an inch in height,
or quarter of a span,
and who encountered all sorts of adventures,
falling into a pudding-bowl, being tied to a thistle,
or carried away by a raven, seemed to be a special
1 Reprinted in Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England,
Collected and Edited by W. C. Hazlitt, London, 1866. Vol. II.
pp. 167-192.
68 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
favourite of the Fairy Queen. She gave him his
name and :
...with her traine of GobHns grim,
Vnto his christning came.
The latter part of the pamphlet tells " How Tom
Thumb did take his sicknesse, and of his Death
and Buriall " :
And so with peace and quietnesse
he left this earth below ;
And up into the Fayry Land
his ghost did fading goe.
Whereas the Fayry Queene receiv'd,
with heavy mourning cheere,
The body of this valiant knight
whom she esteem'd so deare. ^
II
While Robin Goodfellow, a typical popular
goblin, was still looked upon either as a devilish
spirit or, as time went on, as a mischievous one
only whose tricks and coarse jokes would set the
boors roaring at the street-corner, the fairies now
won their way into higher literature. Those
mysterious beings provided the poets with a myth
which, though now stripped, in their eyes, of its
forbidding and ominous aspect, still preserved a
degree of supernaturalness not unfit for the
purposes of poetry. "We were now arrived,"
' 11. 31 1-19. See also, passim: W. Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth:
The Roxburghe Ballads. 7 vols. London, 1869.
III.] LYRICS 69
wrote T. Warton, "at that point when the national
credulity, chastened by reason, had produced a
sort of civilized superstition, and left a set of
traditions, fanciful enough for poetic decoration,
and yet not too violent and chimerical for common
sense." ^ The fairy-world, in fact, was now con-
sidered as a well-spring from which the poets
drew some of their sweetest similes.
A few instances will here suffice. An anony-
mous lyric contained in William Byrd's Psalmes^
Sonets J <y Songs of Sadness and Tietie, 1588, begins
with these lines :
Though Amaryllis dance in green
Like Fairy Queen,
And sing full clear... ^
Thomas Churchyard, in A handeful of gladsome
verses^ given to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke
this Trograce^ Oxford, 1592, related the strange
tales told by " old thin-faced wives " :
... of monsters in their lives
That now prove shadows light.
These fairies used to dance "on Bednall Green," or:
... where good cheer was great,
Hodgepoke would come and drink carouse
And munch up all the meat.
• History of English Poetry from the Tnvelfth to the close of the
Sixteenth Century. London, 1871. Vol. IV, p. 359. — ^ These lines
are also to be found in England's Helicon, 1600. They are included
in A. H. Bullen's Lyrics from the song-books of the Elizabethan age.
London, 1891, p. 34.
70 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
But where foul sluts did dwell,
Who used to sit up late,
And would not scour their pewter well,
There came a merry mate
To kitchen or to hall,
Or place where spreets resort ;
Then down went dish and platters all.
To make the greater sport.
A further sport fell out.
When they to spoil did fall ;
Rude Robin Goodfellow, the lout.
Would skim the milk-bowls all,
And search the cream-pots too,
For which poor milk-maid weeps,
God wot what such mad guests will do.
When people soundly sleeps. ^
Edward Guilpin, in his rough satire against the
fashionable poetry, and most particularly the soft,
amorous Petrarchan tone of his time : Skialetheia^
Or a Shadowe of Truth in certaine Epigrams and
Satyres, 1598, exclaimed :
Let's esteeme opinion as she is,
Fooles bawble, innovations mistris.
The Proteus Robin-goodfellow of change,
Smithfield of jaded fancies, and th'Exchange
Of fleeting censures...^
' First cited by E. K. Chambers in his edition of A Midsummer-
Night's Dream (The Warwick Shakespeare). — * Satyra Sexta.
III.] LYRICS 71
A Scottish poet, Alexander Montgomery, thus
described the " King of Pharie" in his green garb,
with his Queen and all their court :
In the hinder end of haruest, on Alhallow euen,
When our good nighbours doe ryd, gif I read right,
Some buckled on a bun wand, ^ and some on a been,
Ay trottand in trupes from the twilight,...
The King of Pharie, and his court, with Elfe Queen,
With many elrich Incubus, was rydand that night.^
Barnabe Barnes, lastly, in Parthenophil and Parthe-
nope^ 1593) wrote a sprightly little ode to a cruel
maid, the first two stanzas running thus :
On the plains
Fairy trains
Were a-treading measures.
Satyrs played.
Fairies stayed
At the stops' set leisure.
Nymphs begin
To come in
Quickly, thick, and threefold !
Now the dance,
Now the prance
Present there to behold ! ^
One has noticed, In the piece just quoted from,
that the fairies had been mixed with the nymphs
and satyrs of ancient lore. This is a frequent
1 Ragwort, an herb. — -' Poems, Ed. Irving, 1821, pp. 1 13-14. —
» Cited by S. Lee in Elizabethan Sonnets, Vol I. p. 291. .
72 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
device in Elizabethan poetry. T.Nash, we
remember, had already identified the classical
deities with the elves of Teutonic mythology, and
so did the translators of the Latin poets, who all
rendered the word nympha or naiades by fairy.
Thus these two lines of Virgil :
Haec nemora indigenae Fauni Nymphaeque tenebant,
Gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata, ^
appear in Gavin Douglas's Mneid (15 13) as :
With Nymphis and Faunis apoun every side
Quhilk Fairfolkis or than Elfis clepen we...
and in Thomas Phaer's (1555-60) as :
The woods (quoth he) sometime both fauns and nymphs
[and gods of ground,
And Fairy-queens did keep, and under them a nation
[rough...
Again, in Arthur Golding's translation of the
Metamorphoses of Ovid (1565-67) we encounter
such forms as :
Nymphis latura coronas... IX. 337.
Was to the fairies of the lake fresh garlands for to bear...
Pan ibi dum teneris jactat suacarmina«}'w//j/;.,. XI. 153.
There Pan among the Fairte-eheSy that daunced round
[together...
...semicaper Pan
Nunc tenet, at quodam tenuerunt tempore nymphae...
XIV. 515-16.
1 JEneid.-Vni. 11. 314-15.
III.] TRANSLATIONS 73
The halfe-goate Pan that howre
Possessed it, but heretofore it was the Fairies' bower.
Turn deus ' Arcadiae gelidis in montibus ' inquit
* Inter hamadryadas celeberrima Nonacrinas
*■ Naias una fuit.... I. 689-91.
Of all the nymphes of Nonacris and Fairie ferre and neere,
In beautie and in personage this ladie had no peere.
Solaque naiadum celeri non nota Dianae... IV. 304.
Of all the water-fayries^ she alonely was unknowne
To swift Diana...
No wonder then that the fairy queen herself
should soon be called either Diana, in The Discoverie
of Witchcrafts^ or Titania, in A Midsummer-Night's
Dream, one of the several titles which Ovid attri-
buted to the Uranian queen. This idea, moreover,
of mingling the English fairies with the classical
deities was no novelty : the beautiful love-song of
Thomas Campion to "all the ladies that do sleep " :
...if you let your lovers moan,
The fairy-queen Proserpina
Will send abroad her fairies every one.
That shall pinch black and blue
Your white hands and fair arms
That did not kindly rue
Your paramours' harms.
In myrtle arbours on the downs
The fairy-queen Proserpina,
This night by moonshine leading merry rounds,
1 Book III, chap. XVI.
74 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
Holds a watch with sweet love,
Down the dale, up the hill ;
No plaints or groans may move
Their holy vigil... ^
being, it will be remembered, an harmonious echo
of Chaucer's above-quoted phrase on :
Pluto, and his quene
Proserpina, and al hir fayerye. "
Together with the deities of classical paganism,
the fays of mediaeval romance came in touch
with the homely elves of the Teutonic folk-belief.
The spirit of Chivalry, as is well-known, and
might be easily exemplified, was still alive in the
Elizabethan age. And the legend of Arthur, if
' St. 2, 3. From A Book oj Ayres, 1601. — * A last example —
which we have but recently come across — of the widespread use of
the word Jair)/ among Elizabethan lyrists may be added here.
Lodge's translation of one of Ronsard's sonnets (Amours, I, cxix ;
Phillis, xxxi ; cited by S. Lee : The French Renaissance in England,
Oxford, 1910, p. 260) begins as follows:
Devoid of reason, thrall to foolish ire,
I walk and chase a szy^agt fairy still,
Now near the flood, straight on the mounting hill,
Now midst the woods of youth, and vain desire.
Ronsard's original was :
Franc de raison, esclave de fureur,
Je vay chassant unefere sauvage,
Or' sur un mont, or' le long d'un rivage,
Or' dans le bois de jeunesse et d'erreur.
Here we have the French word -.fere, a wild beast, (Latin : fera)
rendered by the English word : fairy, which, of course, is totally
different.
III.] KING ARTHUR y C
not SO often resorted to as the gorgeous fictions
of the Latin poets, of Ovid especially, still
continued in vogue till the end of the century.
Listen to the testimony of Roger Ascham, for
instance, complaining of the popularity of Sir
Thomas Malory's Morte ly Arthur :
...the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two
speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold baw-
drye : In which booke those be counted the noblest
Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarreli,
and commit fowlest aduoulteries by sutlest shiftes : as
Sir Launcelote with the wife of king Arthure his
master : Syr Tristram with the wife of king Marke his
vncle : Syr Lamerocke with the wife of king Lote, that
was his own aunte. This is good stuffe for wise men to
laughe at, or honest men to take pleasure at. ^
The deeply-read antiquarian Holinshed, on the
other hand, also makes an ironical allusion to :
...the same Arthur of whom the trifling tales of the
Britains euen to this day fantasticallie doo descant and
report wonders. . . ;
and elsewhere ridicules :
...the follie of such as beleeued that he should returne
and reigne againe as king in Britaine, whether it be a
fiction or a veritie that there was such an Arthur or no...^
Besides, the XVth century metrical romances were
1 T/ie Scholemaster, 1570. Arber's Rpt. p. 80. — " Chronicles of
England, 1577. The fifth Booke of the Historic of England. The
xiiij. chapter.
76 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
often republished. Thus the translation of Sir
Launfa/ by Thomas Chestre was printed in 1558,
being licensed, with "a Jeste of syr Gawain, " to
John Kynge, as appears in the Stationers' Register :
To John Kynge to prynte these bolces followynge, that
ys to saye a Jeste of syr Gawayne, the boke of carvynge
and sewynge, syr Lamwell. '
One book, especially, played an important part
in the evolution of fairy poetry in Elizabethan
England : namely the translation by Lord Berners
of Huon de Bordeaux.
This popular work, assigned by its editor,
Mr. Sidney Lee,' to "some date after 1533 and
before 1542, " ^ is the rendering into English, not
of the famous French chanson de geste of the middle
of the Xlllth century,* but of one of the various
amplified versions in prose written about a cen-
tury later. The translator, John Bourchier, Lord
Berners, who had already published an English
version of the Chronicles of Froissart (1523-25),
was in full sympathy with, and thoroughly entered
into the spirit of, his original. He may be looked
' Arber's Rpt. Vol. I. p. 24. — ^ The Boke of Duke Huon of Bordeaux
done into English by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and printed by
Wynkyn de Worde about 1534. Edited by S. Lee, 2 vols. E. E. T. S.
1882-3. — ' A second edition was published c. 1570, a third in
1601, "and the rude English corrected and amended." In 1558
it was valued at the high sum of xviij d. (S. Lee. Introd.) ; and it
was one of the romances which Cox, the old captain of Coventry
described in R. Laneham's Letter, had " at his fingers' end." —
Ed. F. Guessard and C. Grandmaison, Paris, i860.
III.] HUON OF BORDEAUX y-^
upon, together with Sir Thomas Malory, as one
of those valiant compilers who not only imported
into England some of the more notable French
productions, but succeeded in handing down the
romances of Chivalry, with renewed and almost
original freshness, from mediaeval to Renaissance
literature.
The subject may be briefly stated. Huon
of Bordeaux, who has slain Charlemagne's son
while traitorously attacked by him, and has come
victorious out of the ordeal of battle, is banished
from the court and sent by the Emperor on
an all but impossible expedition : he is to go to
Babylon, to find his way to the Persian Admiral,
Gaudisse, literally to beard him, and carry off his
daughter. He starts through Rome, Brindisi,
and Jerusalem, not without encountering obstacles
or difficulties of all kinds. His meeting with
Oberon is one of the most noticeable events, if
not the essential feature, of the whole narrative.
One day Huon came to a wood inhabited by the
fairy king and considered perilous owing to the
latter's magic power. He was warned not to
speak to him, lest he should be bewitched, and his
life endangered. Oberon greeted him, asked
him questions and, on his remaining silent, struck
him and his attendants with such fright that he was
compelled to answer. They soon made friends
however, and the fairy king, taken by the spirited
loyalty of Huon, presented him with his wonderful
78 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
goblet and his horn of great virtue. Hencefor-
ward, with Oberon's marvellous help, the French
knight succeeded in all his quests. Before dying,
Oberon imparted to him his supernatural gifts,
instructed him in all the devices of magic, and
even crowned him king of Faerie.
The character of Oberon is a very complex one.
It first of all belongs to Teutonic lore. Auberon,
as the name is spelt in the French romance, is
derived from Alberkh {Alb = elf + rich = king), who,
in the Niebelungenlied, watches over the hoard
that Sigfried has won from the Niebelungen, and
in the Heldenbuch, a collection of German
romances of the Xlllth century, meets Ortnit, a
German emperor journeying to Syria in quest of
the king's daughter, and helps him in his enterprise,
just as the French Auberon does Huon; while the
dwarfish stature of the fairy prince : " he is of
heyght but of III fote, and crokyd shulderyd, " ^
is quite in agreement with the diminutive figure
so characteristic of the Teutonic elves. In the
second place, Oberon lives in the midst of all the
pomp and luxury of an Asiatic monarch. He is
himself of entrancing beauty; his enchanted palace,
with its golden roof and diamond pinnacles, has
been compared to the splendid mansion of a
Caliph ; and there is hardly anybody at his court
who does not wear " a gowne so ryche that it were
meruayll to recount the ryches and faysyon there-
' Chapt. XXI, p. 63.
III.] HVON OF BORDEAUX yn
of, and it was so garnyshed with precyous stones
that the clerenes of them shone lyke the sone. " ^
Sundry Christian features also appear in Oberon's
character. He is the son of Julius Caesar, who
with Alexander, as Mr. S. Lee has pointed out,
" typifies in the mediaeval legend papal and im-
perial Rome, that is Christianity and the Western
Empire. " He ascribes his power to Jesus, and
eventually prefers his seat in Paradise to the joys
of Faerie. He borrows not a few traits, lastly,
from Arthurian romance: he is the son of Morgan
le Fay, that " great clerk in nigromancy ; " his
supernatural power was granted him at his birth
by the tays ; and when he dies. Merlin comes
with King Arthur to his death-bed, in his Eastern
realm of Momur. Several other points connect
him with Celtic tradition: his "aungelyke vysage,"
his enchanted golden goblet, which is never to be
drained of its wine when in the hands of a truthful
man, his ivory horn compelling an instant answer
after a single blast, and bringing immediate aid
to him who blows it. The very idea that Huon
entertains of fairies : " And ji ye speke to hym,
ye are lost for ever, " is distinctly representative
of Celtic lore.
Nothing more heterogeneous then than the
character of le petit rot sauvaige, such as it appears
in Lord Berners' translation of Huon de Bordeaux^
nothing more perplexing even, but more suggestive
> Chapt. XXII, p. 65.
80 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
as well. Oberon became, in Elizabethan literature,
the recognized name for the fairy king. The
book, in which the typical features of Breton story
mingle with those of the Carolingian epic, was as
a mine which many poets took to drawing from,
as best suited their individual fancies. It was, in
a special degree, freely used by Spenser, who bor-
rowed from it the name of Oberon, which he was
the first, it seems, to introduce into English poetry.
Ill
The Faerie Queene is to some extent, and as far
as we are here concerned, a misnomer. The long
romantic epic — which, in the poet's mind, was to
consist of twelve books, only three of which were
pubHshed in 1590, and three others in 1596, —
never intended to relate the wonderful history of
the fairy people. Its aim was much wider and
more complex. The fairy mythology appears but
as a piece of the allegorical machinery of the
whole book, and is quite unessential to its main
purport. In fact, owing to Spenser's having left
his work uncompleted, the introduction and
leading motives ot which had been reserved till
the end, it bears the name of a heroine who is
now and then alluded to, but never actually
depicted.
The Faerie Queene is, first of all, a morality,
destined, not unlike those popular dramatic per-
III.] SPENSER 8 1
formances of the Middle Ages, to exhibit the
struggles between good and evil, between virtues
and vices in the spirit of man. It is the delineation
of an ideal, half-patristic, half-Platonic, world, and,
so to speak, the pilgrim's progress of a soul. The
poet's purpose is expressly didactic. " The generall
end of all the booke," Spenser wrote in his prefatory
letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentle-
man or noble person in vertuous and gentle dis-
cipline ; " while, some years before, in the course of
his famous conversation with his friend Ludowick
Bryskett, he had announced that " he had already
well entred " into a work tending " to represent all
the moral vertues, assigning to euery vertue a
Knight to be the patron and defender of the same,
in whose actions and feates of arms and chiualry
the operations of that vertue, whereof he is the
protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and
unruly appetites that oppose themselves against
the same, to be beaten down and ouercome. " ^
A deeply religious man, Spenser is earnestly alive
to the sore trials that beset a man's soul. He
believes that rehgion, once cleansed of sin and
falsehood, is to be the source of all nobleness. He
seems to have inherited much of the Calvinistic
"criticism of life. " He looks seriously, and even
sternly upon it, as a means to an end. He
sees it teeming with all sorts of allurements to
evil, which his stout knights are constantly
^ Quoted in R. W. Church's Spenser, p. 84.
82 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
Struggling against. He feels sure that their
example, their eager fight against wickedness, will
do much to further truth and virtue. Like
Milton, he considers his work as a God-imposed
task, and himself as already " in his great Task-
Master's eye. "
He labours hard, on the other hand, to attract
the gaze and win the favour of Elizabeth. The
time he lived in was a momentous period, rife
with court intrigues and political difficulties of
every kind, while he was an eye-witness, during
his residence in the county of Cork, of Lord
Grey's savage pacification of insurgent Ireland.
Hence the numberless allusions to historical
events which continually break in among the
moral and religious professions, one might almost
say, of the Faerie Queene. Besides embodying
some virtue, the knights, for instance, not seldom
personate some of the most notable contemporaries.
Prince Arthur, the ideal hero of the poem, who
stands therein for Magnificence, is at times Philip
Sidney, and at others Leicester. Sir Arthegal, the
knight of Justice, is the unrelenting Puritan Lord
Grey. Duessa, in the guise of Falsehood, is the
arch-sorceress Mary Stuart, the " scarlet whore "
of the Scots :
A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old,
Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told. ^
' Bk. I, c. viii, St. 46.
III.] THE FAERIE QUEENE 83
The place of honour is of course reserved for
Elizabeth, in the dedication, one of the boldest
that ever was penned, as well as in several
characters portrayed in the epic : Gloriana, the
Faerie Queene, Belphoebe, a paragon of sweetness
and beauty, Britomart, a pure and high-spirited
maiden, Mercilla, the gracious and the compas-
sionate. She is the noblest goal of man, the
very type of all womanly virtues, and, at the same
time, " the most royal Queen or Empress of
England." Among the grossest homages paid,
during the last decade of the XVIth century, to
the now aged Virgin-Queen, those of the romantic
Spenser were not among the least shameless.
Now to enshroud " the generall end of all the
booke," both these moral abstractions and con-
temporary allusions, or, in the poet's own words,
to render it "most plausible and pleasing," he
chose to " colour it with an historicall fiction,"
and steeped it in the supernatural atmosphere of
Arthurian romance. Spenser was intimately ac-
quainted with Malory's compilation, and even with
the translation of Lord Berners, Sir Guyon, for
instance, having " taken knighthood " :
...of good Sir Huons hand.
When with king Oberon he came to Faery land. ^
That Fairyland in which knights-errant could
achieve all sorts of wonderful deeds without ever
' Bk. II, c. i, St. 6.
84 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES CHAP.
getting beyond the bounds of credibility, was the
precise scene which he required. And Spenser,
making ample use of the materials at his disposal,
transferred to the chivalrous times of Arthur's
Round Table, of sturdy knights and fair damsels,
whatever ethical meaning or political hint he
wanted to convey. Thus he described Fairyland
as " exceeding spacious and wyde, "
And sprinckled with such sweet variety
Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye ; ^
while, in another place, he seemed to identify it
with England :
Of faery lond yet if he more inquyre,
By certein signes, here sett in sondrie place,
He may it fynd —
And thou, O fayrest Princesse under sky !
In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face.
And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery,
And in this antique ymage thy great auncestry. ^
The country is peopled with ugly monsters of
all description : loathsome dragons, half serpents
and half women, skulking in caverns, ^ hideous
giants " horrible and hye," '^ dwarfs who, " panting
for breath, and almost out of hart, " * carry messages
from knight bold to lady fair, wicked witches who,
of a sudden, by their hellish science, can raise :
^ Bk. VI, Intr., st. i. — ^ Bk. II, Intr., st. 4. — ^ Bk. I, c. i, st. 14.
— -• Bk I, c. vii, St. 8.—^ Bk. Ill, c. v, st. 4.
III.] THE FAERIE QUEENS 85
A foggy mist that overcast the day,
and a dull blast that, breathing on a maiden's face :
Dimmed her former beauties shining ray. ^
Here a vile magician tries to beguile the steadfast
heart of a gentle lady, ^ or some wanton sorceress.
Clad in fayre weedes but fowle disordered,
And garments loose that seemd unmeet for womanhed,^
stands at the porch of the Bower of Bliss, and
allures the passers-by to " lewd loves and wastfuU
1" 4
uxuree.
Merlin himself, the " learned " enchanter who :
...had in Magick more insight
Then ever him before, or after, living wight,®
appears frequently on the scene. The royal maid
Britomart having repaired to his secret abode and
found " the dreadfull Mage " :
Deepe busied bout worke of wondrous end.
And writing straunge characters in the grownd.
With which the stubborne feendes he to his service
[bownd, ^
he reveals to her the state of Arthegal, her
destined husband that dwells :
...in the land of Fayeree,
Yet is no Fary borne, ne sib at all
To Elfes, but sprong of seed terrestriall. ^
» Bk. I, c. ii, St. 38.— » Bk. Ill, c. xii, st. 31.—' Bk. II, c. xii,
St. 55.—'' Bk. [I, c. xii, St. 80.—^ Bk. Ill, c. iii, st. 11. — « Bk.
c. iii, St. 14. — ^ Bk. Ill, c, iii, st. 26.
86 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
Prince Arthur, on the other hand, who, when a
boy, had been instructed by Merlin, passes through
the six books of the Faerie Queene in a somewhat
mysterious way. He represents at times Magni-
ficence ; or he is called :
The famous Briton Prince and Faery knight ; ^
or he is a paragon of chastity, who scorns :
That ydle name of love, and lovers life,
As losse of time and vertues enimy. ^
Once, however, nothing being " sure that growes
on earthly grownd, " he had been ranging the
forest and was resting on the verdant grass when
he had a splendid vision :
" Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd
Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay :
So fayre a creature yet saw never sunny day.
" Most goodly glee and lovely blandishment
She to me made, and badd me love her deare ;
For dearely sure her love was to me bent.
As, when just time expired, should appeare.
But whether dreames delude, or true it were.
Was never hart so ravisht with delight,
Ne living man like wordes did ever heare.
As she to me delivered all that night ;
And at her parting said, She Queene of Faeries hight." ^
As to Gloriana herself, who is never introduced
to the reader, and an excision of whose character
' Bk. Ill, c. i. St. I . — * Bk. I, c. ix, st. i o. — ^ Bk. I, c. ix, st. i 3-4.
III.] THE FAERIE QUEENE 87
from the poem would not affect its tenor in the
slightest degree, she is endowed with the most
noble virtues. She is :
That soveraine Queene, that mightie Emperesse,
Whose glorie is to aide all suppHants pore,
And of weake Princes to be Patronesse.^
She "lays high behests" on her gallant knights
who, all of them, are solely intent on pleasing,
worshipping, deifying her.
The fairy mythology of Spenser is, on the
whole, highly artificial. It is essentially allegorical,
the reader being constantly reminded of the ethical
or political meaning which hides behind the romantic
scenery. It impresses one as a conventional mas-
querade, in which the poet has brought together the
well-worn decorations, and all the machinery of
knight-errantry. It remains confused, unsettled.
The heroes are indifferently called elves or fairies,
Sir Guyon, for instance, being now " the Elfin
knight, " ^ and now "the warlike Elfe,"^ or Prince
Arthur " the Faery knight."^ It is purely imagin-
ary, no distinction having been drawn between the
" little people " of the folk-belief and the fays of
romance, save once or twice when ^//^ seems to be
taken as a masculine, and/ajy as a feminine word :
But that he by an Elfe was gotten of a Fay ; ^
and no allusion, except, may be, when Arthegal *
' Bk. V, c. i, St. 4.—" Bk. II, c. vii, st. 19.—* Bk. II, c. vii, st. 56.
— * Bk. Ill, c. i. St. I.—* Bk. Ill, c. iii, st. 26.— « lb.
88 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
and the Red Cross Knight^ were stolen away from
their infant cradles, being ever made to the popu-
lar superstitions. The fairydom of Spenser is
but a fanciful fabric, a peculiar modification of
the common theme, a mere literary device, in
short, imitated not only from the romances of
Malory or Lord Berners, but from the classical
mythology as well, the nymphs of ancient lore
being often coupled, as in the Elizabethan trans-
lations, with the national fairies :
But Nymphes and Faeries by the bancks did sit,..^
But frendly Faeries, met with many Graces,
And lightfoote Nymphes, can chace the lingringNight.^
Though Spenser may have found a precedent in
Chaucer's Sir Thopas^ he caused the fairies to be
presided over by a Queen only because they had
to be ruled by Elizabeth-Gloriana. He went the
length of making her one of Oberon's descendants,
and identifying Oberon himself with her father,
Henry VIII. The following stanzas, in which is
given the genealogy-roll of Elfin Emperors, will
afford us a typical instance of Spenser's treatment
of the fairy-world :
...first Prometheus did create
A man, of many parts from beasts deryv'd,
And then stole fire from heven to animate
His worke, for which he was by Jove depryv'd
Of life him self, and hart-strings of an Aegle ryv'd.
' Bk. I, c. X, St. 65.—* Bk. VI, c. x, st. 7.—' The Shepheards
Calender, June.
III.] THE FAERIE QUEENE 89
That man so made he called Elfe, to weet
Quick, the first author of all Elfin kynd ;
Who, wandring through the world with wearie feet
Did in the gardins of Adonis fynd
A goodly creature, whom he deemd in mynd
To be no earthly wight, but either Spright,
Or Angell, th' authour of all woman kynd ;
Therefore a Fay he her according hight.
Of whom all Faeryes spring, and fetch their lignage
[right.
Of these a mighty people shortly grew.
And puissant kinges which all the world warrayd.
And to them selves all Nations did subdew.
The first and eldest, which that scepter swayd,
Was Elfin ; him all India obayd,
And all that now America men call :
Next him was noble Elfinan, who laid
Cleopolis foundation first of all :
But Elfiline enclosed it with a golden wall . . .
After all these Elficleos did rayne,
The wise Elficleos in great Majestie,
Who mightily that scepter did sustayne.
And with rich spoyles and famous victorie
Did high advaunce the crowne of Faery :
He left two sonnes, of which faire Elferon,
The eldest brother, did untimely dy ;
Whose emptie place the mightie Oberon
Doubly supplide, in spousall and dominion.
Great was his power and glorie over all
Which, him before, that sacred seate did fill,
90 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
That yet remaines his wide memoriall.
He dying left the fairest Tanaquill,
Him to succeede therein, by his last will :
Fairer and nobler liveth none this howre,
Ne like in grace, ne like in learned skill ;
Therefore they Glorian call that glorious flowre :
Long mayst thou, Glorian, live in glory and great
[powre. '
After allowance has been made for the several
shortcomings of Spenser's fairies, there is no
denying that they contribute largely to the
perennial beauty of his work. They may be
destitute of all reality, but they bear a great part
in the charm of the epic. They bestow upon it
something of that hazy remoteness which is one
of its most distinctive features. They carry us
away into a strange world, an unbounded dream-
land where mysterious figures are constantly rising
up before our view. The Faerie Queene, as is
well known, was written in Ireland, and it seems
as though the poet had spread over it something
of the Celtic glamour. The bold elfin knights
and virtuous faery damsels move in a romantic
wilderness where the moon is ever shimmering, the
steel armour of the ones and the maidenly apparel
of the others making :
A little glooming light, much like a shade. ^
The fairies enwrap the whole book in " darke
' Bk. 11, c. X, St. 70-76. — - Bk. I, c. i, st. 14.
III.] JOHN LYLY 91
conceit, " no doubt, but also in a sort of magical
mist, of fantastic and aerial beauty. They make
it, besides an allegory, a magic pageant, of life.
IV
The last decade of the XVIth century witnessed
the apparition of a good many poems concerning
the fairies, and, specially, their introduction on
the stage. Warton was no doubt right in ascrib-
ing the popularity of these little mysterious beings
to the success of the Faerie Oueene. The word
fairy was henceforward adapted for elves and fays
alike, the attributes of the tricksy, mischievous
Teutonic goblins being now constantly mixed up
with those of the weird ladies of Arthurian
romance. A few instances borrowed from two of
the chief pre-Shakespearean playwrights will be
sufficient to point out the general drift of such
production.
John Lyly, the founder of English comedy,
the first, as has been said, ^ " to write comedy
purged of all appeal to the gross popular taste,
clear of all old English tradition, and depending
on aesthetic and intellectual qualities alone, " did
not fail, for all that, to bring the dancing and
' T. Seccombe and J. W. Allen : The Age of Shakespeare, vol. ii,
p. 21. This time-honoured opinion, however, has been strongly
opposed, recently, by Prof. A. Feuillerat. See his important work
on John Lyly, Cambridge, 191 o, pp. 309-314.
92 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
antics of the national fairies into his plays. They
are to be met with in the highly artificial Gallathea
(1584-5):
Act II, Sc. 3. Enter Raffe alone.
. . . Would I were out of these Woodes, for I shall haue
but wodden lucke, heers nothing but the skreeking of
Owles, croking of Frogs, hissing of Adders, barking of
Foxes, walking of Hagges. But what be these ?
Enter Fayries dauncing and playing and so^ Exeunt.
I will follow them : to hell I shall not goe, for so fair
faces neuer can haue such hard fortunes...^
and again in the court allegory of Endimion
(1585-6):
Act IV, Sc. 3. The Grove. Endimion sleeping on
the lunary bank. Corsites, solus.
Enter Fayries.
But what are these so fayre fiendes that cause my
hayres to stand vpright, and spirits to fall downe ?
Hags — out alas ! Nymphes ! — I craue pardon. Aye me,
out ! what doe I heere ?
The Fayries daunce, and with a song pinch him^ and hee
falleth a sleepe : they kisse Endimion^ and depart.
Omnes. Pinch him, pinch him, blacke and blue,
Sawcie mortalls must not view
The complete nvorks of John Lyly, Edit, by R. W. Bond. Vol. ii,
p. 4+2.
III.] JOHN LYLY 93
What the Queene of Stars is doing,
Nor pry into our Fairy woing.
1 Fairy. Pinch him blue.
2 Fairy. And pinch him blacke.
3 Fairy. Let him not lacke
Sharp nailes to pinch him blue and red,
Till sleepe has rock'd his addle head.
4 Fairy. For the trespasse hee hath done,
Spots ore all his flesh shall runne.
Kisse Endimion, kisse his eyes.
Then to our Midnight Heidegyes.
Exeunt. ^
In a dramatic entertainment given by the Earle of
Hertford to Elizabeth in " Progresse, at Elvetham
in Hampshire," 1591, the Fairy Queen herself
appeared under the name of Aureola, with a silver
staff and a garland, to deliver this speech :
I that abide in places underground.
Aureola, the Queene of Fairy land.
That euery night in rings of painted flowers
Turne round and car roll out Elisaes name :
Hearing that Nereus and the Syluane Gods
Have lately welcomde your Imperiall Grace,
Oapend the earth with this enchanting wand.
To doe my duety to your Maiestie.
And humbly to salute you with this Chaplet
Given me by Auberon, the Fairy King.
Bright shining Phoebe, that in humaine shape,
Hid'st heaven's perfection, vouchsafe t'accept it :
^ lb. Vol. iii, pp. 59-60.
94 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
And I Aureola^ belou'd in heaven,
(For amorous starres fall nightly in my lap)
Will cause that heavens enlarge thy Goulden dayes,
And cut them short, that envy at thy praise. ^
The fantastic compliment " so delighted Her
Majesty," says Nichols, "that she commanded to
hear it sung and to be danced three times over."^
Robert Greene, a very different writer from the
delicate, witty, and frigid author of Enphues, also
admitted the fairies into his work. Thus, in
the course of one of his best known pamphlets :
Greenes Groats-Worth ofwitte^ bought with a million
of Repentance ...written before his death and published
at his dyeing request^ 159^, an actor mentions one
of the parts in which he had gained most applause :
" Nay then, said the Player, I mislike your judgment.
Why, I am as famous for Delphrygus^ and the King of
Fairies^ as ever was any of my time. The Twelve La-
hours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage..."
Two years later, Greene introduced Oberon into
a play, the full title of which ran as follows :
The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth, slaine at
Flodden, Entermixed with a pleasant Comedie presented
by Oboram [sic) King of Fayeries. '
' lb. Vol. i, pp. 449-50. — * The Progresses and Public Processions of
Queen Eli'zabeth. Vol. iii, p. 119. — ^ Entered in the Stationers'
Register on May 14, 1594; probably printed that year, though no
copy is known before 1598.
III.] ROBERT GREENE 9^
Oberon, who bears very little resemblance to the
personage in Huon de Bordeaux^ is a happy, con-
templative spirit that looks upon life as something
of very little importance, but, on the whole, rather
amusing. He thus describes himself, after the
first act :
I tell thee, Bohan, Oberon is King
Of quiet, pleasure, profit and content.
Of wealth, of honor, and of all the world ;
Tide to no place, yet all are tide to me.
Liue thou this life, exilde from world and men.
And I will shew thee wonders ere we part.^
He is styled " King of the Fairies," and, in a
somewhat clumsy way, leads them dancing
during the intervals. If the opinion of Churton
Collins concerning the indebtedness of Shake-
speare to this production is somewhat exaggerated,
namely that " there cannot be the smallest doubt
that he saw what Greene meant, and the Midsum-
mer-Night's Dream only gave more articulate ex-
pression to what found stammering and partial ex-
pression in the Interlude portions of this play," ^ the
fact remains that Greene's Oberon is not totally
different from the husband of Titania, and strikes
one as a sketch, as rough and tentative as may be
conceived, of the Oberon of the Dream.
In The Maydes Metamorphosis, lastly, an anonym-
' 11. 608-1 3.— 2 Robert Greenes Works, Edit, by J. Churton Collins,
vol. ii, p. 84.
96 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
ous play to which Lyly, on no good grounds
however, is supposed to have added some portions
in preparing it for performance by the " Children
of Paul's, " ' there occurs a fairy episode which, in
more respects than one, recalls the author of
Endimion :
Act II, Sc. 2.
Mopso. But soft, who comes here ?
Enter the Faieries^ singing and dauncing.
By the Moone we sport and play,
With the night begins our day :
As we daunce the deaw doth fall.
Trip it little vrchins all :
Lightly as the little Bee,
Two by two, and three by three :
And about go we, and about go wee.
loculo. What mawmets are these ?
Frisco. O they be the Fayries that haunt these woods.
Mopso. O we shall be pincht most cruelly.
1 Fay. Will you haue any musick Sir ?
2 Fay. Will you haue any fine musicke ?
3 Fay. Most daintie musicke ?
Mopso. We must set a face on't now, theres no flying.
No Sir : we are very merry, I thanke you.
I Fay. O but you shall. Sir.
' The Maydes Metamorphosis. As it hath bene sundrie times Acted
by the Children ofPotvles. London, 1600, 4^°. The play has been
ascribed either to John Day (Gosse, Bullen, Bond) or to Daniel
(Fleay).
III.] THE MATDES METAMORPHOSIS 97
Frisco. No, I pray you saue your labour.
2 Fay. O Sir, it shall not cost you a penny.
loculo. Where be your Fiddles ?
3 Fay. You shall haue most daintie Instruments, Sir.
Mopso. I pray you, what might I call you ?
1 Fay. My name is Penny.
Mopso. I am sory I cannot purse you.
Frisco. I pray you Sir, what might I call you?
2 Fay. My name is Cricket.
Frisco. I wish I were a chimney for your sake.
loculo. I pray you, you pretie little fellow what's your
[name ?
3 Fay. My name is little, little Pricke.
loculo. Little, little Pricke ? O you are a daungerous
Fayrie, and fright all the little wenches in the
Country, out of their beds. I care not whose
hand I were in, so I were out of yours.
1 Fay. I do come about the coppes.
Leaping vpon flowers toppes :
Then I get vpon a flie,
Shee carries me aboue the skie :
And trip and goe.
2 Fay. When a deawe drop falleth downe,
And doth light vpon my crowne,
Then I shake my head and skip,
And about I trip.
3 Fay. When I feele a gyrle a sleepe,
Vnderneath her frock I peepe,
There to sport, and there I play,
98 ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
Then I bite her like a flea.
And about I skip... ^
Does not the scene we have just quoted
put one in mind of the passage in The Merry
Wives of Windsor^ where Falstaff comes across Sir
Hugh Evans, Pistol, Mistress Quickly and Anne
Page, all disguised as Fairies ? The punning
upon their names, at any rate, recalls to us as
famous a scene in A Midsummer-Night' s Dream,
when Bottom desires " the more acquaintance " of
Titania's dainty attendants, Peaseblossom, Cobweb,
Moth and Mustardseed. The idea, needless to
say, is much more finely developed in Shakespeare,
still it was already to be found in The Maydes
Metamorphosis, the likeness being even too close
to be a mere coincidence.
Towards the end of the XVlth century, in
short, the English fairies have begun to be freely
admitted into lyric and dramatic poetry. Their
once discordant characteristics have been blended
together into an harmonious convention, which
the poets now expatiate upon and embellish as
they deem best. The essential distinction between
Teutonic elves and the fays of Celtic romance has
long been forgotten. The fairies, as they are
' lb. Vol. iii, pp. 359-61. The scene is rounded off with a
chorus :
Round about, round about, in a fine Ring a :
Thus we daunce, thus we daunce : and thus we sing a....
III.] JOHN MARSTON 99
most generally called, now please the unlettered
folk and the cultured classes alike, as appears
plainly enough in two passages from The Scourge
ofVillanie^ Three bookes of Satyres^ by John Marston,
1598, the first one alluding to the popular taste
for the ballads connected with fairy-lore :
Base mind away, thy master calls, begon.
Sweet Gnato let my poesie alone.
Goe buy some ballad of the Faiery King,
And of the begger wench, some rogie thing... ; ^
the other sketching some conceited poetaster who
dreams of nothing less than donning the mantle
of Spenser :
Another walkes, is lazie, lyes him downe,
Thinkes, reades, at length some wonted sleep doth
[crowne
His new falne lids, dreames, straight tenne pound to one
Out steps some Fayery with quick motion,
And tells him wonders, of some flowrie vale.
Awakes straight, rubs his eyes, and prints his tale. ^
The time has come when, after a long period of
often imperfect or unsuccessful efforts, all the
materials have been brought together, and only
wait for a powerful hand to build them up into a
supreme masterpiece.
' In Lectores prorsus indignos, Bz. — ' Liber Secundus, VI. E7.
CHAPTER IV
«A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM"
Shakespeare, who probed the heart of man to
its most obscure recesses, seems to have been as
intensely attracted by the unknown regions that lie
beyond the limits of human existence, and has given
to the supernatural a place of no little importance in
his work. He shows us witches in Macbeth^ with
" the mystery and grandeur of their evil influence,"
and, in Richard 11^ Julius Casar^ and Hamlet,
some appalling, blood-curdling ghosts. Besides
representing, in the tragic period of his work, these
unearthly spirits of horror, he had, in his earlier
days, — and was to do it again towards the close
of his career — depicted the denizens of Fairyland,
bestowing on the delineation of those imaginary,
airy nothings the same psychological realism, so to
speak, that pervades his whole work. The
fairies are hinted at in a good many plays, in
The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, where the
king, seeing "riot and dishonour stain the brow
of his young Harry, " wishes :
I02 A midsummer-night's dream [chap.
...that it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay... ; ^
in Cymbeline^ where the sensitive Imogen commits
herself to sleep with these words :
To your protection I commend me, gods.
From fairies and the tempters of the night
Guard me, beseech ye ; ^
and again in The Winter s Tale^ where the old
shepherd exclaims to his son, after finding Perdita
on " a desert country near the sea " :
... it was told me I should be rich by the fairies. This
is some changeling : open't
This is fairy gold, boy, and 'twill prove so : so up
with't, keep it close. ^
They form distinct episodes in Romeo and Juliet,
The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Tempest.
Above all, they constitute the chief characteristic
o{ A Midsummer-Night'' s Dream, the first of Shake-
speare's plays that, as has been said, " from the first
scene, in which Hermia is given her choice between
marriage with Demetrius and :
...living a barren sister all her life.
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon,
to the last, in which the fairies dance at midnight
• Act I, Sc. i, 11. 86-8.—- Act II, Sc. ii, II. 8-10.— ^ Act III,
So. iii.
IV.] HUON DE BORDEAUX IO3
in Theseus' palace, is unmistakably a work of
genius."^
What does the fairy-lore of Shakespeare, in the
Dream especially, consist of? What did he actually
borrow from his predecessors ? How much is to be
traced back to literary models, to mediaeval,
feudal romance or to classical poetry, and how
much to the traditions still current in his time ?
How did he qualify these inherited ideas, and
what shape did his imaginative genius eventually
give to them ? What light, finally, does Shake-
speare's particular treatment of the fairy themes
throw over his mind and art in general, — such are
the several questions which will now, in as few
words as possible, be examined.
Shakespeare did in no way create his fairy-lore.
A certain amount of literature bearing on the
subject was in existence when he began his dramatic
career, and we may be sure that, as was his wont, he
availed himself of a good many hints and allusions
scattered among the preceding writers we have
already reviewed. Thus he seems to have been
personally acquainted with Lord Berners' transla-
tion of Huon de Bordeaux. The fairy king in the
Dream is called Oberon, as in the French romance.
His kingdom, as that of Huon's protector, lies in
that mysterious country east of Jerusalem which
' T. Seccombe and J. W. Allen : The Age of Shakespeare, Vol. ii,
P- 74-
I04 A midsummer-night's dream [chap,
is called " the farthest steppe of India, " ^ where
the air is fragrant with spices.' Again, he holds a
court, as in the pure romance themes, keeps a train
of knights,^ and a jester, " to make him smile." ^
His queen has some handmaidens attached to her
person,^ and is followed by a full attendance of fairy
subjects. " The English, as the French, Oberon,
interferes with mortals ; he takes an interest, no
longer in the affairs of Papacy, but in those of
Athens ; he displays a kind concern in the lovers'
misunderstandings, being even instrumental in
their reconciliation ; while, on the other hand, his
proud and rash consort falls in love with a simple-
minded clown, the weaver Bottom. The resem-
blances between Huon de Bordeaux and the Dream
do not, however, amount to much more, and Ob-
eron's character is marked by other features which
are not to be found in his mediaeval prototype :
his invisibility,^ for instance, and his immortality.^
Latin poetry supplied Shakespeare with various
traits. The great playwright was well aware of
the assimilation, already popular in his day, of
the fairies to the demi-goddesses of pagan antiquity.
Thus, as they are extremely quick of motion, and:
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow, ^
they have hurried away from India for Theseus'
marriage, alighted in a grove near Athens, and
1 II, i, 69.—* II, i, 124.—^ II, i, 25.—" II, i, 44.—* II, i, 8.—
6 11, i, 17; II, ii, 5.— MI, i, 186.— MI, i, loi, 135.— Mil, ii, no.
IV.] LATIN POETRY IO5
there disport themselves wantonly, just like the
nymphs and satyrs who used to haunt that
ancient place. They attend the wedding, and
acting, as it were, the part of the god Hymen,
hallow the house with their songs, ^ and give the
bridal bed "joy and prosperity. "^ They show
no ignorance in classical myth, whether they make
an allusion to " wing'd Cupid, " ^ and his " fiery
shaft, " * or to " the triple Hecate's team. " *
Their queen seems to belong to the resplendent
mythology of the Ancients, such at least as it was
painted in the brilliant, sensuous poems of Ovid.
She is called Titania, one of the several names
attributed to Diana in the Metamorphoses ^ that is
Titan-born, as Diana was sister to Sol, the Sun-
god, a Titan. She is not, in the Dream, totally
unlike the classical goddess. If she leaves aside
her maidenly attributes and her patronage of
chastity, she preserves, though not a goddess
herself, some of her characteristics, with regard to
the Moon especially : she appears now as a votaress
bound to her service, dealing in occult influences and
magic herbs, ^ now as a strange gleaming huntress
starting on aerial quests in dim, dewy nights. ^
Her fairies, lastly, are also of the night, and run :
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream, ^
1 V, i, 398-429.—^ II, i, 73.-3 I, i, 235.—'' II, i, 161.—^ V, i,
391. — ^ Bk. Ill, 1. 173 : Dumque ibi perluitur solita Titania
lympha. — ^ II, i, 103, 170, 184. — ^ II, i, 82, Sqq. — * V, i, 3923-
io6 A midsummer-night's dream [chap.
her royal husband himself, like Pluto, being
" king of shadows, " ^ umhrarum dominus^ as Ovid
styled the latter.
Not content to derive the characters of his
fairies both from French romance and classical anti-
quity, Shakespeare also had recourse to the elves
of popular tradition. They were well known to
him, either as recollections of his early days in
rural Warwickshire, from his intercourse, as has
been suggested, with some Welsh people, or from
the perusal of R. Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft^ that
complete treatise of all the superstitions of the
time. Nay, the fairies of folk-belief play a far
more important part in his work than those
borrowed from mere literary sources.
From Celtic lore, first of all, Shakespeare
adapted the name of Mab^ the tricksy elf that
Mercutio alludes to in Romeo and Juliet^ and of
Fuck^ the merry jester of Oberon in the Dream.
The origin of the former, derived by some from
the Welsh mah^ a child, and considered by others
as a contracted form of Dame Abonde, has been
the subject of much discussion, and is not yet
positively established ; the latter is only a generic
word for all sorts of sprites, and Shakespeare, who
was the first to use it as a proper name, also refers
to the freakish wanderer of the night as " sweet
' III, ii, 347.
IV.] FOLK-BELIEF IO7
Puck, " ' " an honest Puck, " ' and " the Puck. " ^
Many analogies, as noted before, are to be met
with in the dialects of England, and the word itself
is found, not only in Langland, but in Golding's
translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses :
The country where Chimaera, that same pouke^
Hath goatish body, lion's head and breast, and dragon's
[tail ; '
and even in Spenser's Epithalamion :
Ne let the Pouke, nor other evill sprights,
Ne let mischivous witches with theyr charmes,
Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not.
Fray us with things that be not, ^
where it seems to mean, if not a devilish, at least
a harmful spirit. Now Queen Mab and Puck,
or Robin Goodfellow as he is indiscriminately
called, have much in common. The Elfin-lady,
who is but slightly connected with the high-born
Titania, springs direct from folk-belief Her
description, which occurs in Romeo and Juliet, must
be quoted here in full : it is, in a way, an epitome
of all the common traditions about the fairy people
which the boy Shakespeare may have heard many
a time from the mouth of an old gossip, in the
ingle-nook of some Stratford cottage :
1 II, i, 40.—* V, i, 438.—=' V, i, 442.—^ ix, 646.—^ 11. 340-3.
Quoted by E. K. Chambers, in his excellent edition of M. N's. D.
(The Warwick Shakespeare.)
io8 A midsummer-night's dream [chap.
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep ;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs.
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers.
The traces of the smaller spider's web.
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams.
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat.
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid ;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o'mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love ;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream.
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues.
Because their breaths with sweet meats tainted are :
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose.
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit ;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a'lies asleep.
Then dreams he of another benefice :
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats.
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades.
IV.] MAB AND PUCK IO9
Of healths five-fathom deep ; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plaits the manes of horses in the night.
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes ^
Puck, on the other hand, that " shrewd and
knavish sprite call'd Robin Goodfellow,"^ resem-
bles Mab in many respects. He too is country-
born and bred. He is a popular goblin who
will at night steal into houses, help in the
domestic duties, sweep the floor, grind the corn,*
or, when displeased, play all kinds of mischievous
tricks, skim the milk, make the " breathless
housewife " toil in vain at her churn,* or keep the
beer from fermenting.^ He roves through the
village, scaring all the maids, pestering the old
gossips till :
...the whole quire holds their hips and laugh.
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there. ^
He can invest himself with a variety of shapes, as
of a " fat and bean-fed horse, " a roasted crab, a
three-foot stool, just in front of:
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale....
Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, ^
' Romeo and Juliet .- Act I, Sc. iv, 11. 53-91 . — '' M. N's. D. II, i, 3 3-34.
— ' II, i, 36—* II, i, 37.—* II, i, 38 —' n, i, 55-7—' 11, 5, 51-3-
iio A midsummer-night's dream [chap.
a hound, a hog, a headless bear, ^ even of a fire,
when he tempts travellers astray, " laughing at
their harm. " ^ His roughness and hairy appear-
ance, " a lob of spirits " ^ as he is called by one of
the fairies, to wit a lout, make him the fright
of homespuns and, in the course of the long
winter evenings, the chief talk of the " villagery. "
The fellow-fairies of Puck, though much finer
and daintier, also borrow many traits from folk-
lore. They appear at night, tripping " after
night's shade, " ^ and " following darkness like a
dream." ^ They steal away babies^ and leave chan-
gelings in their stead. They love cleanliness :
" Cricket," says Pistol, disguised as Hobgoblin in
The Merry fVives,
"...to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap :
Where fires thou find'st unralced and hearths unswept,
There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry :
Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery." ^
Again, they are passionately fond of dancing :
they form, with glow-worms as their lanterns, **
"dewy orbs upon the green," ^ "dance their
ringlets to the whistling wind," ^'^ and take immense
pleasure in " moonlight revels." " All these charac-
teristics Shakespeare must have become acquainted
with in early life. They form no slight part of
'III, i, 112.— 2 II, i, 39— '11. h i6.— UV, i, loi. *V, i, 393.
— II, i, 22.— 'M. ^.V,v, 47-50.— '*//'. Sz.—^M.N's. D. II, 1,9.
— '»/A. 86.—" lb. 141.
IV.] Shakespeare's invention hi
his knowledge of the country, and of the rustic
and popular element of his genius.
These several contributions, however, constitute
but a small part of the fairy-world that is depicted
in A Midsummer-Night' s Dream, and Shakespeare
added much of his own. Thus Oberon, the fairy
king who, in Huon de Bordeaux, is violent and par-
ticularly prone to anger, who bestows wealthy pres-
ents on the adventurous youth and, a moment after,
orders his death because the latter has refused to
heed his command, only retains a canny capricious-
ness in the Dream, which he displays either in his
benevolence towards the parted lovers, or in his
deliberate, malicious vengeance upon his queen.
Still more different from her classical prototype
is Titania. She is but a childish, impulsive
woman, who falls under the shafts of " wing'd
Cupid," and innocently loves the weaver Bottom,
a conceited, self-complacent village tyrant. She is
wilful, just a trifle haughty, as though she were
conscious of her glorious descent, yet not unwilling
to yield and confess her faults. She is coquettish
withal, and the very type of feminine daintiness,
as when, before being sung asleep with a pretty
lullaby, ^ she sends the fairies of her train on var-
ious errands :
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence ;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
^ II, ii, 9-26.
112 A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT*S DREAM [CHAP.
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats, and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders
At our quaint spirits. ^
Puck's popular character Shakespeare has like-
wise graced with not a few traits. Oberon's
henchman has cast off all the harsher aspects of his
personality in the Teutonic myth and, first of all,
his downrip-ht evil-mindedness. He is connected
neither with the remembrance of the primitive
earth-dwellers, nor with the spirits of the dead ;
nor does he, in the Dream^ represent the powers
of terror and malignity, as he does in peasant-lore.
He is now become a merry goblin, every inch of
him. Though he enjoys teasing and vexing the
poor "human mortals," ^ and laughs wantonly at
their squabbles, which he " esteems a sport," ^ he
never means any serious harm and, on the whole,
rather brings them luck than otherwise.*
Now these different characteristics, discrepant as
they may seem, are firmly welded together by the
poet's creative imagination. Oberon has been re-
moved from the world of romance, where he was
still a dwarf, and brought among the tiny Teutonic
elves, while Puck, on the other hand, so familiar
to every country homestead, appears as Oberon's
court jester, being thus put under the fairy king's
direct subjection. The names of the chief fairies
• lb. 2-6.— » II, I, 101.—' HI, II, 353 — II, ', 41
IV.J IMPORTANCE OF THE FAIRIES II3
and most of their attributes may have originated in
different countries : the " little people " form in the
Dream a. well-defined realm, almost a single family,
in which the slow process of assimilation that had
been at work for centuries has reached its climax.
Many elements : Saxon and Celtic folk-lore,
French romance and Latin poetry, both the na'ive
mediaeval creed and the luxuriousness of Renais-
sance culture, may have entered into the combin-
ation, the result is unique, and bears the stamp of
genius. ^
For the first time, moreover, the fairies became
a very important, if not the essential, element in
a drama. They were introduced on the stage not
only by way of interlude, as in Greene and Lyly,
but as actual dramatis personae. They are indis-
pensable to the plot, Oberon, for instance, inter-
vening between, and reconciling, the Athenian
lovers, and Titania growing extravagantly fond of
the weaver Bottom. They even form by them-
selves, and within the drama, a little by-play with
a complete plot and well-defined characters, the
"jangling" of the mortals being, in a way, but
the counterpart to the sad disagreement of the royal
elfin pair. More than that, they embody a
' Cf. the interesting note of J. O. Halliwell : " Charles Lamb, in
a manuscript that I have seen, speaks of Shakespeare as having
" invented the fairies ; " by which, I presume, he means that his
refinement of the popular notion of them was sufficiently expansive
to justify the strong epithet. " Memoranda on the Midsummer-
Night's Dream. Brighton, 1879, P- ^3-
8
114 A midsummer-night's dream [chap.
distinctly Shakespearean idea. They bring Fairy-
land itself before the play-goer's eyes, not a pure,
ethereal country like that of Spenser, in which
everything is serene, or fervently exalted, but a
fairy-world where life is active, rapid, ever in
a bustle. Availing himself of the most popular
traditions and of some hints scattered in previous
writers, Shakespeare imparted to the fairies a
sort of aerial realism and, so to speak, sublimed
them into the finest poetry, just as, in his dramas,
he was to lay hold of some of the most common
feelings of man, and to work them out into
imperishable masterpieces.
A Midsummer-Night' s Dream is, in a word, a
dreamland drama. Shakespeare's fairies are much
more tiny than those of the village gossips. They
" creep into acorn-cups and hide them there. " ^
They wrap themselves in the cast " enamell'd "
slough of a snake,
2
'3
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from... sleeping eyes.^
They travel with extreme rapidity, " swifter than
the wind," "* " swifter than the moon's sphere," ^
and Puck even promises his royal master to " put
a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes." ®
They strike us, with that minute etherealness of
theirs, as the very personifications of dreams.
1 II, i, 31.—- II, i, 256.— ^ III, i, 175-6.—' Ill, ii, 9+.—* II, i.
7.— « II, i, 175-6.
IV.] THE LYRICAL ELEMENT II 5
They are " airy spirits, " ^ or mere "shadows." ^
Congenial to them are the most delicate things in
nature : flowers, dewdrops, butterflies and nightin-
gales ; and they answer to such sweet names as
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed.
They constitute a new supernaturalism, a sort of
dainty, graceful world of the marvellous. They
impersonate pastoral dreams, and all that is con-
nected with fragrant and moonlit groves. They
are spoken of, if not by such practical or sober
men as Theseus, who does not believe in them,
and considers the whole matter as the growth of a
wild imagination :
Lovers and madmen have such seethino- brains.
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends, ^
at least by the simple-minded Bottom or the entranc-
ed lovers. They body forth, in short, all those
sweet witcheries of a warm, mellow, soothing
Midsummer night, which vanish away with the
first glimmer of the dawn.
The fairy-world of Oberon and Titania repre-
sents in some way, thrown into the semblance of
a real world, the dreams of Shakespeare's youth.
The lyrical poet appears first and foremost in this
play, a dramatic poem, in fact, rather than a drama.
The Dream has all the brightness and unsubstan-
tiality of a youthful poet's view of life. Youthful
1 III, i, 164.—-' V, i, 430.— ■■* V i, 4-6.
Ii6 A midsummer-night's dream [chap.
is the sensuous beauty of the fairies' domain, that
aromatic, flower-scented kingdom of India where
they "fleet " the time carelessly, and lead a merry,
luxurious life, heedless of all that goes beyond the
present moment ; youthful also are the love troubles
of Titania and Oberon, that pretty squabbling
which scarcely ruffles the surfaces of their hearts.
Now, before closing his career, Shakespeare will
return once more to the principal theme of his
earliest master-piece, and The Tempest may rightly
be called a fairy romance. The scene is laid in an
" un-habited Island, " where " sounds and sweet
airs " proceed from all quarters, and which is as
imaginary as " the farthest steppe of India."
Oberon has been superseded by Prospero, the Lord
of nature, a magician who, by his " so potent art,"
can summon no less goddesses than Juno, Ceres and
Isis; who has besides sounded the depths of mor-
tality, till his character, as has been justly remark-
ed, " conveys an impression of serenely wise good-
ness and self-centred detachment from the material
interests of life." ^ Ariel himself is not without
some likeness to Puck. He also is a preternatural
courier, and flies nimbly through the air on his
master's errands. He is more refined, however,
more " dainty " ^ and " delicate " ^ than Oberon's
body-servant, though, once at least, he fairly
treats himself to a Puck-like trick when his invisible
1 A. W. Verity, in his edition of The Tempest, p. xx. — ' V, 95.
— ' I, ii, 272, 441.
IV.] SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES II7
interference leads to blows between Trinculo and
Stephano.^ He is besides more tender-hearted;
he takes his share of the hardships of life ; and
instead of making fun of the mishaps that the
poor " human mortals " are tormented with, he
even seems at times to sympathise with the very
woes he is inflicting on them, and of which he is
but the irresponsible minister.
Upon the whole, it is not a little significant that
both at the beginning and the end of his triumphant
career, Shakespeare was attracted by the particular
charm of the fairy-world, and made it the subject
of two of his master-creations ; that both as a
youth but lately arrived from his little country-
town, and in riper years, after he had fought out
his battle with the world and won it, when, to
use Bacon's words, he was " standing upon the
vantage ground of truth," and could see " the
Errours, and Wandrings, and Mists, and Tem-
pests, in the vale below," ^ he chose to fill a play
with fairy-lore, and to take " the little people " of
the night as spokesmen of his most inward feelings.
Nay, his very words of renunciation to the
enchanted work of his life, which he put in the
mouth of Prospero, a creation of his own genius,
and the pure offspring of his most original
imagination, were actually borrowed from country-
side legend :
1 III, il.— ' Essays, I, Of Truth.
Il8 A midsummer-night's dream [chap. IV.]
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back ; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make.
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew....
....I'll break my staff.
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth.
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book. ^
' V, i, 33-57.
CHAPTER V
POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES
Shakespeare's fairydom achieved immediate
success. Written between the years 1593-95,
published in 1600 in two almost simultaneous
quartos, after being, so the title-page says, " sundry
times publickely acted, " A Midsummer-Night' s
Z)r^rtw continued, till far into the XVIIth century,
to be one of the most popular of Shakespeare's
comedies : the groundlings, whose superstitions
became, under the Stuarts, more intense than
ever, found many things in it which they would
easily understand, and the poets, who could not
but admire the great dramatist's invention, spared
no pains in imitating and, if possible, improving
upon it. Oberon, Titania, and their merry court of
twilight frolickers soon stepped, in the minds
of the common people, into the place of the
romantic, unapproachable Gloriana. Shakespeare's
presentment of the fairy-world was accepted as the
ideal one, heartily admired, and perseveringly
borrowed from.
I20 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
I
An external reason contributed not a little,
during the first decades of the XVIIth century,
to the wide vulgarisation of Shakespeare's fairy-
dom : it happened to express a current of thought
which, in fact, still formed a large part of the
popular creed. When James VI of Scotland
ascended the throne of England in 1 603, he brought
with him his narrow prejudices and his pedantic,
authoritative theology. He showed himself parti-
cularly zealous against sorcerers and all that was,
in some way or other, connected with magic. A
law was passed soon after his accession, which
condemned witches to capital punishment on their
first conviction, " even though they should have
inflicted no injury upon their neighbours. " In
the very same year of his entry into London, he
caused a short treatise on Daemono-logie^ which
he had published six years earlier in Edinburgh,
to be reprinted, ^ in which he set forth his views
upon the subject. The earth, he declared, was
overrun with numberless hellish spirits troubling
men and women, the fairies forming one class of
those " diuells " :
" That fourth kinde of spirites, which by the Gentiles
was called Diana and her wandring court, and amongst
' Daemono-logie, in forme of a dialogue. Di'uided into three bookes.
Written by the high and mightie Prince lames.... London, 1603.
v.] JAMES I, DR. HARSENET 121
vs was called the Phairte^ or our good neighboures, was
one of the sortes of illusions that was rifest in the time
of Papistrie... To speake of the many vaine trattles
founded vpon that illusion : How there was a King and
Queene of Phairie^ of such a iolly court and train as they
had, how they had a teynd, and dutie, as it were, of all
goodes : how they naturally rode and went, eate and
dranke, and did all other actions like naturall men and
women : I think it liker Virgih Campi Elisij^ nor anything
that ought to be beleeued by Christians, except in generall,
that, as I spake sundry times before, the diuell illuded the
senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeue
that they sawe and heard such things as were nothing so
indeed." ^
Another arraignment of the fairies, both as
creatures of the Devil and papistical inventions,
appears again, but this time in a far more virulent
tone, in a pamphlet published that same year
1603 by a certain Dr. S. Harsenet, afterwards
Archbishop of York, and entided J Declaration
of egregious Popish Impostures to withdraw the hearts
of her Majesties subjects from their allegeance^ and
from the truth of Christian Religion professed in
England under the pretence of casting out deuils.
Thus we come, in the twenty-first chapter, upon
such a paragraph as this :
" What a world of hel-worke, deuil-worke, and Elue
worke had we walking amongst vs heere in England,
what time that popish mist had befogged the eyes of our
^ p. 73-
122 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
poor people?... If that the bowie of curds and creame
were not duly set out for Robin Good-fellow the Frier and
Sisie the dairy-maide, to meete at hinch-pinch, and laugh
not^ when the good wife was a bed, why then, either the
pottage was burnt next day in the pot, or the cheese
would not curdle, or the butter would not come, or the
ale in the fat would never have good head. But if a
Peeter-penny^ or an houzle-egge were behind, or a patch
of tyth vnpaid to the Church [lesu Maria) the(n) ware
where you wallce for feare of hull-beggers^ spirits^ witches,
urchins, Elues, hags, fairies, Satyrs, Pans, Fauns, Sylvans,
Kit with the Candlesticke, Tritons, Centaurs, Dwarffs,
Giants, impes, Calcars, coniurers. Nymphs, Changlings,
scritchowles. Incubus the spurne, the mare, the man in the
oake, the fire-drak^e, the puckle, Tom thumbe, hobgoblin, Tom
Tumbler, Boneles and the rest : and what girle, boy, or
old wisard would be so hardy to step over the threshold
in the night for an half-penny worth of mustard amongst
this frightfull crue without a dosen auemaries, two dosen
of crosses surely signed, and halfe a dosen Pater nosters,
and the commending himself to the tuition of iS'' Vncumber,
or els our blessed Lady ? " ^
The erudite Doctor is not even ignorant of
Chaucer's sly skit upon the " limitours, " as
appears by another passage :
" Geoffrey Chaucer, who had his two eyes, wit and
learning in his head, spying that all these brainlesse
imaginations of witchings, possessings, househaunting,
and the rest, were the forgeries, cosenages, Imposturs,
and legerdemaine of craftie priests and leacherous Friers,
' pp. 134-J.
v.] BACON, BURTON 1 23
either to maske their venerie, or to enritch their purses,
by selling their Pope-trumpery (as Medals^ agnus dei^
Blessed beades^ holy water^ hallowed Crosses, amuletSy Smocks
of proof e, and such) at a good rate ; as who would not
giue soundly for a Medal defensiue against the deuil ?
writes in good plain termes of the holy Couent of
Friers.... " ^
Apart from this bitter anti-papal feeling, the
fairy belief was still shared in by some of the most
powerful minds of the century. Thus Bacon,
who admits the existence of good and evil spirits,
even looks upon them as a legitimate subject of
study :
" So of degenerate and revolted spirits, the conversing
with them or the employment of them is prohibited, much
more any veneration towards them. But the contem-
plation or science of their nature, their power, their
illusions, either by Scripture or reason, is part of spiritual
wisdom. For so the apostle saith : we are not ignorant
of his stratagems. " ^
Nor does Robert Burton, the recluse of Christ
Church, the learned but candid and humorous
anatomiser of human folly, fail to admit the
widespread superstition into his book :
" Terrestrial devils are those Lares, Genii, Fauns,
Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Fairies, Robin Good-Fellows,
Trulli, &c., which, as they are most conversant with
•p. 137. — ^Advancement of Learning, Book II, 1605, quoted
by H. H. Stewart, The Supernatural in Shakespeare, 1908, p. 38.
124 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
men, so they do them most harm.,.. Some put our fairies
into this rank, which have been in former times adored
with much superstition, with sweeping their houses,
and setting of a pail of clean water, good victuals and
the like, and then they should not be pinched, but find
money in their shoes, and be fortunate in their enter-
prises. These are they that dance on heaths and greens,...
and leave that green circle which we commonly find in
plain fields, which others hold to proceed from a meteor
falling, or some accidental rankness of the ground, so
nature sports herself ; they are sometimes seen by old
women and children.... Paracelsus reckons up many
places in Germany where they do usually walk in little
coats, some two feet long. A bigger kind there is of
them called with us hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows,
that would in those superstitious times grind corn for a
mess of milk, cut wood, or do any matter of drudgery
work." 1
And Sir Thomas Browne even goes so far as
declaring it a riddle to him :
"...how so many learned heads should so far forget
their metaphysics, and destroy the ladder and scale of
creatures, as to question the existence of spirits : for my
part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there
are witches. They that doubt of these do not only deny
them, but spirits ; and are obliquely, and upon conse-
quence a sort, not of infidels, but atheists. " ^
While such beliefs were so boldly professed by
> The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, Part I, Sec. 2, Memb. i,
Subs. 2. — - Religio MeMci, 1643.
v.] T. HEYWOOD 1 25
some of the loftiest thinkers of the time, they
were made the subject, in the lower ranges of
literature, of a vast amount of multifarious work.
Numberless treatises appeared that dealt with
witchcraft. ^ The particularly horrific trial of the
Lancashire witches was recorded in two plays, one
by T. Heywood and Rich.Brome,* the other, some-
what later, by T. Shadwell. ' Ghosts and goblins
were constantly alluded to, whether in a half-
theological treatise as The Hierarchic of the blessed
Angells^ their names^ orders^ and offices. The fall of
Lucifer with his Angells... by Thomas Heywood,
1635, in which we may read :
" ...Such as wee
Pugs and Hob-goblins call. Their dwellings bee
In corners of old houses least frequented,
Or beneath stacks of wood ; and there conuented,
Make fearefuU noise in Buttries and in Dairies;
Robin good-fellowes some, some call them Fairies.
In solitarie roomes these vprores keepe,
And beat at dores to wake men from their sleepe.
Seeming to force locks, be they ne're so strong,
1 For instance : George GifFord : A Dialogue concerning Witches
and Witchcrafts. In ivhich is layed open honx) craftily the Di^ell
decei'veth not onely the 'witches, but many others... 1603 ; J. Cotta :
The Triall of Witch-craft, shelving the true... methode of discouery,
<vjith a confutation of erroneous 'way es, 161 6; rpt. 1625; H. Goodcole:
The "wonderfull Disco-verie of Elizabeth Saivyer, a Witch, late of
Edmonton, 1621. — ^ The late Lancashire Witches. A njoell recei^ved
comedy, London, 1634, — " The Lancashire Witches and Tegue
DtHjelly the Irish priest. A comedy. London, 1682.
1 26 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
And keeping Christmasse gambols all night long.
Pots, glasses, trenchers, dishes, pannes, and kettles
They will make dance about the shelues and settles,
And if about the kitchen tost and cast,
Yet in the morning nothing found misplac't.
Others such houses to their vse have fitted.
In which base murthers haue been once committed.
Some haue their feareful habitations taken
In desolat houses, ruin'd, and forsaken " ^
or in a mere satire as that of Samuel Rowlands :
"In old wives daies, that in old time did live...
Great store of goblins, fairies, bugs, night-mares,
Vrchins and elves, to many a house repaires.
Yea far more sprites did haunt in divers places
Then there be women now weare devils faces ;
Among the rest, was a good fellow devill
So cal'd in kinds, cause he did no evill.
Known by the name of Robin...
But as that time is past, that Robin's gone.
He and his ni^ht-mates are to us unknowne." ^
The belief is represented, in these last lines,
as dying out, but R. Scot, and Chaucer himself,
we remember, had already averred as much.
The higher and more enlightened classes may
have repudiated such base superstitions : they
none the less enjoyed, till far into the XVIIth
century, a wide currency and, we may feel
1 Lib. 9. The Angell, pp. 574-5. — ^ More Knaves Tet ? The
Knaues of Spades and Diamonds. London, n. d. : On Ghoasts and
Goblins.
v.] ROBIN GOOD-FELLOfT 12']
sure, contributed to bring into vogue the new
interpretation which Shakespeare had given of
the popular theme. Just as most of the play-
goers, the most thoroughly educated as well as
the most ignorant, believed, when they saw the
ghost of Hamlet's father striding across the stage,
that such things would happen, thus the fairies of
A Midsummer-Night' s Dream^ even leaving aside
their unparalleled literary qualities, must have
struck Shakespeare's contemporaries as well-known
and, in fact, all but natural beings. One easily
realises what additional interest accrued to the
play from the popular belief in fairies, and how
it enhanced its essential charm to a degree which,
to-day, is hard for us to imagine.
II
The welcome which A Midsummer-Nighf s Dream
met with soon influenced contemporary literature.
There appeared, in 1628, an anonymous tract called
Robin Good-Fellow ; his mad pranks and merry jests, ^
which, in many places, reminds one of Oberon's
body-servant in the fairy drama. Now some
version was surely in existence previous to that date,
though not, as has been assumed, before the writing
of Shakespeare's play, as the pamphlet rather seems
to be founded on the drama than the drama on
1 Edited by J. P. Collier for the Percy Society, 1841 ; rpt. in
F. Sidgwick's Sources and Analogues of'A M.-N's. D." 1908.
128 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
the pamphlet. Several other chap-books, either
in prose, In verse, or in both alternately, have
also come down to us, which, as is always the case
when we deal with popular literature, only make
up a small portion of those that were actually
hawked on the road-side : such, for instance, as
The merry Puck^ or Robin Good-fellow: Describing his
birthy and whose son he waSy how he ran away from
his Mother.., how his Father , King Oberon^ found
him^ together with all his merry Prankes. Very
pleasaunt and witty., a unique black-letter ballad
privately printed by J. P. Collier ; ^ or as The Mad
Merry Pranks of Robin Good-fellow., ^ a shorter and
rhymed version of the prose pamphlet.
Another example, though somewhat different,
may be noticed here. It is from the very text of
Ovid's Metamorphoses that Shakespeare borrowed
his fairy queen's name, Titania ; the epithet at any
rate never occurs in Golding, who translated it,
whenever it applied to Diana, by Titan s daughter.
Now when George Sandys, some ten years after
Shakespeare's death, published another translation
of the Metamorphoses ( 1 62 1 -6), the word Titania was
freely used in many cases as a synonym for Diana,
which innovation may be reasonably ascribed to
the far-reaching influence'of the Dream.
In the drama, the fairies, such as they had been
' Rpt. in Halliwell's Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of "A M.-
N's. D." Percy Society, 1845. — " ^V^- i" Percy's Reliques, and
F. Sidgwick's op. cit.
v.] THE DRAMA 1 29
delineated by Shakespeare, exercised an influence of
their own, and here are a few plays in which they
are entrusted with more or less prominent parts.
In Lusts Dominion ; or The Lascivious Queen, a play
mentioned in Henslowe's Diary for February 1 600
as The Spaneshe Mores tragedie, and written in col-
laboration by Dekker,Haughton and Day,^Oberon
appears with " Fairies dancing before him, and
Music with them, " He is a mere deus ex machina,
or rather a sort of soothsayer : he foretells to
the heroine Maria who, pressed too hard by the
King of Spain, had just given him a sleeping
draught, what fate is now awaiting her :
" Before he wake, thou shalt be slain :
His mother's hand shall stop thy breath.
Thinking her own son is done to death :
And she that takes away thy life
Does it to be thy husband's wife :
Adieu, Maria, we must hence :
Embrace thine end with patience.
Elves and fairies make no stand,
Till you come in fairyland.
Exeunt dancing and singing.
Maria : Fairies or devils, whatsoe'er you be.
" 2
Thus will I hide me from your company.
' F. 67. " Layd owt for the company the 13 of febrearye 1599
for a boocke called the spaneshe mores tragedie vnto thomas deckers
wm. harton John daye in pte of payement the some of iij 11." Rpt
by W. W. Greg. 1904, p. 118. — ^ Act III, Sc. 2. The play was
130 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
The same diary of Philip Henslowe keeps record
of a tragedy, the writer of which appears to have
been Henry Chettle, on the adventures of the
merry wanderer of the night :
Lent vnto harey Chettell the 9 of September ^
1602 in pt. of payement of a [tragedie] called ^
Rohingoodfellowe some of j X^ ^
A play called Narcissus^ a Twelfth Night Merriment^
was acted at St. John's College, Oxford, in 1602 :
it is a kind of burlesque, not unlike that of Pyramus
and Thisbe in the Dream^ which contains besides
many verbal resemblances that plainly bespeak
an imitation of Shakespeare's fairy drama. ^ A
poetaster, William Percy, who in 1594 had
published a sonnet-sequence called Coelia^ wrote
some years later The Faery Pastorall or Forrest of
Elues, the end of which bears " Finis 1603. Wolues
Hill my Parnassus." It is a very sorry production
indeed, in which Oberon is shown in the character
of a pedantic and cavilling philosopher, who dis-
cusses with the Queen of the Fairies, " stickt with
Flowres all her body," about inconstancy in Love,
and whether man or woman is capable of the
greater affection. ^ The fairies appear again in
first published in 1657, and erroneously attributed to C. Marlowe.
It has been reprinted in Dodsley's Collection of Old English Plays, 4th
Edit. 1875. Vol. 14.—' Ed. W. W. Greg, p. 1 8 i .—- Edited by Miss
M. Lee from the Rawlinson Poet. MS. 212. Cf E. K. Chambers'
Edition of M.-N 's. D. Appendi.x F. On the play of " Narcissus. "
— Printed by the Shakespeare Press, 1824, from a private MSS.
v.] THE DRAMA I3I
A verie excellent and delectable Comedie^ intituled
" Philotus^'' wherein we may perceive the great incon-
veniences that fall out in the mariage betweene olde age
and youth, sometimes attributed to Hey wood, and
published in Edinburgh in 1603, where the little
people of the night associate both with the Virgin
and with Hell :
First I conjure thee by Sanct Marie,
By Alrich King and Queene of Farie,
And by the Trinitie to tarie...
Gang hence to hell or to the Farie,
With me thou may no longer tarie . . • ; ^
as also in A Pleasant Comedie called. Wily Beguiled,
printed in London in 1606, where Robin Good-
Fellow comes to the rescue of two unfortunate lovers
whom a cruel father would keep apart. This is
the way he speaks to the hard-hearted parent,
and how, playing the bug-bear, and showing himself
in an " ougly uncouth shape," he scares him into
granting his immediate consent to the marriage :
The high commander of the damned soules,
Great Dis the Duke of Diuels,and Prince oi Limbo lake.
High Regent of Acheron, Styx and Phlegeton,
By strict command from Pluto, Hels great Monarch,
And faire Proserpina the Queene of Hell,
By full consent of all the damned Hagges
And all the fiends that keepe the Stygian plaines,
' 11. 122-132 ; Rpt. in 1612.
132 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
Hath sent me here from the depth of under-ground,
To sommon thee to appeare at Plutoes Court ! ^
Lastly, in the course of a " Drammatical Poem, "
The Whore of Babylon^ in which he endeavoured
" to set forth the Greatness, Magnanimity, Cons-
tancy, Clemency, and other the incomparable
Heroical vertues of our late Queene, And (on
the contrary part) the inueterate Malice, Treasons,
Machinations, Underminings and continual blody
Stratagems of that purple Whore of Rome,
Thomas Dekker addressed Elizabeth as Titania,
the now apparently recognised name for the queen
of the Fairies, England being of course Fairyland
itself. Florimell, a councillor, speaks thus of
Henry Vll's time :
...when great Elfiline
(Our grandsire) fild his throne, your bowers did shine
With fire-red Steele, and not with Fairies' eies,
You heard no musicke then, but shriekes and cries,
Then armed Vrchins, and stearne houshold Elues,
Their fatall pointed swords turn'd on themselves. '
Henry VIII is, in his turn, called :
...great king heron
T'ltaniaes royall father,
while his daughter's
' H. 3. — * The Whore of Babylon.... Written by Thomas Del^r,
London, 1607. B. 4.
v.] DEKKER 133
...maiden hand
Shall with a silken thred guide Fairie land. ^
The reader who remembers the passage from the
Faerie Queene we have quoted above, in which
Spenser also had descanted upon Elizabeth's fairy
genealogy, will remark the significant change that
has taken place : Gloriana, Tanaquil, Britomart,
Belphoebe, all the romantic and allegorical appel-
lations have made room for the simpler, and now
firmly established, name of Titania.
Ill
The success of A Midsummer-Night's Dream
kindled the emulation, not only of such minor
playwrights as have just been reviewed, but also
of two of the greatest dramatists of the age, two
of Shakespeare's personal friends, and who, during
the XVIIth century, were considered as, at least,
his equals: namely John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.
To the charm of Shakespeare's earliest master-
piece Fletcher could not but be keenly alive.
They had known each other for a good many
years. They had, in 1613, written two plays in
collaboration. Two Noble Kinsmen^ and Henry Fill.
Above all, Fletcher's keen sense of youthful beauty,
his sweet wantonness of mind, though it not seldom
1 B. 4. Titania is described, in the list of "Dramatis Personae, '•
as " The Fairie Queene, vnder whom is figured our late Queene
Elizabeth. "
134 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
verged upon mere licentiousness, made him an
ardent sympathiser with, and no doubt admirer
of, the romantic fancy wherein, as we have attempt-
ed to show, lay the main characteristic of Shake-
speare's fairy drama. No wonder then that he
tried to introduce into his own work the very
theme that had proved so felicitous in his friend's
hands.
In fact, The Faithful Shepherdess^ probably pro-
duced in the winter of 1608-9, and pubHshed
before May 1610, bears ample evidence of the
influence of A Midsummer-Night'' s Dream. The
subject may be quite different, and, with its tender
grace and melodious volubility, remind one rather
of Spenser, yet it is far more positive, " of the
earth, earthy ; " its soft, voluptuous, and at times
lewd dialogues, are obviously reminiscent of
Shakespeare's playful little imps, a good many
details being thrown in, of fresh and exquisite
beauty. Hark for instance to the soliloquy of
Clorin, in the wood, after the departure of the
Satyr :
...Yet I have heard (my mother told it me,
And now I do beHeve it), if I keep
My virgin-flower uncropt, pure, chaste and fair,
No goblin, wood-god, fairy, elf, or fiend,
Satyr, or other power that haunts the groves,
Shall hurt my body, or by vain illusion
Draw me to wander after idle fires ;
Or voices calling me in dead of night.
v.] JOHN FLETCHER 135
To make me follow, and so tole me on,
Through mire and standing pools, to find my ruin... ^
In another passage, Fletcher adds to the fairydom
of Shakespeare a dainty flourish of his own.
Perigot begs Amoret to lend an ear to his suit,
and they agree to meet in the neighbouring wood,
there, continues the enamoured shepherd :
...to plight our troths
With interchange of mutual chaste embraces,
And ceremonious tying of our souls.
For to that holy wood is consecrate
A virtuous well, about whose flowery banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds
By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying flesh and dull mortality. ^
The Satyr, lastly, who seems to be one of Puck's
family, thus explains what he is commissioned to
do during the revels of Pan :
. . .here must I stay
To see what mortals lose their way,
And by a false fire, seeming bright.
Train them in and leave them right;
Then must I watch if any be
Forcing of a chastity ;
If I find it, then in haste
Give my wreathed horn a blast.
And the fairies all will run
. ^ Act. I, Sc. 1.—' Act. I, Sc. ii.
136 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP.
Wildly dancing by the moon,
And will pinch him to the bone,
Till his lustful thoughts be gone ^
Ben Jonson himself, the erudite poet who, in
his comedies and dramas, contrived to blend so
much classicism with a minute, though sturdy
and vivid, realism, often suffered his lyrical, lighter
muse to trifle with the tiny revellers of the
night. Many are the allusions to the fairies to
be found in his works. We read, for instance, in
The Silent Woman :
Dauphihe : 'Slight, they haunt me like fairies, and
give me jewels here ; I cannot be rid of them.
Clerlmont : O, you must not tell though... ^
and in The Satyr^ when Mab gives a jewel to the
queen :
Utter not, we you implore.
Who did give it, nor wherefore :
And whenever you restore
Yourself to us, you shall have more.
Highest, happiest queen, farewell.
But beware you do not tell ; ^
an allusion, in both cases, to the popular belief
already mentioned by Shakespeare's shepherd in
The Winter s Tale^ and long before in the romance
of Sir Launfal^ that it was very dangerous to
^ Act. Ill, Sc. 1.-2 Act V. Sc. I. Work', Ed. F. Cunningham.
Vol. T, p. 454—^ Vol. II, pp. 574-5-
v.] BEN JONSON 1 37
betray the confidence of the fairies, who never
allowed their favours to be boasted of. On an-
other occasion, Jonson says of one of his characters
in The Alchemist that :
He is of the only best complexion
The queen of Fairy loves, ^
and he notices how fond her subjects are of
dancing, first in the Epilogue to Every Man out of
his Humour :
The throat of War be stopt within her land,
And turtle-footed Peace dance fairy-rings
About her court.. .^
and again in A Tale of a Tub :
To shew your pomp, you'd have your daughter and maids
Dance o'er the fields like faies to church ^
In addition to these widespread and indeed trite
notions concerning the fairies, Jonson seems, in
some places, to have gone to A Midsummer-
Night's Dream for direct inspiration. Thus, in The
Satyr, " A Particular Entertainment of the Queen
and Prince at Althorpe, at the Right Honourable
the Lord Spencer's, on Saturday, being the 25th
of June, 1603, as they came first into the King-
dom," Ben Jonson, who produces on the stage the
realistic mythology of" Merry England," is mostly
> Act I. Sc. I. Vol. II, p. 13.— "Vol. I. p. 140.—' Act II. Sc. I.
Vol. II, p. 448
138 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
content, with regard to the fairies, to take up
those traits already exhibited in Shakespeare. If
Queen Mab now, for the first time, fills the
place of Titania as the " Mistress Faery, " her
pranks and those of her tiny elves are most likely
imitated from the Dream. The words with which
the Satyr, a wood-spirit, alias Pug, the " skipping
jester," addresses Mab, at the head of a bevy of
fairies, closely resemble those of the original court-
jester of Oberon :
Mab. Satyr, we must have a spell
For your tongue, it runs too fleet.
Satyr. Not so nimbly as your feet,
When about the cream-bowls sweet.
You and all your elves do meet.
This is Mab, the Mistress-Faery,
That doth nightly rob the dairy.
And can hurt or help the cherning,
An she please, without discerning . . .
She that pinches country wenches.
If they rub not clean their benches,
And with sharper nails remembers
When they rake not up their embers :
But if so they chance to feast her.
In a shoe she drops a tester ^
We may also notice that Jonson's masque was
written, as the poet himself mentioned, for per-
formance " on Midsummer-day at night," which
' Vol. II, p. 573-
v.] BEN JONSON 1 39
makes the parallelism between the two plays still
more significant.
Two other masques of Ben Jonson acted, in
the midst of splendid " formalities and shews," in
June 1610, when Prince Henry, who had just
reached his sixteenth year, was created Prince of
Wales, are again connected with Fairyland. One,
known as Prince Henry s Barriers, introduced the
Lady of the Lake, Arthur, the British hero-king,
and JMerlin the learned magician who all extolled
the unequalled virtues of the heir to the throne,
and prophesied his glorious future. The other
masque, Oberon, the Fairy Prince, concerns us
more nearly. Here again, in spite of the continu-
ous un-Shakespearean confusion of classical deities
with both romantic fays and Teutonic elves, the
influence of the Dream is clearly felt. Something
of the wanton grace and refined realism of the
older poet has passed into the dialogue of the
satyrs who, in the beginning of the play, gambol
around Silenus, and beset him with questions :
Silenus. . . . These are nights
Solemn to the shining rites
Of the Fairy Prince and knights :
While the moon their orgies lights.
2 Satyr. Will they come abroad anon ?
3 Sat. Shall we see young Oberon ?. ...
4 Sat. Will he give us pretty toys,
To beguile the girls withal ?
3 Sat. And to make 'em quickly fall ?
140 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
S'tlen. Peace, my wantons ! he will do
More than you can aim unto ....
2 Sat. Tie about our tawny wrists
Bracelets of the fairy twists ?
4 Sat. And, to spight the coy nymphs' scorns,
Hang upon our stubbed horns
Garlands, ribbands, and fine posies,
3 Sat. Fresh as when the flower discloses ? ^
As they are waiting for daybreak, when the Prince
is to come out of the palace, the petulant elves
fall to dancing again, and sing a ballad to the
moon, the lightness of touch and glowing fantasy
of which have quite a Shakespearean ring :
I Sat. ...Let us sport
And make expectation short.
Silen. Do, my wantons, what you please,
I'll lie down and take mine ease.
I Sat. Brothers, sing then, and upbraid.
As we use, yond' seeming maid.
Song
Now, my cunning lady : moon,
Can you leave the side so soon
Of the boy you keep so hid ?
Midwife Juno sure will say
This is not the proper way
Of your paleness to be rid.
But perhaps it is your grace
To wear sickness in your face,
' Vol. Ill, pp. 73-+.
v.] BEN JONSON I4I
That there might be wagers laid
Still, by fools, you are a maid.
Come, your changes overthrow,
What your look would carry so ;
Moon, confess then what you are,
And be wise, and free to use
Pleasures that you now do lose,
Let us Satyrs have a share.
Though our forms be rough and rude,
Yet our acts may be endued
With more virtue : every one
Cannot be Endymion. ^
At the close of the masque, Oberon, that is
the Fairy Prince, having stepped into the midst of
the " bright Faies and Elves," they all together,
lest they should have :
...no more worth
Than the coarse and country Faerie
That doth haunt the hearth or dairy,^
" let their nimble feet tread subtle circles. " The
" gentle knights " themselves dance the whole
night out round the " high graced Oberon, " till
the dawn rises:
...from her blushing wars
And with her rosy hand puts back the stars. ^
A short masque presented at Court during the
Christmas festivities, 1 6 lo- 1 1 : Love Restored^ gives
^ lb. p. 75. — * lb. p. 77. — ^ lb. p. 77.
142 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
US a sprightly account of one " coarse and country-
faery, " Robin Good-fellow. He himself relates,
in an amusing monologue, the pains he has been
at to get admittance into Whitehall, where he
wishes to procure a sight of the entertainment
that is to be given. Now, on hearing that the
performance has been postponed, he thus gives
vent to his spite :
'Slight, a fine trick ! a piece of England's Joy this !
Are these your Court sports ? Would I had kept me to
my gambols o' the country still, selling of fish, short
service, shoeing the wild mare, or roasting of robin-red-
breast. These were better than, after all this time, no
masque : you look at me. I have recovered myself now
for you, I am the honest plain country spirit, and harm-
less ; Robin Goodfellow, he that sweeps the hearth and
the house clean, riddles for the country maids, and does
all their other drudgery, while they are at hot-cockles :
one that has discoursed with your Court spirits ere now ; but
was fain to-night to run a thousand hazards to arrive at
this place ; never poor goblin was so put to his shifts to
get in to see nothing. ^
This Robin Good-fellow is, of course, a near
relation to Shakespeare's Puck, who even may
have been alluded to in the sentence italicised.
He reappears under the name of Puck-hairy,
in The Sad Shepherd^ that unfinished pastoral
published after Ben Jonson's death, in the folio of
1 64 1. We are struck here with a new departure,
' Vol. Ill, p. 84.
v.] THE SAD SHEPHERD 1 40
not only from old Ben's usual style, but even from
the standard of the pastoral drama. This is a
distinctly national composition. Its chief characters:
Robin Hood and his merry men, who are dwelling
in the forest of Sherwood, as well as the country
folk of Belvoir Castle, are all flesh and bone
Englishmen, far removed from the artificial and
somewhat languid atmosphere of Elizabethan
Arcadia. The idealised descriptions, copied from
the Italian pastoral, have been ousted by simple
popular legends. We thus meet with an ugly
witch. Maudlin, with her son, the doltish swine-
herd Lorel, her daughter, the haughty Douce, and
her familiar sprite. Puck-hairy. Jonson, who, in
his Masque of Queens^ had already exhibited an
accurate knowledge of, and deep sympathy with,
witchcraft, connects it closely now with fairy-lore.
He improves upon Fletcher. For the ideal pic-
tured in The Faithful Shepherdess^ he substitutes a
" hempen home-spun " atmosphere. If he never
reaches, perhaps, to the perfect and easy workman-
ship, the dainty luxuriance, or, in Swinburne's
phrase, the " lyrical jewellery " of Fletcher, he is,
however, with both his artless familiarity and
healthy, cheerful burlesque, far more true to
English life. Puck-hairy is an obliging fiend in
the service of Dame Maudlin who, he says,
...grows high in evil,
And thinks she does all, when 'tis I, her devil,
144 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [CHAP.
That both delude her, and must yet protect her...^
Once, when Robin Hood, who, in spite of her
disguise, suspects her of being a witch, has caught
her by her girdle and the girdle has snapped, she
flies into a rage, deluges him with threats and
curses, till her devoted Puck, happening to be
about, undertakes to talk her into reason again :
Maud. O Puck, my goblin ! I have lost my belt.
The strong thief, Robin Outlaw, forced it from me.
Puck. They are other clouds and blacker threat
[you, dame ;
You must be wary, and pull in your sails,
And yield unto the weather of the tempest.
You think your power's infinite as your malice.
And would do all your anger prompts you to ;
But you must wait occasions, and obey them :
Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw your mast,
A cobweb all your cloth, and pass unseen.
Till you have 'scaped the rocks that are about you...^
And, the argument concludes, it is owing to the
aid and delusions of Puck that Maudlin escapes
the huntsmen who, chancing upon her foot-prints,
fall a pricking after her as hard as ever they can.
The pastoral breaks off unhappily, leaving the third
act itself unfinished. One cannot help being sorry
to hear so little of the benevolent sprite who is,
in fact, little more than caught a glimpse of, and
speaks such exquisite words as :
'Act. II, Sc. 2. Vol. II, p. 507. — *Act. Ill, Sc. 2. Vol. ii, p. 509.
v.] BEN JONSON I45
...I do love, madam,
To shew you all your dangers, — when you're past them 1 ^
On the whole, it is of some curiosity to see the
robust, burly playwright of The Fox or Sejanus
soften down, take in hand the delicate fairy themes,
and privilege the homely goblins with a by no
means unimportant place in his work. Even in
what he meant to be a genuine English pastoral,
and, in his own words, made of :
...such wool
As from mere English flocks his muse could pull, ^
he but followed in the steps of " his beloved master
William Shakespeare,"^ and borrowed the very
name of the most popular, if not the most
characteristic, fairy in the Dream.
So much then for those we have ventured to call
the " post-Shakespearean fairies. " The perform-
ance of ^M/<^j«;;?»?^r-M^/^^'j Z)rd'<:?»?, in 1594-5, its
double publication in 1 600 undoubtedly contribut-
ed something new to the national literary stock.
It revealed all the capacities of Fairyland and its
mysterious denizens as a poetical theme. It did not
actually create it, the subject being a very ancient
one, as we have seen, and which more than one
writer had tried his hand at. Yet Shakespeare may
be said to be the discoverer of it. He first realised
1 Act. Ill, Sc. 2. Vol. ii, p. 509.—* Prologue, lb. p. 486. — ^ Under-
<woods, XII. Vol. iii, pp. 287-89.
10
146 POST-SHAKESPEAREAN FAIRIES [cHAP. V.
its hidden resources, brought them to light, and
made them accessible to every one. It was chiefly
from the Dream that, for the first two decades of the
XVIlth century, the generality of English poets,
and the dramatists especially, copied their fairy-lore,
in proportion, of course, as it suited their own
imaginations. Too powerfully, however, had the
figures been stamped to allow of their being easily
tampered with and distorted. Even a Fletcher and
a Jonson, with their robust personalities, could not
help imitating the master's pattern and, in spite of a
few alterations, copying its main features. Both
the Shakespearean and post-Shakespearean fairies
are extravagantly fond of dancing on moonlit
meadows. They take an intimate interest in
human affairs, either to help them on, or, mayhap,
to cross them mischievously. They like beautiful
things, and associate freely, during their midnight
revels, with the nymphs and satyrs of classical
mythology. Though the spectator is not so often
reminded, in Jonson's and Fletcher's plays, of
their diminutive stature, they continue to be, as
regards their shape, totally different from mere
*' human mortals." They still belong, in a word,
to that particular vision of the world which is so
characteristic of the English Renaissance, when life
looked new and bright, was overbrimming with joy,
untrammelled, and not a little wild, with, moreover,
something mysterious, unexplained, suggestive of
far-off countries and perilous departures.
CHAPTER VI
FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK
A distinct change occurred in the fairy poetry-
written in England between the years 1620 and
1650. It was not yet past its vogue, though
altered and degraded. The delineation of the
fairies had been carried by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries well-nigh to the pitch of perfection,
and those who followed were left nothing better
than to fall back upon a few exterior and minute
details. The fairy belief, still a part of the popular
creed in Shakespeare's youth, was now dying out,
till it became but an artificial literary device, and a
mere poetical commonplace. From the stagey
where they had been so boldly portrayed, the
fairies retired into narrower forms of literature,
where all the poet wrote for was to express his
own personality, and his enjoyment thereof, instead
of creating characters, and giving voice to such
feelings as were easily understood by one and all.
Out of the mass of fairy poetry that was composed
during the first half of the XVIIth century, let us
select a few representative works, namely by
148 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
Drayton, W. Browne, Milton, Randolph and
Herrick, which, from Nimphidia^ published in
1627, to the Hesperides, published in 1648, will
afford us a sufficient idea of the slow but obvious
decay of fairy poetry in England.
I
It was only about the end of his long literary
life that Drayton felt attracted by, and actually
ventured into, Fairyland. Though a fellow shire-
man of Shakespeare, and born within a twelvemonth
of the great dramatist, his proved a very different
career. The former developed rapidly his dramatic
power, and climbed up, after a comparatively short
period of apprenticeship, to the summit of human
genius ; the latter experimented, for over a half-
century, on the many topics that successively came
into vogue, passing from amatory lyrics to pastoral,
then to historical and patriotic poetry, till, towards
the close of his life, when he had at last thrown
off the heavy labour of his 'Poly-Oibion, he
displayed a light and fantastic playfulness which
he would never have been given credit for.
By dint of dogged perseverance, he contrived
to retain the admiration of his contemporaries
and pass for a first-rate poet, though, in fact, he
was only a follower, a sturdy, untiring worker,
no doubt, but whose chief talent consisted in
detecting the feeling of the moment or even the
VI.] M. DRAYTON I49
coming fashion, and, on the other hand, in leaving
upon his laboured poems an impression of sweet
and graceful ease.
The fairydom of Drayton marks one of the
last stages of his literary career. It was only in
The Battaile of Agincourt...^ a volume that came out
in 1627, when he was sixty-four years of age, that
he published his poem of Nimphidia. The work
is manifestly a burlesque. It is a circumstantial
account of how the faithless Queen Mab, who has
yielded to the suit of a fairy knight, Pigwiggen,
and has gone to meet him at night in a fair
cowslip bower, is missed by her husband, the fiery,
madly jealous Oberon. She is immediately pur-
sued by the king's devoted goblin. Puck, who has
received a command to bring her home " alive
or dead." The guilty queen hurries away from
her lover, and hides with all her attendants in a
hazel-nut, which the little fairy Nimphidia succeeds,
by some mysterious charm, in rendering invisible
to Puck's " sharp and piercing sight." Meanwhile,
Pigwiggen has already defied Oberon, and is
fighting him in single combat when Proserpina,
a friend of Mab, interposes, and orders them both
to drink a draught of Lethe water, " in dreadful
Pluto's name." A moment after :
King Oberon forgotten had,
That he for iealousie ranne mad :
But of his Queene was wondrous glad,
And asked how they came thither :
150 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
Pigwiggen likewise doth forget,
That he Queene Mab had ever met ;
Or that they were so hard beset,
When they were found together.^
Upon this slender theme, Drayton built up
a long and highly polished burlesque, containing
no fewer than eighty-seven stanzas of eight lines
each. The simple, unsophisticated folk-belief has
almost disappeared, or strikes one here as a hack-
neyed tradition, when the poet says of the fairies,
for instance, that :
They make our Girles their sluttery rue.
By pinching them both blacke and blew,
And put a penny in their shue.
The house for cleanely sweeping :
And in their courses make that Round,
In Meadowes, and in Marshes found.
Of them so call'd the Fayrie ground,
Of which they haue the keeping.'
One thing however was quite new : the mock-
heroic tone that prevails throughout the poem.
Thus, when king Oberon hears that his faithless
queen has deserted the palace, he flies into a raving
passion ; he clasps in his arms a poor wandering
wasp :
As though his breath he forth would graspe,
Him for Pigwiggen taking ; ^
' St. 85.—* St. 9.—^ St. 25.
VI.] NIMPHIDIA 151
he mistakes a glow-worm for the devil, and thrashes
her hard :
For carrying fier in her tail ; ^
he rushes into a hive, besmears his face with wax,
daubs his beard with honey, meets an ant which
he bestrides :
And post thereon away he rides ; ^
hits against a mole-hill, tumbles down into a lake,
but :
...in his Oaken Cup doth float,
As safe as in a Wherry.
Men talke of the Aduentures strange,
Of Don Quishotty and of their change
Through which he Armed oft did range.
Of Sancha Panchas trauell :
But should a man tell euery thing.
Done by this franticke Fayrie king.
And them in lofty numbers sing
It well his wits might grauell. '
At times, the mock-heroic poem drifts into
downright parody. Gathering a few hints from
A Midsummer-Night' s Dream^ Drayton contrives to
transpose them into a humorous key. Shakespeare's
Oberon was only wittily and smilingly malicious
towards his heady consort : he is stark mad in
' St. 27.—' St. 30.— 3 St. 33-4.
152 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
Nimphidia^ as much so " as any hare, " His
henchman addresses him somewhat irreverently :
Hoh, hoh, quoth Hob, God saue thy grace,
Who drest thee in this pitteous case ? ^
while Puck is himself drawn into the snares laid
for him by the serviceable Nimphidia :
A plague vpon Queene Mab, quoth hee.
And all her Maydes where ere they be,
I thinke the Deuill guided me.
To seeke her so prouoked.
Where stumbling at a piece of Wood,
He fell into a dich of mudd,
Where to the very chin he stood.
In danger to be choked. ^
Elsewhere Drayton burlesques the old romancers,
in such sentences as :
Thorough Brake, thorough Brier,
Thorough Muck, thorough Mier,
Thorough Water, thorough Fier . . . ^
Hobgoblin fumes. Hobgoblin frets,..*
Poore Puck doth yell, Poore Puck doth rore.,.^
which were so characteristic of the chivalric
ballad.*' The sudden fancy, finally, which Titania
1 St. 35.—* St. 57.—^ St. 38.—^ St. 56.—^ St. 58.— « True to
say, the above-quoted alliterative sentences may have been simply
imitated from A Midsummer-Nighfs Dream, II, i, 11. 2-5 :
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale.
Thorough flood, thorough fire...
VI.] NIMPHIDIA 153
takes to the fairy knight Pigwiggen may have been
suggested by, and certainly recalls, the illicit love
of Guinevere and Launcelot.
To sum up, Nimphidia evinces a lower kind of
imagination. The playful ingenuity that pervades
it impresses one not uncommonly as a mere straining
after effect. Different as it is from A Midsummer-
Nighfs Dream, it has taken up one of its features,
the tiny stature of the fairies, and emphasised it to
an extreme. What was but a detail in Shakespeare,
or at most one of the several distinctive traits of
the fairy people, was now made their essential
characteristic. Nimphidia has been rightly called
a "Lilliputian extravaganza," its heroes being mere
puppets. It is a joke, very cleverly sustained
stanza after stanza, but in which Drayton appears
as more of a wit, and even a punster, than of a
true poet :
Hop, and Mop, and Drop so cleare,
Pip, and Trip, and Skip that were
To Mab their Soueraigne euer deare :
Her speciall Maydes of Honour ;
Fib, and Tib, and Pinck, and Pin,
Tick, and Quick, and lill, and lin.
Tit, and Nit, and Wap, and Win,
The Trayne that wayte vpon her. ^
Nothing has been preserved of the idealized at-
mosphere of Shakespeare's fairy drama : here
' St. ao.
154 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
everything is clearly defined, stands out in full
day-light, or else is wrapped in a most unim-
aginative darkness. Compare with the mysterious
suggestiveness of the Dream the hard and dull
accuracy of the descriptions in Nimphidia^ that,
for instance, of Pigwiggen's arms, as he is ready
to shed his blood for the sake of his high-born
paramour :
His Helmet was a Battles head,
Most horrible and full of dread,
That able was to strike one dead,
Yet did it well become him :
And for a plume, a horses hayre.
Which being tossed with the ayre,
Had force to strike his Foe with feare.
And turne his weapon from him.
Himself he on an Earewig set.
Yet scarce he on his back could get,
So oft and high he did coruet.
Ere he himselfe could settle :
He made him turne, and stop, and bound,
To gallop, and to trot the Round,
He scarce could stand on any ground,
He was so full of mettle. ^
In spite of this, Nimphidia remains a very
interesting piece of literary work. The style is
polished to a degree, by turns graceful and
piquant, while the versification is uniformly smooth,
' St. 63-4.
VI.] POLT-OLBWN 1 55
with an all too elaborate but sprightly and pleasant
lilt. It is an elegant trifle, in which, obviously,
the fairy theme serves as a mere pretext for a
display of patient and strenuous workmanship.
Nimphidia was not the first poem in which
Drayton dealt with fairies. In some previous
work, at a time when he was still under the spell
of Spenser, he had already made a few allusions
to the Faerie Queene. Thus, in the third eclogue
of the Pastorals (1593), Perkin declares that :
. . .learned Colin lays his pipes to gage
And is to Fayrie gone a pilgrimage ;
while, in the next one, Gorbo is heard piping :
... amongst the lowly sort,
Those silly herd-grooms who have laughed to see
When I by moon-light make the Fairies sport.
The fairies appear again in Drayton's bulky work,
the Poly-Olbion. England is said to be swarming
with Oreades, Dryades, Naiades, and the like, who
keep company with the national goblins of the
streams or hills, while Merlin himself is alluded to,
in the fourth Song, as one who :
...by loving of an elf
(For all his wondrous skill) was cozen'd by himself.
For, walking with his Fay, her to the rock he brought
In which he oft his nigromancies wrought :
And going in thereat his magics to have shown
She stopp'd the cavern's mouth with an enchanted stone ;
156 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
Whose cunning strongly cross'd, amaz'd whilst he did stand,
She captive him convey'd unto the Fairy land.
Drayton returned to the fairy themes in his
last book, The Muses Eiiziumy lately discovered by a
new way over Parnassus... ^ 1630, which has often
been considered both as a compendium and the
crown of all his work. The book is divided into
" Nimphals," of which the eighth, perhaps the best,
and the one done in the lightest and happiest vein,
describes the preparations of a Fairy Wedding.
Mertilla, Claia, and Cloris are talking about the
coming marriage of the nymph Tita with a
" dwarfish fairy Elfe, " who is :
...deft and Wondrous Ayrye.
They think of the ornaments they will have to
provide for the bride, and also of the wedding
ceremony itself. Mertilla will give her a dainty
jewel for her ear, Claia a fine cup " in fashion
of a Fly," Cloris "a Tyer for her head," in which :
The yellowes in the full-blowne Rose
Which in the top it doth inclose
Like drops of gold Oare shall be hung.
Tita's wedding gown shall be :
Of Pansie, Pincke, and Primrose leaves,
Most curiously laid on in threaves
A trayle about the skirt shalle runne,
The Silkewormes finest newly spunne
VI.] THE MUSES ELIZIUM I 57
As for the " feast " itself :
The Nightingale, of birds most choyce,
To doe her best shall straine her voyce ;
And to this bird to make a set
The Mausis, Merle and Robinet ;
The Larke, the Lennet and the Thrush,
That make a Quier of every bush
Before parting, and setting about their several
errands, the nymphs practise a pretty Prothalamion,
A thing that much must grace our feast,
from which we must also quote the conclusion :
Claia : But when night comes and she must goe
To Bed, dear Nimphes, what must we doe ?
Mert'illa : In Posset must be brought.
And Poynts be from the Bridegroome caught.
Claris : In Maskes, in Dances and deHght,
And reare Banquets spend the night :
Then about the roome we ramble,
Scatter nuts, and for them scramble.
Over Stooles, and Tables tumble,
Never thinke of noyse nor rumble.
Mertilla] For our Tita is this day
Claia j Married to a noble Fay.
II
Quite different from Drayton's quaint, if some-
what laboured and artificial, treatment of the
158 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK. [cHAP.
fairy themes are the developments on that same
subject which William Browne introduced into
his Britannia's Pastorals. Here we come to a
purely descriptive poet, very sincere, and even quite
ingenuous, who sets forth in an easy, rambling,
discursive way the many minute particulars which
make up an English landscape. Browne who
was scarcely over thirty when he had completed
his work, who was besides an ardent admirer
of Spenser, allowed himself to wander into
endless descriptions, intermixed, frequently enough,
with tedious and all but inextricable allegories ;
elsewhere, he leapt from the most conventional
and long-winded Arcadianism into a delicate
realism that already smelt of the open air ; and he
generally imparted something of his simple,
unassuming sensitiveness to the delineation of his
native Devonshire.
Browne's treatment of the fairies displays these
various tendencies. He is, when dealing with the
theme, both discursive and realistic, graceful and
richly euphuistic. Here is an instance taken from
the first book :
Near to this wood there lay a pleasant mead,
Where fairies often did their measures tread,
Which in the meadow made such circles g(r)een,
As if with garlands it had crowned been.
Or like the circle where the signs we track,
And learned shepherds call't the Zodiac :
Within one of these rounds was to be seen
VI.] WILLIAM BROWNE 1 59
A hillock rise, where oft the fairy-queen
At twilight sat, and did command her elves
To pinch those maids that had not swept their shelves ;
And further, if by maidens' oversight
Within doors water were not brought at night ;
Or if they spread no table, set no bread,
They should have nips from toe unto the head ;
And for the maid that had perform'd each thing,
She in the water-pail bade leave a ring.^
The several features which the poet thus ascribes
to the fairies are but gracefully expressed common-
places. Their fondness for dancing, their love of
cleanliness, their pinching the slatternly maids
black and blue, their rewarding all such as prove
duly painstaking are but conventional themes,
which wc have often met with before. The same
almost holds good of several other passages, either
in the first book :
...the fairy troop which nimbly play.
And by the springs dance out the summer's day,
Teaching the little birds to build their nests.. .^
or in the second, published in 1616 :
The dancing fairies, when they left to play.
Then back did pull them^ and in holes of trees
Stole the sweet honey from the painful bees.*
Another reference to the fairies, which occurs
1 Bk. I, Song 2, 11. 389-404.—* Bk. I, Song 4, 11. 283-5.—
' Lilies.—* Bk. II, Song 3, 11. 776-78.
l6o FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
in the third book of Britannia s Pastorals composed
between 1624 and 1628, according to Mr. Moor-
man, about 1635, according to Mr. Bullen, and
first printed in 1852, is of a somewhat different
character. It consists in a long, circumstantial
description of a feast offered to Oberon, and re-
minds one not a little o^ Nimphidia, which, as it was
published in 1627, may have preceded it. It gives
a full and particular account of the banquet, the
Lilliputian minuteness of which recalls either the
elopement of Queen Mab, in Drayton, her pursuit
by Puck, or again the single combat between the
king and his faithless liege, Pigwiggen. Browne
first depicts the fairy banqueting hall, a " trim feat
room "
Out of the main rock cut by artful strength.
The two-leav'd door was of the mother pearl,
Hinged and nail'd with gold. Full many a girl.
Of the sweet fairy ligne, wrought in the loom
That fitted those rich hangings clad the room.
In them was wrought the love of their great king,
His triumphs, dances, sports, and revelling :
And learned Spenser, on a little hill
Curiously wrought, lay, as he tun'd his quill. . . ^
A little mushroom served for a table, strewn over
with white rose leaves for a cloth :
...for their bread, was put
The milk-white kernels of the hazel nut ;
1 Bk. Ill, Song I, 11. 718-728.
VI.] BRITANNIA'S PASTORALS l6l
The cupboard, suitable to all the rest,
Was as the table with like cov'ring dress'd.
The ewer and bason were, as fitting well,
A periwinkle and a cockle-shell :
The glasses pure, and thinner than we can
See from the sea-betroth'd Venetian,
Were all of ice not made to overlast
One supper, and betwixt two cowslips cast. . . *
A little spruce elf brought in the bottles, cut
out of cherry-stones :
To each a seed pearl served for a screw,
And most of them were fill'd with early dew.
Some choicer ones, as for the king most meet.
Held mel-dew and the honeysuckle's sweet. '
Then came the dishes :
In white broth boil'd a crammed grasshopper ;
A pismire roasted whole ; five crayfish eggs ;
The udder of a mouse ; two hornets' legs ;
Instead of olives, cleanly pickl'd sloes ;
Then of a bat were serv'd the pettitoes ;
Three fleas in souse, a cricket from the brine ;
And of a dormouse, last, a lusty chine. ^
This first course being served in, the fairy nobles
ushered Oberon into the hall. He was most
gorgeously dressed " in a suit of speckled gilli-
flow'r," his hat "of a lily made,"
His ruflF a daisy was, so neatly trim,
1 lb. 11. 755-764.—' lb. 11. 775-78._» lb. 11. 786-92.
II
1 62 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
As if of purpose it had grown for him,,..
His cloak was of the velvet flow'rs, and lin'd
With flow'r-de-luces of the choicest kind. . . ^
Between the various courses, Oberon surveyed
the " hawks and sports " of the fairy tribe, while
his ear was delighted by an exquisite concert :
The treble was a three-mouth'd grasshopper,
Well tutor'd by a skilful quirister :
An ancient master, that did use to play
The friskings which the lambs do dance in May,
And long time was the chiefest call'd to sing.
When on the plains the fairies made a ring ;
Then a field-cricket, with a note full clean,
Sweet and unforc'd and softly sung the mean. . .
And to all these a deep well-breasted gnat,
That had good sides, knew well his sharp and flat,
Sung a good compass, making no wry face,
Was there as fittest for a chamber bass. ^
These long quotations will enable the reader
to estimate the quality of the new fairy poetry
that was being written in England about 1630.
The popular belief was gone for good, and had
made room for ingenious wit. A few particulars^
mainly borrowed from A Midsummer-Night' s
Dream, were developed at length, many new, and
even novel, details being grafted on, which aimed,
above all, at piquancy. Graceful things were
mixed with odd and far-fetched ones. Mere
/i. 11. 819-828.— * /i&. 11. 953-70.
VI.] MILTON 163
desultoriness began to play the part of fancy.
The once rough and awful folk-creed was fast
dwindling into a recognized literary theme.
Conventionality was ready to set in.
Ill
So widespread was the infection as to be caught
even by Milton. An admirer both of Spenser
and of Shakespeare, he paid special attention to
the Dream, which was fraught with so many things
his earlier years had delighted in. It may have
been of that very play he was thinking when he
wrote, in U Allegro, of:
...sweetest Shakespear fancies childe,
Warbl(ing) his native Wood-notes wilde. ^
With his classical learning, that broad, deep, well-
ordered culture which had mastered all the secrets
of the poets of old, he combined a sincere taste
of his own for nature and country simplicities,
in which the fairy belief was naturally included.
Thus, in n Allegro, that fresh picture of innocent
mirth belonging to the years of Milton's life at
Horton (1632-8), the young poet found room for
the villagers' tales of Queen Mab and Robin
Good-fellow, the "drudging goblin," whilst a
sprinkling of Shakespearean reminiscences supple-
mented the popular tradition :
Ml. 133-4-
164 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
How Faery Mab the junkets eat,
She was pincht, and pull'd, she sed,
And he by Friars Lanthorn led
Tells how the drudging Gohlin swet,
To ern his Cream-bowle duly set,
When in one night, ere glimps of morn.
His shadowy Flale hath thresh'd the Corn
That ten day-labourers could not end.
Then lies him down the Lubbar Fend.
And stretch'd out all the Chimney's length.
Basks at the fire his hairy strength ;
And Crop-full out of dores he flings,
Ere the first Cock his Mattin rings. ^
The same fairies reappear in Comus, 1634, also
written during the Horton period, when Milton
had retired from Cambridge to his father's house
in Buckinghamshire, there to study by himself and
plan out his future. In the midst of the long
monologues that sing the praise of virtue, that
unite to the festive associations of a masque some
lofty thoughts on the identity of beauty and
chastity, we are again given a glimpse of the little
mischievous elves :
Som say no evil thing that walks by night
In fog, or fire, by lake, or moorish fen,
Blew meager Hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost.
That breaks his magick chains at curfeu time,
No goblin, or swart faery of the mine,
Hath hurtfull power o're true virginity..,^
' 11. 102-114. — - 11. 4.32-7.
VI.] COMUS 165
a passage that closely follows, and very likely
imitates, the above-quoted lines from Fletcher's
Faithful Shepherdess on the advantages of purity.
Again, speaking of the "guiltless" nymph Sabrina,
Milton shows her, in her " maid'n gentleness,"
who :
...oft at Eeve
Visits the herds along the twilight meadows,
Helping all urchin blasts, and ill luck signes
That the shrewd medling Elfe delights to make,
Which she with pretious viold liquors heals. ^
Or else, as is often his way, Milton freely
associates the Greek or Latin names and attributes
of the pagan deities with those of British mythology,
or the Christian religion. His refined language,
overwrought with allusions, decks as with a rare
embroidery his lofty and austere ideas, and gives
them, to use Sir Henry Wotton's happy phrase,
** a certain Doric delicacy," till the now trite assim-
ilation of English fairies to classical nymphs gains,
in ComuSy a fresh beauty :
The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove
Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move.
And on the Tawny Sands and Shelves,
Trip the pert Fairies and the dapper Elves ;
^ 11. 843-47. See, on line 846, the note in Mr. Verity's edition
of Comus : " tAe, as if he had some particular elf in view ; probably
Robin Goodfellow, the influence of A Midsummer-Night' s Dream on
Milton being so strong." p. iii.
1 66 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
By dimpled Brook, and Fountain brim,
The Wood-Nymphs deckt with Daisies trim,
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep :
What hath night to do with sleep ? ^
Milton never totally renounced the ideals of
his youth, and in the works of his stern maturity
did not fail to return, now and again, to the dainty
fairy theme which suggested to " the admirable
dramaticke poet W. Shakespeare " ^ one of his
most signal masterpieces. Just as, in one of
his earliest productions : <yf/ a Vacation Exercise
in the Colledge, Milton had taken up the Shake-
spearean notion that the fairies would dance upon
the hearth, as a sign of favour, and bless children
" in nativity " :
Good luck befriend thee Son ; for at thy birth
The Faiery Ladies daunc't upon the hearth ;
Thy drowsie Nurse hath sworn she did them spie
Come tripping to the Room where thou didst lie ;
And sweetly singing round about thy Bed
Strew all their blessings on thy sleeping Head... ^
so, years afterwards, he remembers the fairies of
the Dreamy whether he alludes to one of the most
familiar tricks of Puck :
...as when a wandring Fire...
Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends,
'11. 115-22. — * The title of the epitaph composed by Milton
and printed in 1632, in the Second Folio. — ' 11. 59-64. Cf. A M.-
N's. D. V, 398-421.
VI.] T. RANDOLPH 1 67
Hovering and blazing with delusive Light,
Misleads th' amaz'd Night-w^anderer from his way... ^
or, in another book of his Taradise Lost, speaks of
their small stature, of their Indian dwellings, and
of their " midnight revels " :
...that Pigmean Race
Beyond the Indian Mount, or Faerie Elves,
Whose midnight Revels, by a Forrest side
Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees.
Or dreams he sees ... *
Other instances might be adduced in proof
of the strong influence A Midsummer-Night's
Dream exercised on Milton.^ In fact it was but
natural that Shakespeare's fairy drama, a sort of
epithalamium, a hymn, in some ways, both to the
sanctity and passionate ardour of love, should
delight the poet who, in Comus, was going to
extol the rosy glow of virginal affections. And
it is pleasant to think that the great Puritan
himself felt the charm of Elizabethan Fairyland,
strayed on its borders in his youth, and dallied,
till late in his dark and lonely years, with its
graceful memories.
IV
Thomas Randolph, one of Milton's contem-
1 Paradise Lost. Book ix, 11. 634-40 — ^ lb. Book i, 11. 780-85. Cf.
tA M.-N's. 2). : II, i, 29, 84, 141. — * See, in Mr. Verity's edition of
the Dream, Appendix I : " Milton and A M.-N's. D. "
1 68 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
poraries at Cambridge, an admirer and one of the
most faithful " sons " of Ben Jonson, also entered
the kingdom of the fairies. Among the rather
voluminous writings which he composed before his
early death in 1635, when he was scarcely in his
thirtieth year, there occurs a comedy called
AmyntaSy or The Impossible Dowry (c. 1632) in which
fairy-lore plays no little part.
It is a pastoral in the Italian style. Its
materials are mostly drawn from Guarini's Pastor
Fidoy and other Italian pastoral dramas. Its main
plot, a rather intricate affair, turns upon the wrath
of Ceres, and upon some enigmatic oracles which
Amyntas endeavours to interpret.
On the other hand, Randolph introduced into
his play a comic under-plot, thoroughly English,
quite fresh and brisk, sufficient by itself to raise his
work above the mass of commonplace pastorals,
and to put it almost on the same level as Fletcher's
Faithful Shepherdess and Jonson's Sad Shepherd.
Thus Dorylas, " a knavish boy," with Jocastus,
" a fantastic Shepherd and a fairy knight," and a
jolly crew of country lads, gull everybody all
round. In the first act, Mopsus, " a foolish
augur," is madly enamoured of Thestylis. Jocastus
tries to dissuade him, and to turn his attentions to
a higher aim :
Jocastui : Choose a better match : goe love
Some Fairy Lady ! Princely Oberon
Shall stand thy friend: and beauteous Mab^ his Queene,
VI.] AMYNTAS 1 69
Give thee a maid of Honour.
Mopsus : How locastus ?
Marry a puppet ? Wed a mote ith' Sunne ?
Goe looke a wife in nutshells ? wooe a gnat,
That's nothing but a voice ? no, no, locastus ,
I must have flesh, and blood, and will have Thestylis.
A fig for Fairies ! ^
In the next act, Jocastus and Dorylas have plotted
together, for mere fun, to cajole the proud Thestylis
into marrying the silly dolt :
Thestylis : But what estate shall he assure upon me ?
locastus : A Royal joynture, all in Fairyland.
Dorylas knowes it... A curious Parke...
Besides a house made all of mother of Pearle ;
An Ivory Tenniscourt.
Dorylas : A nutmeg Parlour.
lo. : A Saphyre dary-roome.
Dor. : A Ginger hall.
lo. : Chambers of Agate.
Dor. : Kitchins all of Christall...
Thest. : ... Nay then lets in
To seale the writings. ^
In the third act, Dorylas alone, who has disguised
himself as Prince Oberon, now undertakes to steal
all the apples in the orchard of his friend Jocas-
tus. The scene is very amusing, but is unhappily
too long to be quoted in full :
Enter Dorylas, with a Bevy of Fairies.
1 Act. II, Sc. 6.—' Act. I, Sc. 3.
lyO FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
How like you now my Grace ? is not my countenance
Royall and full of majesty ? Walke not I
Like the young Prince of Pigmies ? Ha ? my knaves,
Wee'll fill our pockets. Looke, looke yonder, ElveSy
Would not yon apples tempt a better conscience
Than any we have to rob an Orchard ? ha ?
Fairies^ like Nymphs with child, must have the things
They long for. You sing here a Fairy catch
In that strange tongue I taught you : while our selfe
Doe clime the Trees. Thus Princely Oberon
Ascends his throne of State.
Elves : Nos Beata Fauni Proles,
Qui bus non est magna moles,
Quamvis Lunam incolamus,
Hortos saepe frequentamus.
Furto cuncta magis bella,
Furto dulcior Puella.
Furto omnia decora.
Furto poma dulciora.
Cum mortales lecto jacent.
Nobis poma noctu placent.
Ilia tamen sunt ingrata,
Nisi furto sint parata.
Enter locastuSy BromiuSy his man.
lo. : What divine noyse, fraught with immortall harmony,
Salutes mine eare ?
Bro. : Why, this immortall Harmony
Rather salutes your Orchard !
VI.] AMY NT AS I7I
Towards the end of the scene, after the blunt
clown Bromius has whipped and pummelled the
pretended fairies into mortality again, the latter
retire with a show of well-assumed arrogance :
Dory/as: Come, noble Peers
Of Fairy, come, attend our Royall grace.
Let's goe and share our fruit with our Queen Mab,
And th' other Darymaids : where of this theam
We will discourse amidst our Cakes and Cream.
Elves : Cum tot poma habeamus,
Triumphos laeti jam canamus.
Faunos ego credam ortos
Tantum ut frequentent hortos.
I domum, Oberon, ad illas
Quae nos manent nunc ancillas.
Quarum osculemur sinum.
Inter poma, lac, et vinum. ^
All this is good comedy indeed. The humour,
a trifle broad perhaps, is quite genuine. The
dialogue is quick and racy. It owes nothing
to the Italian pastoral. Randolph may have
remembered J Midsummer-Night's Dream in some
of his more serious scenes : those between Damon,
in love with Laurinda, and Amaryllis, in love
with Damon being somewhat similar to the
squabbles of the Athenian lovers; but, on the
whole, ^myntas is far more in the vein of the
' Act. Ill, Sc. 4.
172 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
Merry Wives^ where Falstaff is terrified at the
sight of the counterfeit fairies, " lest he should be
transformed to a piece of cheese." With Ran-
dolph, the fairies have lost all the romantic
glamour of old. They have come down to the
state of enticing dairymaids, " daintiest rogues "
who :
...kisse
As sweet as sillibubs ; surely Oberon
Lives a delitious life ! ^
They are now the mere inventions of a sharp-
witted poet, roguish, ease-loving, and not over-
burdened with modesty.
With Robert Herrick, lastly, the fairy themes
reached the height of elaborateness. The author
of the Hesperides was well conversant with the
preceding literature on the subject, and availed
himself of all the features which Shakespeare in
the Dream, Jonson in his masques, Drayton in his
mock-heroic poem had severally dwelt upon.
Herrick's fairy poems, though scattered in his
book : The Fairie Temple, or Oberon s Chappell (221^)',
Oberon s Feast (294) ; Oberon s Talace (444) ; The
Fairies (sSl) > "^^^ ^^SS^^ ^^ Mab, the Fairie Queen
(639), are obviously connected. They may be
1 Act. IV, Sc. 6.
VI.] R. HERRICK 1 73
looked upon as the product of a long evolution, as
the result of many previous attempts, or, in
Mr. Gosse's words, as "a kind of final compendium
of all that the poets of the XVIIth century-
imagined about fairies." ^
Long before the publication of the Hesperides^
1648, there appeared, in a curious little pamphlet:
A Description of the King and Queene of Fayries, their
hahit^ fare^ their abode, pompe and state , printed in
1635, a short poem entitled A Description of his
Dyet, which is only an incomplete version of the
piece called, in xho, Hesperides, Oberon's Feast (2^4).
How Herrick's poem found its way into the
booklet, we do not know. The initials only of
the compiler have been preserved : R.S., written
by hand on the first page, and printed at the end of
the address to the reader. Herrick's contribution
may have been included either without the poet's
consent, or without any knowledge of the real
authorship, having only been copied, perhaps,
off one of those commonplace books which were
quite the fashion in the XVIIth century. It
describes the feast of Oberon, but is much shorter
than the final text of the Hesperides, thirty-two
lines instead of fifty-four, and is, in fact, nothing
more than a sketch.
The little duodecimo tract ^ consists of twenty-
two pages, of which three are blank, and four
' Seventeenth Century Studies, London, 1883, p. 131. — * See
Appendix I.
174 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
occupied by rude woodcuts. In addition to
Herrick's poem, it contains a few other fairy-
pieces, of no little beauty in themselves, which
moreover clearly show the stage of development
that this kind of fanciful poetry had arrived at in
1635. Thus we find another anonymous poem :
A Description of the King of Fayries Clothes, brought
to him on New-yeares day in the morning, 1626, by
his Queenes chamber-maids, which is again a fragment
only, forty-four lines instead of seventy-six, of one
of the best-known fairy pieces in the XVIlth
century. The complete poem is to be found in a
good many manuscripts, and, in most of them, is
expressly ascribed to Sir Simeon Steward, a North-
amptonshire gentleman, educated at Trinity Hall,
Cambridge, where he undoubtedly made the
acquaintance of Herrick, who even addressed to
him, in January 1624, a sort of eclogue entitled
A New Teares Gift (320). Steward's poem is
graceful and quaint, and might serve as a type of
seventeenth century fairy poetry. Let us quote,
from a manuscript preserved in the British
Museum, the beginning of the piece, left out in
the printed pamphlet :
When the monthly horned Queene
Grew jealous that the Starrs had scene
Her rising from Endimions armes,
In rage did throw her misty charmes
Into the bosome of the night,
To dimme the curious prying light.
VI.] SIR S. STEWARD 1 75
Then did the dwarfish Fairyes elves
(Having first attir'd themselves)
Prepar'd to dresse their O heron King
In light robes for revelling. .J
Herrick's Oberons Feast Is followed, first by a
long poem of eight six-line stanzas : The Fairies
Fegaries^ a sort of ballad sung by the Fairy Queen
to her little elves ; and then by The Melancholly
Lovers Song, the well-known ditty contained in
Fletcher's Nice Valour, and beginning:
Hence all you vaine delights...
The appearance of the latter in the fairy book,
twelve years before it was published in the com-
plete folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher
(1647), is not one of the least interesting curiosities
of our little volume.
One thing especially draws the reader's attention:
the close resemblance of the several poems to the
fairy pieces of Herrick. What is more. Steward's
Description of the King of Fayries Clothes is so obvi-
ously in the manner of the Devonshire parson-
poet, that one of his editors, W. C. Hazlitt,
went so far as to question whether " Steward was
not simply the copyist, and as such, agreeably to
the common usage at that time, affixed his signa-
ture." With this conjecture we must confront the
fact that Herrick, in his final edition in 1648, did
' Egerton MSS. 2725. Fol. 144 r.
176 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
not claim the poem as his own, which he did not
fail to do with regard to two other pieces included
in Carew's first collected edition in 1640 ; and also
that no manuscript has been preserved with
Herrick's name subscribed to it, while a good
many others clearly attribute the Description to
Steward. Be this as it may, several coincidences
seem too exact to be merely accidental. The
following lines, from Steward's poem in the
1635 pamphlet :
A rich Wastcoat
Made of the Trout-flies gilded wing
...a lace
Drawne by the unctuous Snails slow pace
Diamond stars of morning dew :
Dy'd Crimson in a maydens blush
About his necke a wreath of pearle
Dropt from the eyes of some poore girle
are faithfully echoed in Herrick's :
...pure seed Pearle of Infant dew
Brought and sweetned with a blew
And pregnant Violet
The unctuous dew laps of a Snaile
or even in the Hesperides :
VI.] HERRICK AND STEWARD 1 77
Grac't with the Trout-flies curious wings 224
With eyes of Peacocks Trains, and Trout-
Flies curious wings ....
And all behung with these pure Pearls,
Dropt from the eyes of ravisht Girles 444.
And it is only the almost incredible fact that a man,
capable of writing such pretty things, should have
left us nothing else, whereas these very sentences
are abundantly paralleled in the rest of Herrick's
work, which induces a belief that Steward was
merely the happy imitator of his talented friend.
The same holds true again of the anonymous
ballad : The Fairies Fegaries, the fifth stanza of
which :
Upon the mushroomes head
Our table cloth we spread,
A graine o'th'finest wheat
Is manchet that we eate :
The pearlie drops of dew we drinke
In Akorne-cups fiU'd to the brinke...
is quite Herrickian :
A little mushroome-table spred.
After short prayers, they set on bread ;
A Moon-parcht grain of purest wheat,
With some small glit'ring grit, to eate .... 294.
The question of Herrick's originality becomes
a more disputable one than ever when we now
set off his Oberons Feast, such as it finally
12
lyS FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
appeared in the Hesperides^ against the description
of Oberon's banquet contained in W. Browne's
Pastorals. Here again we are met with striking
similarities. We read in Browne :
A little mushroom . . .
Serv'd for a table...
To each a seed pearl served for a screw,
And most of them were fill'd with early dew...
The treble was a three-mouth'd grasshopper....
Then a field-cricket, with a note full clean.
Sweet and unforc'd and softly sung the mean . . .
And to all these a deep well-breasted gnat...^
Similarly Herrick in the Hesperides :
A little mushroome-table spred . . .
The Elves present to quench his ^ thirst
A pure seed-Pearle of Infant dew...
But that there was in place to stir
His Spleen, the chirring Grasshopper;
The merry Cricket, puling Flie,
The piping Gnat for minstralcy... 294
Both Mr. Moorman, who first called attention to
these resemblances, and Mr. Courthope decide
for the priority of Browne. " There can be no
doubt that the version of the Hesperides is posterior
to Browne's third book of the Pastorals," the
' Book, iii, Song i. — - Oberon's.
VI.] HERRICK AND BROWNE 179
former writes,^ and the latter : " A description ot
the fairy feast in the third book of Britannia s
Pastorals^ though not published till after Herrick's
fairy poems had appeared in 1635, probably
preceded them in composition, and may have been
read by him in MS."^ All this is mere conjec-
ture. As a matter of fact, the third book of Browne's
Pastorals was not published, as has been seen,
before 1852, and, in Mr. Moorman's own words,
" with our present knowledge of Browne's life, it
is impossible to say whether the third book was
written before or after the publication of Drayton's
Nymphidia in 1627."^ Now, according to the
same critic, Herrick's fairy poems, at any rate his
Oberons Feast^ were written in or about 1626,^ and
the poet of the Hesperides^ therefore, may have been
the first in the field. Browne, who was then in
London, may have heard of the first draught of
Oberons Feast and, finding it a fit subject to
expatiate upon, may have developed in that grace-
ful, winding, and desultory style of his the terse
octosyllables of Herrick. This, when we remember
^ IV. Bronvne. His Britannia s Pastorals. Strassburg, 1897, p. 146.
— ^ A History of English Poetry, Vol. iii, London, 1903, p. 261. —
^ Op. cit. p. 146. The interesting chapter of Mr. Moorman on
Browne and Fairies contains however a few inaccuracies : " Browne's
observation on the fairies' love of cleanliness strikes us as original,"
p. 145. " The introduction of a reward for cleanliness Browne
seems to have borrowed from the folk-lore of his native county,"
p. 145. "Browne's poem appeared between 1624 and 162S, at
which time Herrick was an unknown Cambridge student," p. 148.
— * Robert Herrick, London, 1910, p. 267.
l80 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
how many poems of the latter were actually
circulating in MS. is, to say the least, as likely as
Herrick's getting sight of Browne's manuscript
work, of which, so far as we know, there is but
one copy extant, which was discovered in the library
of Salisbury Cathedral and published at no earlier
date than half a century ago.
All the more so that, whereas the Fairies' Banquet
is but an episode in Britannia s "Pastorals^ loosely
connected with the rest, Herrick's fairy poems,
separated as they are from one another in the
Hesperides^ are markedly linked together by their
opening lines, and form a complete series, as though
their author had, at one time, dreamt of writing a
sort of epic to the glory of Oberon. We have
elsewhere described at length the literary charac-
teristics of Herrick's fairy poems, too well known,
or at least of too easy access, to need quotation
here. Never did the light-hearted lover of Julia
and Anthea more thoroughly evince his fondness
for all that was pretty, dainty, and of elegant
tininess, his taste for the " curious " dream of
an idle hour, together with his elaborate work-
manship, his gift of phrase, his unique way of
suggesting the subtlest and most refined ideas
with the help only of clear and simple words.
His lusty Oberon, his amorous Queen Mab,
" tender as a chick," may be some distant relations
to the " King of Shadows " and to the passionate
Elfin majesty of the Dreamy just as the shimmering
VI.] herrick's fairies i8i
twilight diffused through their palace is the very same
that faintly glimmered over the lovers' grove near
Athens. But on the whole, Herrick's fairy-world
is essentially different from Shakespeare's. The
one might be justly compared to the early evening
of a fine summer day, when the country is all
aglow with the last rays of the departing sun.
The other is but an artificial summer night, such
as we see represented on the stage, with painted
scenery instead of a natural landscape. Herrick's
fairies are brisk and witty puppets, and the play
they are acting is but a sort of ingenious peepshow.
They are the direct outcome less of actual life
than of a great artist's patient labour.
*
The middle of the XVIIth century witnessed
the banishment of the fairies from English poetry,
and Herrick has been rightly called by Mr. Gosse
" the last Laureate of Fairyland." ^ Some poems
were still written on the subject, no doubt, such
as the Mad Merry Trunks of Robin GoodfelloWj
which, printed by Percy and attributed, without
any valid reason, to Jonson, very likely belongs
to that period ; or as The Faerie King Fashioning
Love and Honour by Samuel Sheppard, the
amanuensis of Jonson, a long-winded " heroical "
poem somewhat in the style of the Faerie
* 0/>. cit. p. 131.
1 82 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP.
Queene, in six books, each book of six cantos of
eight-line stanzas, the manuscript of which,
preserved in the Bodleian Library, has not yet
found an editor. But, roughly speaking, the
theme is now passing into the hands of a few
eccentric poets, as the Duchess of Newcastle, a
dear favourite of Lamb, " the thrice noble, chaste,
and virtuous, but somewhat fantastical and
original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. "
List to this frigid, stilted discourse of hers :
" I wonder any should laugh, or think it ridiculous to
heare of Fairies^ and yet verily beleeve there are spirits ;
and witches^ yet laugh at the report of Fairies^ as impos-
sible ; which are onely small bodies not subject to our
sense, although it be to our reason. For Nature can as
well make small bodies, as great, and thin bodies as well
as thicke So there is no reason in Nature, but that
there may not onely be such things as Fairies^ but these
be as deare to God as we. . . ." ^
And the Duchess proceeds, in a full series of poems,
to expand Drayton's, Browne's and Herrick's fairy
pieces, divesting them, as a matter of course, of
their more notable characteristics, and foisting in,
on the other hand, a number of trivial, tasteless,
and even absurd passages, as a few instances will
sufficiently prove :
The Fairy Queens large Kingdome got by birth.
Is in the circled center of the Earth,
Poems and Fancies .. . London 1653, p. 139.
VI.] THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE 1 83
Where there are many springs and running streams,
Whose waves do glitter by the Queens bright beams...
There Mountains are of pure refined gold.
And Rocks of Diamonds perfect to behold. . .
Quarries of Rubies, Saphirs there are store,
Christah and Amathists many more... ^
Then follows, in The 'Pastime and Recreation of the
Queen of Fairies in Fairy Land, the Center of the
the Earth, the long description of :
...a Bower
Where she doth sit under a flower
To shade her from the Moon-shine bright,
Where Gnats do sing for her delight,
Some high, some low, some Tenour strain.
Making a Consort very plain... '
She " on a dewy leafe doth bathe," while the
feast is getting ready, and :
...on a mushroom there is spread
A cover fine of spiders web,
exactly as in Herrick and Browne. The moment
the fantastic poetess attempts originality, she sinks
into bathos, as in this description of the City of
the Fairies :
The City is the Braine, incompast in
Double walls (Dura Mater, Pia Mater thin)...
Our fancies, which in verse or prose we put,
^ lb. p. 148. — ^ /^. p. 151.
184 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [CHAP.
Are Pictures which they draw, or Figures cut...
When that our braine with amorous thoughts doth run,
Are marrying there a Bride with her Bridegoom. ^
Nothing perhaps could have shown more plainly
how hopelessly drained the fairy themes were
in the latter part of the XVIlth century than the
foolish, pseudo-metaphysical drivelling it had
come down to.
Another reason may account for the decay of
fairy poetry in England : the hostile attitude of
the Puritans. They denounced it. They deemed
its religious rites, its kingly and profligate court a
sort of sacrilegious superstition. They even
declared fairies to be things devilish, and looked
upon them with the same savage hatred they
entertained for witches. They regarded Fairyland
as a province of Satan's immense kingdom, and as
one of the most detestable inventions of the
Papists. Two or three stanzas from the graceful
ballad of Jon son's jolly friend, Richard Corbet,
will show the truth of this :
The Fairies farewell^ or God a mercy will.
St. 2. Lament, lament old abbies,
The fairies' lost command ;
They did but change priests' babies ;
But some have changed your land ;
> lb. p. 164.
VI.] R. CORBET 185
And all your children sprung from thence
Are now growne puritanes,
Who live as changelings ever since
For love of your demaines. . .
St. 5. ...the fairies
Were of the old profession ;
Their songs were Ave Maries^
Their dances were procession,
But now, alas ! they all are dead.
Or gone beyond the seas.
Or farther for religion fled.
Or else they take their ease.
St. 6. A tell-tale in their company
They never could endure ;
And whoso kept not secretly
Their mirth, was punisht sure :
It was a just and Christian deed,
To pinch such black and blew :
O how the common-wealth doth need
Such justices as you ! ^
To the temper of the Restoration, at the same
time gross and dandifiedj the little fanciful beings
proved still less congenial. The judgment passed
by Pepys upon Shakespeare's fairy drama was not
far from being the general one :
((
To the King's Theatre, where we saw A Midsum-
mer-Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor
Certain Elegant Poems 'written by Dr. Corbet, London, 1647.
pp. 47-9.
l86 FROM DRAYTON TO HERRICK [cHAP
shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play
that ever I savk^ in my life." ^
And the Queen Anne school of English literature
which worshipped common sense, which piqued
itself on its repressed emotions and limited im-
agination, its haughty intellectuality and enthrone-
ment of reason,^ felt no earnest interest in country
life, nor would have anything to do with native,
or popular, superstition further than occasionally to
read into it some conventional allegory. When
Dryden exclaimed, in his transcription of The Wife
of Bath :
I speak of ancient times, for novv^ the swain
Returning late may pass the woods in vain,
And never hope to see the nightly train :
In vain the dairy now with mint is dress'd,
The dairy-maid expects no fairy guest
To skim the bowls, and after pay the feast . . .
he was not only paraphrasing Chaucer, but express-
ing an obvious truth. Tickell, who, in his Ken-
sington Garden^ published in 1722, mingled the
Teutonic elves with the Roman deities was not far
from being thought, even then, ridiculous : his poem
tells the story of a young English prince of royal
blood who falls in love with an immortal tairy
maiden ; on Oberon's refusing his consent to the
' Sept. 29, 1662. — ^ See the excellent chapter entitled "Principal
literary characteristics of the Augustan Age " in W. L. Phelps'
Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, Boston, 1899.
VI.] S. JOHNSON 187
marriage, Neptune, "the sea's great sire " himself,
crushes the whole fairy nation at one blow to take
down the pride of the petty monarch, and " sooth
Albion's ghost." It was Johnson who, with his
acute, if dogmatic, judgment, pronounced the
final sentence on the fairy poetry of England.
" Wild and fantastical as this play is, — he declared
about vA Midsummer-Night' s Dream — all the parts
in their various modes are well written, and give
the kind of pleasure which the author designed.
Fairies in Shakespeare's time were much in fashion;
common tradition had made them familiar, and
Spenser's poem had made them great." ^
^ General Observations on Shakespeare's Plays. The Works of
S. Johnson^ London, 1825, vol. v. p. 148.
CONCLUSION
The evolution of English fairy poetry may be
summarized as follows. Springing from folk-
belief, from a very complex superstition in which
purely Teutonic myths combine with French
courtly themes, it but seldom appears in the
literature of the Middle Ages, when the little people
of the night are still to be dreaded, and it is a
man's wisdom to hold his peace about them.
At the time of the Renaissance, the fairy belief
continues to obtain among the lower classes, and
the poets, who have now outgrown it, feeling
what a mysterious charm lies in the deep-rooted
traditions, make them one of their favourite
themes. Spenser borrows from fairy-lore the
machinery for his romantic epic. Shakespeare,
with that unerring dramatic instinct of his, seizes
upon and fuses together the two essential charac-
ters of English fairies : their mythological origins,
their unknown, awful power, their communion
with nature, their influence, for good or for evil,
upon " human mortals " ; and, on the other hand,
their romantic and merely literary associations,
their king, queen, and court, so quaintly imitative
1 1 I
190 CONCLUSION
of feudal life, their diminutive stature, even their
delicate parody of human surroundings. Shake-
speare's fairydom achieved a remarkable vogue
and the greatest poets of the XVIIth century, from
Fletcher to Jonson and Milton, from Drayton and
Browne to Herrick, set about imitating it. A not
insignificant difference however was soon to be
noticed. Of the two threads which the author of
the Dream had so marvellously spun together, his
followers retained only one. ^They no longer
realised it as the essential characteristic of Puck
and Ariel that they were fairies and nothing more,
as unsubstantial as the night air they rode upon,
and that, in fact, none but a poet of Shakespeare's
genius would have dared to present them on the
stage. The XVIIth century poets were most
particularly attentive, on the contrary, to Oberon,
Titan ia, and the fairy court. They may call Mab
their fairy Queen : she has nothing in common
with Mercutio's heroine, unless it be her tiny
stature. She and all her train impress one as the
least likely of spirits. She is too human, and, in
particular, her quarrels with her jealous husband
or her own graceful whims are too much like
those of plain men and women. Taking up only
a part of the subject, the Jacobean and Caroline
writers tasked their wits to eke out the scanty
theme with all sorts of ingenious devices, either
approaching the trifling question with mock gravity,
or indulging in elaborate and minute descriptions
CONCLUSION 191
Thus most of the XVIIth century fairies are in
no way concerned about human affairs, but live in
a miniature world of their own. Their employ-
ment has dwindled into mere literary artifice
and tempts but those word-artists who, like
Herrick, are exceedingly fond of the "curious and
unfamiliar." In fact, fairy poetry may be said to
be extinct in England about 1650. Only with
the awakening of the Romantic movement, with
the renewed influence of early literature and
primitive traditions, with the fresh vogue of
romance will the fairies of old come to their
own again. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,
published by Sir Walter Scott, some poems by
Keats telling of :
Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn,
or of the wan country o^ La Belle Dame sans Merci,
where :
The sedge has withered from the lake
And no birds sing,
succeed, now and again, in reviving the genuine
ancient ring. But the true spirit of fairy poetry,
that simple, spontaneous, unsophisticated faith of
yore, has gone for ever, and is now replaced by
a half-archaic, half-symbolical literature where the
merry domain of Oberon has been exalted into :
192 CONCLUSION
The still strange land unvexed of sun and stars
Where Launcelot rides clanking through the haze.
The comparatively recent productions of such
writers as Th. Hood and George Darley, William
Allingham and " Fiona Macleod, " who have
endeavoured to raise from the dead the fairy
people and restore them to their lost kingdom, do
not amount, pleasant as they generally are, to
much more than polished epithets and patiently
gilded phrases.
APPENDIX
13
195
APPENDIX I.
A Description
of the King and Queene of Fayries.
1635
(Bodleian Library : L 78 Art.)
F^
A
DESCRIPTION
Of the King and Queeneof
ivjyr/Vij their habir/arc,theii:
abodc,pompc,and Aat&
Bccing very dellghtfull to the fenic^ond
full of mirth. ^.^. f .
LONDON,
Printed fori?/V/;*«y^H^rp^r,and are to befoli
at his (bop,at the HolpUalJ gate, \6lU
TO THE READER
Courteous Reader^
Present thee here
with the Descrip-
tion of the King
of the Fayries, of
his Attendants, Apparel, Ge-
sture, and Victuals, which
though comprehended in the
brevity of so short a volume,
yet
A. 3
200
TO THE READER
yet as the Proverbe truely a-
verres, it hath as meUifluous
and pleasing discourse, as that
whose amplitude containes
the fulnesse of a bigger com-
position : yet not so much pre-
suming on the contentment
that it will bring to thee, as
partly relying upon thy con-
nivence at the faults therein
contained, which beeing in-
nocent and harmelesse, can
give no great disturbance to
thy patience, but please thy
palate with varietie of mirth,
and
20I
TO THE READER
and not doubting but my la-
bour will bee remunerable
with your good approbation,
I shall thinke my paines well
taken, and my selfe really sa-
tisfied with your content-
ment, emboldning me to sub-
scribe my selfe
Toun hereafter^
If now approved on^
R. S.
A. 4
203
(0
A Description of the King
of Fayries Clothes, brought to him
on New-yeares day in the
morning, 1626, by his
Queenes Chamber-
maids
FIRST a Cobweb-shirt, more thinn
Than ever Spider since could spin.
Chang'd to the whitenesse of the snow.
By the stormie windes that blow
In the vast and frozen ayre,
No shirt half so fine, so fayre.
A rich Wastcoat they did bring,
Made of the Trout-flies gilded wing;
At
404
At which his Elveship gan to fret,
Swearing it would make him sweat
Even with it weight : he neede would weare
A wascoat made of downy haire,
New shaven of an Eunuchs chin,
That pleas'd him well, t'was wondrous thin.
The out-side of his doublet was
Made of the foure leav'd true lov'd grasse,
Chang'd into so fine a glosse,
With the oyle of Crispie mosse :
It made a Rainbow in the night
Which gave a lustre passing light.
On every seame there was a lace
Drawne by the unctuous Snails slow space.
To which the fin'st pur'st silver thread
Compar'd, did looke like dull pale lead.
His breeches of the Fleece was wrought.
Which from Chlochos lason brought :
Spun into so fine a yarne.
No mortall wight might it discerne,
Weav'd by Arachne on her loome,
Just before she had her doome.
A rich Mantle he did weare.
Made of Tinsell Gosameare,
Beflowred
205
(3)
Beflowred over with a few
Diamond stars of morning dew :
Dy'd Crimson in a maydens blush,
Lin'd with humble Bees lost plush.
His Cap was all of Ladies love,
So wondrous light, that it did move.
If any humming gnat or flie
Buzz'd the ayre in passing by.
About his necke a wreath of pearle
Dropt from the eyes of some poore girle
Pinched, because she had forgot
To leave cleane water in the pot.
2o6
207
Deep skild Geographers, whose art and
skill
Do traverse all the world, and with their q(uill) ^
Declare the strangenes of each severall clime
The nature, scituation, and the time
Of being inhabited, yet all their art
And deep informed skill could not imp(art)
In what set climate of this Orbe or He
The king of Fayries kept, whose honor'd s(ty/e)
Is here inclos'd, with the sincere descript(ion)
Of his abode, his nature, and the region
In which he rules : reade, and thou shalt {in(d)
Delightfull mirth, fit to content thy min(d)
May the contents thereof thy palate sute,
With its mellifluous and pleasing fruit:
For nought can more be sweetn'd to my m(ind)
Than that this Pamphlet thy contentmf^w^j
finf^;
Which if it shall, my labour is suffic'd.
In being by your liking highly priz'd.
Yours to his power,
R. S.
» The letters in brackets are inserted to supply the place of those
Yost through the fraying of the edges.
209
(4)
A Description of his Dyet.
Now they the Elves within a trice,
Prepar'd a feast lesse great than nice.
Where you may imagine first,
The Elves prepare to quench his thirst.
In pure seed Pearle of Infant dew
Brought and sweetned with a blew
And pregnant Violet ; which done,
His kitling eies begin to runne
Quicke ore the table, where hee spyes
The homes of water'd Butter-flies,
Of which he eats, but with a little
Neat coole allay of Cuckowe spittle.
Next this the red cap worme thats shut
Within the concave of a nut.
Moles eyes he tastes, then Adders eares ;
To these for sauce the slaine stagges teares
A bloted earewig, and the pith
Of sugred rush he glads him with.
Then
14
2IO
(6)
Then he takes a little Mothe,
Late fatted in a scarlet cloth,
A Spinners ham, the beards of mice.
Nits carbonado'd, a device
Before unknowne ; the blood of fleas
Which gave his Elveships stomacke ease.
The unctuous dew laps of a Snaile,
The broake heart of a Nightingale,
Orecome in musicke, with the sagge
And well bestrowted Bees sweet bagge.
Conserves of Atomes, and the mites,
The Silke wormes sperme, and the delights
Of all that ever yet hath blest
Fayrie land : so ends his feast.
Orpheus.
211
ORPHEUS.
Thrice excelling, for the finishment of this
Feast, thou must musicke it so, that the Dei-
ties may descend to grace it.
THE
212
213
THE FAIRIES
FEGARIES
OR,
Singing and dancing being all their pleasure,
Theyle please you most nicely, ifyoule be at leasure.
To heare their saveet chanting, it ivillyou delight.
To cure melancholly at morning and night.
Sung like to the Spanish Gypsie.
COME follow, follow me.
You Falrie Elves that be :
And circle round this greene,
Come follow me your Queene.
Hand in hand lets dance a round,
For this place is Fayrie ground.
When Mortals are at rest,
And
214
And snorting in their nest,
Unheard, or unespy'd
Through key-holes we do glide :
Over tables, stooles and shelves,
We trip it w^ith our Fairie Elves.
And if the house be foule.
Or platter, dish, or bowle,
Up staires we nimbly creepe,
And finde the sluts asleepe :
Then we pinch their armes and thighes,
None escapes, nor none espies.
But if the house be swept.
And from uncleannesse kept.
We praise the house and maid,
And surely she is paid :
For we do use before we go
To drop a Tester in her shoe.
Upon the mushroomes head,
Our table cloth we spread
A graine o' th' finest wheat
Is manchet that we eate :
The pearlie drops of dew we drinke
In Akorne-cups fiU'd to the brinke.
The
215
The tongues of Nightingales,
With unctuous iuyce of Snailes,
Betwixt two nut-shels stewde
Is meat thats easily chewde :
The braines of Rennes, the beards of mice
Will make a feast of wondrous price.
Over the tender grasse,
So lightly we can passe,
The yong and tender stalke,
Nere bowes whereon we walke,
Nor in the morning dew to scene,
Over night where we have beene.
The grasse-hopper, gnat, and flie.
Serves for our Minstrels three.
And sweetly dance a while.
Till we the time beguile :
And when the Moone-calfe hides her head.
The glow-worme lights us unto bed.
FINIS.
2l6
217
The Melancholly Lovers Song.
HENCE all you vaine delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly,
There's nought in this life sweet.
If men were wise to see 't,
But onely melancholly.
Welcome folded hands, and fixed eyes,
A sigh that's piercing, mortifies,
A looke that's fastned on the ground,
A tongue chained up without a sound :
Fountaine heads, and pathlesse groves,
Are places where pale passion loves.
Moone-light walkes, when all the fowles
Are warmely hous'd, save Bats and Owles ;
A midnight bell, a parting grone.
These are the sighes I feed upon :
Then stretcht out bones in a still gloomy valley,
There's nothing dainty, sweet to melancholly.
FINIS.
2l8
219
NOTES ON TEXTS.
A Description of the King of Fayries Clothes.
Is also to be found in Ashmole MS., 38, n^ 116,
ff. 99-100 : King Oberons Apparell ; (finis, S"" Simon
Steward). — in Rawlinson MS., Poet,, 147, f. 102 :
The Faery King; (S"- S. St.). — in Add. MS., 1 1.81 1,
ff. 18-20 : The Fairy King; (S'' Simeon Steward). —
Id., 22.1 18, f. I : The apparreUing of Oberon King of
V^ Faryes. — Id., 22.603, f- 62 : K. Oberons his
Apparrell; (S"" Edmond Steward). — Id., 25.303,
f. 172 : The Fay res RevelUnge. — Id., 28.644, f. 72:
Oberon King of the fairies by Sir Simon Stewart.
Was printed without the author's name in Musa-
rum Deliciae, 1655; and in Poole's English Parnassus,
1657 ; rpt. 1677.
A Description of his Dyet.
There are MS. versions of this piece at Oxford in
the Ashmole MS., 38, n° 117, ff. loo-oi : King
Obrons Feast; (finis. Ro'''^ Hericke). — in the Raw-
linson MS., Poet., 160, ff. 169-170: King Oberons
Feast; (Rob. Herrick). — and at the British Museum
in Add. MS., 22.603, ff. 61-62 : Kinge Oberon his
feast; (Herricke).
220 APPENDIX I
The Fairies Fegaries.
The poem was printed in The Mysteries of Love y
Eloquence ; on the arts of wooing and complimenting...
The Preface signed E. P., London, 1658. The
British Museum catalogue attributes these initials to
Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton. It was
included, later on, in Percy's Reliques, (Edit. 1 8 1 2,
vol. Ill, p. 260), and in D*" Bliss' Bibliographical
Miscellanies, Oxford, 18 13, p. 71-72.
The Melancholly Lovers Song.
Resemblances have often been pointed out between
this poem, Milton's U Allegro and // Penseroso, and
The Author''s Abstract of Melancholy which Burton
prefixed to the third (1628) and following editions
of his work. Cf. l>lotes and Queries, 10 Ser., Vol. VI,
Dec. 15, 1906. The song seems to have been a
favourite one in the XVIP*^ century, and has been
preserved in many MS. versions : we find it, at the
British Museum only, in Add. MS., 15.226, f. 28 :
In laudem MelanchoUae. — Id., 15.227, f. 75 :
Melancholic us. — in Sloane MS., 842, f. 42 : On
Melancholy. — Id., 1792, f. 123 : Verses made of
Melancholy. — in Egerton MS., 2.013, f- 4: -^ %ong.
APPENDIX II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The fairy literature is of enormous extent. The
following lists only contain the texts quoted from
or referred to in the preceding chapters, with such
critical studies as have proved useful to the writer,
and might be of some interest to a reader desiring
further acquaintance with the subject.
I. TEXTS.
Ancient Ballads and Broadsides published in England in the XVI th
century, ed. H. Huth, London, 1867.
Ancient English Metrical Romances, ed. Edm. Goldsmid, Edin-
burgh, 1884, 3 vols.
AscHAM, R., The Scholemaster, ed. E. Arber, Birmingham, 1870.
Bacon, R., Essays, ed. W. Aldis Wright, London, 1896.
Beowulf, . . . with a translation by Thomas Arnold, London,
1876.
Beowulf, ed. A. J. Wyatt, Cambridge, 1898.
The Boke of Duke Huon of Bordeaux done into English by Sir John
Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed. S. Lee, London, 1882-3,
2 vols.
A Book of Roxburghe Ballads, ed. J. P. Collier, London, 1847.
222 APPENDIX II
Broadside Black-letter Ballads, printed in the 1 6th and i ']th cen-
turies, ed. J. P. Collier, London, 1868.
Browne, Sir Thomas, Religio Medici and Other Essays, ed.
D. L. Roberts, London, 1898.
Brownk, William, Poems, ed. Gordon Goodwin, London,
1894, 2 vols.
Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto,
London, 1893, 3 vols.
Byrd, William, Psalmes, Sonets iff Songs of sadness and pietie made
into Music ke of five parts, London, 1588.
Campion, Thomas, A Book of A-^res, London, 1601.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Complete Works of ed. W. W. Skeat,
Oxford, 1894, 6 vols.
Churchyard, Thomas, A handeful of gladsome verses, given to
the Oueenes Maiesty at Woodstocke this Prograce, Oxford,
1592.
Corbet, Richard, Certain Elegant Poems..., London, 1647.
Coryate, Thomas, Crudities..., London, 161 1.
The Cuchullin Saga, ed. El. Hull, London, 1898.
CuRTiN, J., Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World, London,
1895.
Daemono-logie, in forme of a dialogue. Divided into three bookes.
Written by the high and mightie Prince James... London,
1603.
Dekker, Thomas, The Whore of Babylon, London, 1607.
Dodslefs Collection of old English Plays, London, 1875, vol. 14.
Douglas, Gavin, ^ncid, ed. Bannatyne Club, 1839, ■^ ^°^^*
Drayton, Michael, The Battaile of Agincourt... Nimphidia, the
Court of Fayrie... London, 1627.
— The Muses Elizium... London, 1630.
— Poems, Spenser Soc. Public, 1888, 2 vols.
Dryden, John, Fables ancient and modern translated into verse
from Homer, Ovid, Boccace and Chaucer... London, 1700.
Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Sidney Lee, London, 1904, 2 vols.
England's Helicon, London, 1600.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 223
English and Scottish Ballads, The, ed. F. ]. Child, Boston, 1882-
98, 5 vols.
English Fairy and other Folk Tales, ed. E. S. Hartland, London,
1893.
English Fairy Tales, ed, J. Jacob, London, 1898.
Fairy Music, ed. A. E. Waite, London, n. d. (Canterbury Poets).
Fairy Poetry, ed. R. S. Bate, London, 1909.
Fairy Tales, Legends and Romances illustrating Shakespeare and other
Early English Writers, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, London, 1875.
Fletcher, John, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. F. W. Moorman,
London, 1897.
GoLDiNG, Arthur, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the XV bookes. London,
1567.
GowER, John, The Complete Works of, ed. G. C. Macaulay,
Oxford, 1899, 4 vols.
Greene, Robert, Groats-Worth of witte, bought with a million
of Repentance... l^or^diOn, 1592.
— The Scottish His tor ie of James the Fourth, London, 1598.
— Works, ed. J. Ch. Collins, Oxford, 1905, 2 vols.
Harsenet, Dr. S., A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures...
London, 1 60 3.
Henslowe, Philip, Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, London, 1904-08,
2 vols.
Herrick, Robert, The Poems of.., ed. W. C. Hazlitt, London,
1869, 2 vols.
— The Poetical Works of.., ed. G. Saintsbury, London,
1893, 2 vols.
Heywood, Thomas, The Hierarchie of the blessed Angells, their
'Names, orders, and offices..., London, 1635.
The History of Tom Thumbe the Little, for his small stature sur-
named King Arthurs Dwarfe..., London, 162 1.
Holinshed, Raphael, The firste volume of the Chronicles of
England, Scotlande, and Irelande, London, 1577.
Huon de Bordeaux, ed. F. Guessard and C. Grandmaison,
Paris, i860.
224 APPENDIX II
Johnson, Samuel, The Works of..., London, 1825, vol. V.
JoNsoN, Ben, The Works of..., ed. GiiFord-Cunningham, London,
n. d., 3 vols.
— The Sad Shepherd, ed. W. W. Greg, Louvain, 1909.
Laneham, R., Robert LanehanCs Letter : describing a part of the
entertainment unto Queen Elizabeth at the Castle ofKenilworth
in 1575, ed. F. J. Furnivall, London, 1907.
Langland, William, The Vision of William concerning Piers the
Plowman, ed. W. W. Skeat, Oxford, 1886, 2 vols.
Layamon, Brut, ed. Sir F. Maiden, London, 1 847, 3 vols.
Lover, Samuel, Legends and Stories of Ireland, London, 1899.
Lyly, John, The Complete Works of..., ed. R. W. Bond, Oxford,
1902, 3 vols.
Lya Celtica, An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry, ed.
E. Sharp. Edinburgh, 1896.
Lyrics from the song-books of the Elizabethan Age, ed. A. H. Bullen,
London, I 891.
Mabinogion, translated by Lady C. Guest, London, 1849, 3 vols.
The mad pranks and merry jests of Robin Goodfellow, ed. J. P. Col-
lier, London, 1842.
The Magic Casement, A Book of Faery Poems, ed. A. Noyes,
London, 1908.
Malory, Sir Thomas, Le Morte Darthur, ed. H. O. Sommer
London, 1889-91, 3 vols.
Marie de France. Lais, ed. K. Warnke, Halle, 1900,
Marston, John, The Scourge of Villanie, Three Bookes of Satyres,
London, 1598.
Milton, John, The Works of.., ed. H. C. Beeching, Oxford,
1900.
— Comus and Lycidas, ed. A. W. Verity, Cambridge,
1898.
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. Sir Walter Scott,
London, 1897.
Monmouth, Geoffrey of, Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. A.
Schultz, Halle, 1854.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 225
Montgomery, Alexander, The Poems of..., ed. D. Irving,
Edinburgh, 1821.
Nash, Thomas, Terrors of the Nig(ht), or, A Discourse of Appa-
ritions, London, 1594.
— The Works of..., ed. A. B. Grosart, London, 1883-85.
6 vols.
Newcastle, The Lady Margaret, Duchess of. Poems and
Fancies, London, 1653.
Nichols, John, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen
Elizabeth, London, 1823, 3 vols.
Sir Orfeo, ed. Dr. Oscar Zielke, Breslau, 1880.
Peele, George, The Battell of Alcazar fought in Barbarie,
London, I 594.
Pepys, Sam., Diary, ed. H. B. Wheatley, London, 1893-9.
Percy, William, The Faery Pastorall, or Forrest ofElues, London,
1824.
Phaer, Thomas, The nyne fyrst bookes of the Eneidos of Virgil
converted into English vearse, London, 1562.
Philotus, A verie Excellent and delectable Comedie intituled,
Edinburgh, 161 2.
Puttenham, George, Arte of English Poesie, ed. E, Arber,
Birmingham, 1869.
Randolph, Thomas, Poems ; with the Muses Looking-glasse : and
Amyntas, Oxford, 1638.
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, coll. Thomas Percy, London,
18 12, 3 vols.
Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, ed. W. C. Hazlitt,
London, 1866.
Romance van Lancelot, ed. W.J. A. Jonckbloet,The Hague, 1849.
The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. J. A. H.
Murray, London, 1875.
The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. W. Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth,
London, 1869, 7 vols.
Rowlands, Samuel, More Knaves Yet? The Knaves of Spades
and Diamonds, London, n. d.
15
226
APPENDIX II
Sandys, George, Ovid^s Metamorphoses Englished, Oxford, 1632.
Scot, Reginald, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. B. Nicholson,
London, 1886.
Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales, ed. Sir G. Douglas, London, 1893.
Shakespeare, William, The Works of... Globe Edition, London,
1891.
— A Midsummer-Night's Dream, ed. H. N. Hudson,
Boston, 1880.
— A Midsummer-Night'' s Dream, ed. C. H. Herford,
London, 1899,
— J Midsummer-Night* s Dream, ed. H. Cunningham,
London, 1904.
— A Midsummer-Night' s Dream, ed. A. W. Verity, Cam-
bridge, 1905.
— J Midsummer-Night's Dream, ed. G. E. Woodberry,
London, 1907.
— A Midsummer-Night's Dream, ed, E. K. Chambers,
London, n. d.
— The Tempest, ed. A. W. Verity, Cambridge, 1 897.
Skialetheia, or A Shadozve of Truth in certaine Epigrams and Satyres^
(Edw. Guilpin), London, 1598.
Spenser, Edmund, The Works of.., ed. Morris-Hales, London,
1899.
Stubbes, p.. The Anatomie oj Abuses..., ed. F. J. Furnivall,
London, 1877-82, 2 vols.
Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatorie... Published by an old companion
of his, Robin Goodfellow, London, n. d.
TicKELL, Thomas, Kensington Garden, London, 1722.
Tilbury, Gervase of, Otia Imperialia, ed. F. Liebrecht,
Hanover, 1856.
The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living, ed.
D. Nutt, London, 1895-97, 2 vols.
Wilde, Lady, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions
of Ireland, London, 1887.
Wily Beguiled, A Pleasant Comedie called, London, 1606.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 227
II. CRITICAL STUDIES.
Anderson, R. B., Norse Mythology : the Religion of our Fore-
fathers, Chicago, 1875.
Arnold, Matthew, On the Study of Celtic Literature, London,
1867.
Bell, William, Shakespeare's Puck and his Folklore, illustrated
from the superstitions of all nations, London, 1852, 3 vols.
Brand, J., Observations on Popular Antiquities, ed. W. C. Hazlitt,
London, 1 870.
V' Cambridge History of English Literature, The, ed. by A. W. Ward
and A. R. Waller, Cambridge, 1908-10, 6 vols. (In
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, Chambers'" s Cychpadia of English Literature, ed. by D. Patrick,
London, 1 903, Vol. I.
Carleton, William, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry,
London, 1893.
Chantepie de la Saussaye, p. D., The Religion of the Teutons,
transl. B. J. Vos, Boston, 1902.
Church, R. W., Spenser, London, 1892, (English Men of
Letters).
VCourthope, William, J., A History of English Poetry, London,
1895-1903, 4 vols.
Cox, M. R., An introduction to Folklore, London, 1 897.
Drake, Nathan, Shakespeare and his Times, Paris, 1843.
Dyer, T. F. T., Folklore of Shakespeare, London, 1883.
Elton, Oliver, Michael Drayton, London, 1905.
Feuillerat, a., fohn Lyly, Cambridge, 19 10.
Folk-Lore : a quarterly review of myth, tradition, institution,
and custom, 1890, etc.
Folk-Lore Journal, The, 1883, etc.
Folk-Lore Record, The, 1878, etc.
Geddie, J., The Balladists, Edinburgh, 1896.
Gibson, J. Paul, Shakespeare' s Use of the Supernatural, Cam-
bridge, 1908.
228 APPENDIX II
GoMME, G. L., The Handbook of Folklore, London, 1890.
GossE, Edmund, Seventeenth Century Studies, London, 1883.
GoYAU, L. F. Faure, La vie et la mort des Fees, Paris, 19 10.
Greg, W. W., Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama, London,
1906.
Grimm, Jacob, Teutonic Mythology, transl. J. S. Stallybrass,
London, 1883, 4 vols.
Gummere, F. B., The Beginnings of Poetry, New- York, 1901.
— The Popular Ballad, London, 1907.
Halliwell, J. O., Jn introduction to Shakespeare's Midsummer-
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Hart, W. M., Ballad and Epic, A Study in the Development of
the Narrative Art, Boston, 1907.
Hartland, E. S., The Science of Fairy Tales, An enquiry into
Fairy Mythology, London, 189 1.
— Folklore : what it is, and what is the good of it, London,
1899.
Hazlitt, William, The Collected Works of ed. A. R. Waller
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Hazlitt, W. C, Faiths and Folklore, London, 1905, 2 vols.
Henderson, T. F., Scottish Vernacular Literature, Edinburgh,
1900.
Hense, D''. C. C, Shakespeare' s Sommemachtstraum, Halle, 1 8 5 1 .
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Hepworth, W., Fairies, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. VIIL
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 229
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230 APPENDIX II
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INDEX
iEneas, 5 I
Alchemist, The, 137
AUingham, W., 192
Allison Gross, 33
Amyntas, 168-78
Argante, 41
Ariel, 116, 190
Arnold, Matthew, 20
Arnold, Thomas, 38
Arthur, King, 24, 25, 29, 39-
41,44, 45,54*58,67, 74,
75. 79. 139
Arthur, Prince, 82, 86
Arthurian romance, 23, 79,
83, 91
Aryans, 13, 14, 18
Ascham, Roger, 75
Auberon, 25, 26, 27, 78, 93
Avalon, 25, 41, 52
Bacon, 117, 123
Ballads, 30-35
Banshee, 2 1
Barnes, B., 71
Beowulf, 36-38
Boccaccio, 58
Bond, R. W., 92 «., 96 «.
Bourchier, John, Lord Ber-
ners, 76-80, 83, 88, 103
Brome, R., 125
Browne, Sir Thomas, 1 24
Browne, William, 148, 157-
63, 178-80, 182, 183, 190
Bryskett, Ludowick, 8 1
BuUen, A. H., 69 »., 96 ».,
160
Burton, R., 123, 124, 220
Byrd, W., 69
Caesar, J., 26, 27, 79
Ceesar, Julius, 1 01
Campion, Th., 73
Carew, Th., 176
Chambers, E. K., 70 n., 107
n., 130 n.
Charlemagne cycle, 23-4, 80
Chaucer, 53-7, 62, 74, 88,
122, 126, 186
Chestre, Th., 44, 47, 76
Chettle, H., 130
Child, Prof., 36 n., 49
Churchyard Th., 69
Clerk Colvill, 33
Collier, J. P., 66 n., 128
Collins, J. Churton, 95
Comus, 164-65, 167
Corbet, R., 184-5
Coryate, Th., 67
Cotta, J., 125 n.
Courthope, W. J., 36 «., 178-
79
Cuchulinn, 22
Cymbeline, 102
Daniel, S., 96 ».
Darley, G., 1 92
232 INDEX
Day, J., 96 «., 129
Dekker, Th., 129, 132
Description of the King and
Queene of Fayries, 9, 173-
77, 195-220
Diana, 73, 105, 128
Discouerie of witchcraft, The,
63-5, 73, 106
Douglas, Gavin, 72
Drayton, M., 148-57, 160,
172, 179, 182, 190
Dryden, J., 186
Eddas, Teutonic, 22
Elfin Knight, The, 32
Elizabeth, Queen, 61, 62, 83,
93, 132, 133
Elves, Teutonic, 15-18, 37,
39' 43,49, 59' 72, 74» 78,
91,98, 112, 113, 139, 186
Emer, 22
Endimion, 92, 96
England's Helicon, 69 w.
Epic, The Teutonic, 35-43
Eumenides, 34
Euphues, 94
Eurydice, 49
Every man out of his Humour,
137
Faerie Queene, The, 80-91,
133, 155, 182
Fairies, Celtic, 18-22,49, 79,
80, 90, 98, 106, 1 13
Faithful Shepherdess, The, 134-
36, 143, 165, 168
FalstafF, 98, 172
Fays, Romantic, 23-27, 57,
74, 91, 98, 112, 113, 139
Ferdiad, 22
Feuillerat, A., 91 n.
Finvarra, King, 21
"Fiona Macleod ", 192
Fleay, F. G., 96 n.
Fletcher, John, 133-36, 143,
146, 165, 168, 175, 190
Gallathea, 92
GifFord, G., 125 «.
Golding, A., 72, 107, 128
Goodcole, H., 125 «.
Goodfellow, Robin, 19, 64-5,
66, 68, 70, 107, 109-10,
122, 123, 124, 130, 131,
142, 163
Goodfellow, Robin; his mad
pranks..., 127
Gosse, Edm., 96 «., 173, 181
Gower, John, 57-8
Greene, Robert, 62, 94-5, 1 1 3
Greenes Groats-Worth ofwitte...,
94
Greg, W. W., 129 «., 130 «.
Grendel, 37
Grey, Lord, 82
Guarini, 168
Guilpin, Edw., 70
Gummere, F. B., 36 n.
Gwennere, 44, 45, 153
Halliwell, J. O., 113 n.
Hamlet, 10 1, 127
Harsenet, Dr. S., 121-23
Hart, W. M., 36 n.
Haughton, W., 129
Hazlitt, W. C, 175
Heldenbuch, 78
Hell, 31, 43, 49, 51, 59,
131, 184
Henderson, T. F., 36 n.
Henslowe's Diary, 129, 130
Herrick, R., 148, 172-81,
182, 183, 190, 191, 219
Hesperdes, 172-81
Heurodis, Queen, 47, 48
Heywood, Th,, 125-26, 131
Holinshed, R., 75
Hood, Robin, 143-4
Hood, Th., 192
Huon de Bordeaux, 27, 76-80,
95, 103, 104
James I, 120-21
Johnson, S., 187
Jonson, Ben, 136-45, 146, Marlowe, C, 130 »
168, 172, 181, 184, 190 Marston, John., 99
INDEX 233
Mad Merry Pranks of Robin
Goodfellow, The, 181
Maiden, Sir F., 38 «., 40 «.,
41 «.
Malory, Sir Thomas, 75, 77,
83, 88
Marchantes Tale, The, 53, 56
Margaret, Duchess of New-
castle, 182-84
Marie de France, 44, 47
Keats, 191
Ker, Prof., 36 «., 37 «.
King Henry the Fourth, 10 1
Kittredge, G. L., 36 «.
La Dame du Lac, 26
V Allegro, 163
Lamb, Charles, 113 n., 182
Laneelot du Lac, 24, 26, 75,
Laneham, R, 66 n., 76 «.
Lang, A., 36 n.
Langland, W., 42-3, 107
Layamon, 38-41
Lee, Miss M., 130 ».
Mary Stuart, 82
Masque of Queens, The, 143
Maydes Metamorphosis, The,
95-8
Merlin, 24, 26, 79, 85, 86,
139. 155
Merry Wives of Windsor, The,
98, 102, no, 172
Midsummer-Night's Dream, A,
73» 95» 98, 101-18, 119,
127, 133, i34» 137, 138,
i39> H5» 1+6, i5i» i52«-»
153, 154, 162, 163, 166,
167, 171, 172, 180, 187
Milton, 82, 148, 163-67,
190, 220
Lee, Sidney, 71 n., 74 «., 76, Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 29,
79
Lodge, Th., 74
Love Restored, 14 1-2
Lusts Dominion, 129
Lydgate, 58-9
Lyly, John, 62, 91-4, 96,
"3
39
Montgomery, A., 71
Moorman, F. W,, 160, 178-
79
Morgan le Fay, 25, 27, 39,
4i» 52. 79
Muses Elizium, The, 156-7
Mab, Queen, 106-09, 136, Narcissus, 130
138, 149, 150, 152, 160, Nash, Th., 65, 72
163, 164, 171, 180, 190 Nichols, J., 94
Mabinogion, 21 Niebelungenlied, 22, 78
Macbeth, 10 1 Nimphidia, 149-55, 160, 179
234 INDEX
Niniane, 26
Nymphs, (nymphae), 72, 88,
104-05, 165, 166
Oberon, 77-80, 88, 89, 94,
95, 103-04, 106, III, 112,
113, 115, 116, 119, 127,
129, 130, 132, 138, 139,
141, 149, 150, 151, 160,
162, 169, 170, 172, 173,
178, 180, 186, 190, 191
Oberon, The Fairy Prince, i 3 9
Ogier the Dane, 51, 52
Onagh, Queen, 2 1
Orpheus, 49, 2 1 1
Ovid, 72, 73, 75, 105, 106,
107, 128
Parcae, 25
Paradise Lost, The, 167
Peele, G,, 63
Pepys, S., 185-6
Percy, Thomas, 181, 220
Percy, William, i 30
Phaer, Th., 72
Phillips, Edw., 220
Philotus, 131
Pluto, 49, 53, 74, 106, 131,
132, 149
Poly-Oibion, 148, 155
Prince Henry's Barriers, 139
Proserpina, 53, 73, 74, 131,
149
Prospero, 116, 117
Puck, 19, 106-07, 109-10,
112, 114, 116, 135, 142,
144, 149, 152, 160, 166,
190
Puck, The Merry,... 128
Puttenham, G., 65
Quiller-Couch, A., 34 «.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 8 1
Randolph, Th., 148, 167-72
Richard II, i o i
Roman de la Rose, Le, 42
Romances, Metrical, 43-52,
53
Romeo and Juliet, 102, 106,
107-09
Ronsard, 74
Rowlands, S., i 26
Sad Shepherd, The, 142-45,
168
Sandys, G., 128
Satyr, The, 136, 137
Scot, Reginald, 63-65, 66,
67, 106, 126
Scott, Sir Walter, 62, 191
Scottish Historic of James the
Fourth, The, 94-5
Shadwell, Th., 125
Shakespeare, 95, 98, 101-18,
119, 127, 130, 133, 134,
135, 138, 145, 147, 148,
151, I53» 163, \66, 167,
172, 181, 185, 187, 189-
90
Shepheards Calender, The, 88 «.
Sheppard, S., 181
Sidney, Sir Philip, 82
Silent Woman, The, 136
Sir Launfal, 44-7, 76, 136
Sir Orfeo, 47-49
SirThopas, 53, 55, 88
Smith, G. G., 36 ».
"Spenser, 62, 80-91, 99, 107,
"4. 133, i34» i55> 158,
160, 163, 187, 189
Steward, Sir Simeon, 174-7,
219
Stubbes, Ph., 66 n.
Swinburne, 143
IN
Tale of a Tub, J, IZJ
Tale of the Wyfof Bathe, The,
54-5
Tarlton's Newes out oj Purga-
torie,... 65
Tempest, The, 102, 11 6- 18
Thomas the Rhymer, 50-2
Tickell, Th., 186
Tilbury, Gervase of, 29
Titanla, 73,95,98, 104, 105,
107, III, 113, ii5» "6,
119, 128, 132, 133, 138,
190
Tom Thumb, 66-8
DEX
Ulysses, 5 1
235
Verity, A.W., 116 «., 165 ».,
167 n.
Virgil, 72
Vivien, see Niniane
Wace, 39
Warton, Th., 59 »., 69, 91
Wily Beguiled, 1 3 1
Winter's Tale, The, 102, 136
Wotton, Sir Henry, 165
Toung Tamlane, The, 31-2, 47
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