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 
 Progress). 
 , 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- 
 Night's Dream, London, 1841. 
 
 — Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer- 
 Night's Dream, London, 1845. 
 
 — Memoranda on the Midsummer-Night' s Dream, Brighton, 
 1879. 
 
 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 
 
 and A. Glover, London, 1902, vol. V. 
 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 . 
 
 — Untersuchungen und Studien, Halle, 1884. Vol. IL 
 Hepworth, W., Fairies, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. VIIL 
 Jeanroy, Alfred, Les Fees^ La Grande Encyclopddie. Tome 
 
 XVIL 
 Keightley, Thomas, The Fairy Mythology; illustrative of the 
 
 Romance and Superstitions of Various Countries, London, 1 834, 
 
 2 vols. 
 Ker, W. p., Epic and Romance,London, 1908.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 
 
 Ker, W. p., The Craven Angels, Modern Language Review, 
 
 Vol. 6, Jan. 191 1. 
 Kirk, R., The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies 
 
 (1696), ed. A. Lang, London, 1893. 
 Legouis, E., Geoffroy Chaucer, Paris, 1910. 
 Le Roux de Lincy, Le Livre des Legendes, Paris, 1836, 
 Maclean, Magnus, The Literature of the Celts, Its history and 
 
 Romance, London, 1902. 
 Mac Ritchie, D., The Testimony of Tradition, London, 1889. 
 Maury, Alfred, Croyances et Legendes du Moyen-Age, Paris, 1896. 
 Moorman, F. W., William Browne, His Britannia's Pastorals, 
 
 Strassburg, 1897. 
 \/ — Robert Herrick, London, 19 10. 
 NuTT, Alfred, Celtic and Mediaeval Romance, London, 1899. 
 
 — The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, London, 1900. 
 Paton, Lucy Allen, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian 
 
 Romance, Boston, 1903. 
 
 Phelps, W. L., The beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, 
 Boston, 1899. 
 
 Proescholdt, Ludw,, On the Sources of Shakespeare' s Midsummer- 
 Night's Dream, Halle, 1878. 
 
 Reeves, W. P., Shakespeare's Queen Mab, Modern Language 
 Notes, Vol. 17, Jan. 1902. 
 
 Renan, Ernest, La Poesie des Races Celtiques, in Essais de 
 Morale et de Critique, Paris, 1859. 
 
 Rhys, J., Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as 
 Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, London, 1888. 
 
 — Studies in the Arthurian Legend, Oxford, 1891. 
 
 — Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx, Oxford, 1901, 2 vols. 
 Root, R. K., Classical Mythology in Shakespeare, New York, 
 
 1903. 
 Rydberg, Victor, Teutonic Mythology, transl. R. B. Anderson, 
 
 London, 1889. 
 Sawtelle, Alice E., The Sources of Spenser's Classical Mythology, 
 
 Boston, 1896.
 
 230 APPENDIX II 
 
 ScHREiBER, D*". H., Die Teen in Europa, Freiburg im Breisgau, 
 
 1842. 
 Seccombe, T., and Allen, J. W., The Age oj Shakespeare, 
 
 London, 1903, 2 vols. 
 SiDGwiCK, Frank, The Sources and Analogues of '■A Midsummer- 
 Night's Dream\ London, 1908. 
 SiKEs, Wirt, British Goblins..., London, 1880. 
 Spalding, T. A., Elizabethan Demonolog\', London, 1880. 
 Squire, C, The Mythology of the British Islands, London, 
 
 1905. 
 Stewart, H. H., The Supernatural in Shakespeare, London, 
 
 1908. 
 Thoms, W. J., Three Notelets on Shakespeare. London, 1865. 
 Van Gennep, A., La Formation des Legendes, Paris, 19 10. 
 Voretzsch, Carl, Die Composition des Huon von Bordeaux, 
 
 Halle, 1900. 
 Walther, Marie, Malory's Einfluss auf Spenser s Faerie Queene, 
 
 Heidelberg, 1898. 
 Ward, A. W., A History of English Dramatic Literature, London, 
 
 1899, 3 vols. 
 Ward, T. H., The English Poets. Vol. II, Ben Jonscn to Dryden, 
 
 London, 1880. 
 Warton, Thomas, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser, 
 London, 1754. 
 \y — History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the close of 
 the Sixteenth century, London, 1871, 4 vols. 
 Weston, Jessie L., King Arthur and his Knights, London, 1899. 
 — The Romance Cycle of Charlemagne and his Peers, London, 
 1901. 
 Yeats, W. B., The Celtic Twilight, London, 1893.
 
 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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