Act II Scene I.
Puck and a Fairy
Puck. How now, spirit! whither wander you?
Fai. Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire.
I do wander every where,
Swifter than the moonès sphere,
And I serve the Fairy-queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see.
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours.
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.390
Farewell, thou lob of spirits! I’ll be gone;
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.
Puck. The king doth keep his revels here to-night.
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing fell and wroth,
Because that she, as her attendant, hath
A lovely boy stolen from an Indian king,—
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
But she, perforce, withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy
And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled star-light sheen,
But they do square; that all their elves, for fear,
Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.
Fai. Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Good-fellow. Are you not he
That frights the maidens of the villagery,
Skims milk, and sometimes labours in the quern,
And bootless makes the breathless housewife churn;
And sometimes makes the drink to bear no barm;
Misleads night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hob-goblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck,
Are not you he?
Puck. Thou speakest aright,
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile,
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly-foal;
And sometimes lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometimes for three-foot stool mistaketh me:
Then slip I from her bum,—down topples she,
And tailor cries, and falls into a cough;
And then the whole quire hold their hips and loffe,
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there.
The haunts of the Fairies on earth are the most rural and romantic that can be selected. They meet
On hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea,
To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind.
And the place of Titania’s repose is
A bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania, some time of the night
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
The powers of the poet are exerted to the utmost, to convey an idea of their minute dimensions; and time, with them, moves on lazy pinions. “Come,” cries the queen,
Come now, a roundel and a fairy song,
Then for the third part of a minute hence:
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds;
Some war with rear-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats.
And when enamoured of Bottom, she directs her Elves that they should
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes;
To have my love to bed, and to arise
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes.
Puck goes “swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow;” he says, “he’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes;” and “We,” says Oberon—
We the globe can compass soon,
Swifter than the wandering moon.
They are either not mortal, or their date of life is indeterminately long; they are of a nature superior to man, and speak with contempt of human follies. By night they revel beneath the light of the moon and stars, retiring at the approach of “Aurora’s harbinger,”391 but not compulsively like ghosts and “damned spirits.”
But we (says Oberon) are spirits of another sort;
I with the morning’s love have oft made sport,
And like a forester the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.
In the Merry Wives of Windsor, we are introduced to mock-fairies, modelled, of course, after the real ones, but with such additions as the poet’s fancy deemed itself authorised to adopt.
Act IV., Scene IV., Mrs. Page, after communicating to Mrs. Ford her plan of making the fat knight disguise himself as the ghost of Herne the hunter, adds—
Nan Page, my daughter, and my little son,
And three or four more of their growth, we’ll dress
Like urchins, ouphes,392 and fairies, green and white,
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,
And rattles in their hands.
Then let them all encircle him about,
And, fairy-like, to-pinch393 the unclean knight,
And ask him why that hour of fairy revel
In their so sacred paths he dares to tread
In shape profane.
And
My Nan shall be the queen of all the fairies,
Finely attired in a robe of white.
In Act V., Scene V., the plot being all arranged, the Fairy rout appears, headed by Sir Hugh, as a Satyr, by ancient Pistol as Hobgoblin, and by Dame Quickly.
Quick. Fairies black, grey, green, and white,
You moonshine revellers and shades of night,
You orphan heirs of fixed destiny,394
Attend your office and your quality.
Crier Hob-goblin, make the fairy O-yes.
Pist. Elves, list your names! silence, you airy toys!
Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap;
Where fires thou findest unraked, and hearths unswept,
There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry:
Our radiant queen, hates sluts and sluttery.
Fals. They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die.
I’ll wink and couch; no man their works must eye.
Pist. Where’s Bead?—Go you, and where you find a maid
That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said,
Raise up the organs of her fantasy,
Sleep she as sound as careless infancy;
But those as sleep and think not on their sins,
Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides, and shins.
Quick. About, about,
Search Windsor castle, elves, within and out;
Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room,
That it may stand till the perpetual doom,
In state as wholesome as in state ’tis fit;
Worthy the owner, and the owner it.
The several chairs of order look you scour
With juice of balm and every precious flower;
Each fair instalment, coat, and several crest,
With loyal blazon evermore be blest;
And nightly, meadow-fairies, look, you sing,
Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring:
The expressure that it bears green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And “Hony soit qui mal y pense” write,
In emerald tufts, flowers, purple, blue, and white;
Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee:
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.
Away—disperse!—but, till ’tis one o’clock,
Our dance of custom, round about the oak
Of Herne the hunter, let us not forget.
Eva. Pray you, lock hand in hand, yourselves in order set,
And twenty glow-worms shall our lanterns be,
To guide our measure round about the tree;
But stay, I smell a man of middle earth.395
Fal. Heaven defend me from that Welsh fairy, lest
He transform me to a piece of cheese.
Pist. Vile worm! thou wast o’erlook’d even in thy birth.
Quick. With trial fire touch we his finger-end:
If he be chaste the flame will back descend,
And turn him to no pain; but if he start,
It is the flesh of a corrupted heart.
Pist. A trial, come.
Eva. Come, will this wood take fire?
Fal. Oh, oh, oh!
Quick. Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire:
About him, fairies, sing a scornful rime;
And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time.
In Romeo and Juliet the lively and gallant Mercutio mentions a fairy personage, who has since attained to great celebrity, and completely dethroned Titania, we mean Queen Mab,396 a dame of credit and renown in Faëry.
“I dreamed a dream to-night,” says Romeo.
“O then,” says Mercutio:—
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 forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies,
Over 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 smallest 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 gray-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 of mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night;
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bode.
This is the hag,397 when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them.
In an exquisite and well-known passage of the Tempest, higher and more awful powers are ascribed to the Elves: Prospero declares that by their aid he has “bedimmed the noon-tide sun;” called forth the winds and thunder; set roaring war “’twixt the green sea and the azured vault;” shaken promontories, and plucked up pines and cedars. He thus invokes them:—
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;398
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.
The other dramas of Shakspeare present a few more characteristic traits of the Fairies, which should not be omitted.
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planet strikes,
No fairy takes,399 no witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is that time.
Hamlet, Act. i. sc. 1.
King Henry IV. wishes it could be proved,
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And called mine—Percy, his—Plantagenet!
The old shepherd in the Winter’s Tale, when he finds Perdita, exclaims,
It was told me, I should be rich, by the fairies: this is some changeling.
And when his son tells him it is gold that is within the “bearing-cloth,” he says,
This is fairy-gold, boy, and ’twill prove so. We are lucky, boy, and to be so still requires nothing but secresy.400
In Cymbeline, the innocent Imogen commits herself to sleep with these words:—
To your protection I commit me, gods!
From fairies and the tempters of the night,
Guard me, beseech ye!
And when the two brothers see her in their cave, one cries—
But that it eats our victuals, I should think
Here were a fairy.
And thinking her to be dead, Guiderius declares—
If he be gone, he’ll make his grave a bed;
With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
And worms will not come to thee.
The Maydes Metamorphosis of Lylie was acted in 1600, the year the oldest edition we possess of the Midsummer Night’s Dream was printed. In Act II. of this piece, Mopso, Joculo, and Frisio are on the stage, and “Enter the Fairies singing and dancing.”
By the moon we sport and play,
With the night begins our day;
As we dance the dew doth fall—
Trip it, little urchins all,
Lightly as the little bee,
Two by two, and three by three;
And about go we, and about go we.
Jo. What mawmets are these?
Fris. O they be the faieries that haunt these woods.
Mop. O we shall be pinched most cruelly!
1st Fai. Will you have any music, sir?
2d Fai. Will you have any fine music?
3d Fai. Most dainty music?
Mop. We must set a face on it now; there is no flying.
No, sir, we very much thank you.
1st Fai. O but you shall, sir.
Fris. No, I pray you, save your labour.
2d Fai. O, sir! it shall not cost you a penny.
Jo. Where be your fiddles?
3d Fai. You shall have most dainty instruments, sir?
Mop. I pray you, what might I call you?
1st Fai. My name is Penny.
Mop. I am sorry I cannot purse you.
Fris. I pray you, sir, what might I call you?
2d Fai. My name is Cricket.
Fris. I would I were a chimney for your sake.
Jo. I pray you, you pretty little fellow, what’s your name?
3d Fai. My name is little little Prick.
Jo. Little little Prick? O you are a dangerous faierie!
I care not whose hand I were in, so I were out of yours.
1st Fai. I do come about the coppes.
Leaping upon flowers’ toppes;
Then I get upon a fly,
She carries me about the sky,
And trip and go.
2d Fai. When a dew-drop falleth down,
And doth light upon my crown.
Then I shake my head and skip,
And about I trip.
3d Fai. When I feel a girl asleep,
Underneath her frock I peep,
There to sport, and there I play,
Then I bite her like a flea,
And about I skip.
Jo. I thought where I should have you.
1st Fai. Will’t please you dance, sir?
Jo. Indeed, sir, I cannot handle my legs.
2d Fai. O you must needs dance and sing,
Which if you refuse to do,
We will pinch you black and blue;
And about we go.
They all dance in a ring, and sing as followeth:—
Round about, round about, in a fine ring a,
Thus we dance, thus we dance, and thus we sing a;
Trip and go, to and fro, over this green a,
All about, in and out, for our brave queen a.
Round about, round about, in a fine ring a,
Thus we dance, thus we dance, and thus we sing a;
Trip and go, to and fro, over this green a,
All about, in and out, for our brave queen a.
We have danced round about, in a fine ring a,
We have danced lustily, and thus we sing a,
All about, in and out, over this green a,
To and fro, trip and go, to our brave queen a.
The next poet, in point of time, who employs the Fairies, is worthy, long-slandered, and maligned Ben Jonson. His beautiful entertainment of the Satyr was presented in 1603, to Anne, queen of James I. and prince Henry, at Althorpe, the seat of Lord Spenser, on their way from Edinburgh to London. As the queen and prince entered the park, a Satyr came forth from a “little spinet” or copse, and having gazed the “Queen and the Prince in the face” with admiration, again retired into the thicket; then “there came tripping up the lawn a bevy of Fairies attending on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring, began to dance a round while their mistress spake as followeth:”
Mab. Hail and welcome, worthiest queen!
Joy had never perfect been,
To the nymphs that haunt this green,
Had they not this evening seen.
Now they print it on the ground
With their feet, in figures round;
Marks that will be ever found
To remember this glad stound.
Satyr (peeping out of the bush).
Trust her not, you bonnibell,
She will forty leasings tell;
I do know her pranks right well.
Mab. Satyr, we must have a spell,
For your tongue it runs too fleet.
Sat. Not so nimbly as your feet,
When about the cream-bowls sweet
You and all your elves do meet.
(Here he came hopping forth, and mixing himself with the Fairies, skipped in, out, and about their circle, while they made many offers to catch him.)
This is Mab, the mistress Fairy,
That doth nightly rob the dairy;
And can hurt or help the churning
As she please, without discerning.
1st Fai. Pug, you will anon take warning.
Sat. She that pinches country wenches,
If they rub not clean their benches,
And, with sharper nail, remembers
When they rake not up their embers;
But if so they chance to feast her,
In a shoe she drops a tester.
2d Fai. Shall we strip the skipping jester?
Sat. This is she that empties cradles,
Takes out children, puts in ladles;
Trains forth midwives in their slumber,
With a sieve the holes to number,
And then leads them from her burrows,
Home through ponds and water-furrows.401
1st Fai. Shall not all this mocking stir us?
Sat. She can start our Franklin’s daughters
In her sleep with shouts and laughters;
And on sweet St. Anna’s402 night
Feed them with a promised sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.
1st Fai. Satyr, vengeance near you hovers.
At length Mab is provoked, and she cries out,
Fairies, pinch him black and blue.
Now you have him make him rue.
Sat. O hold, mistress Mab, I sue!
Mab, when about to retire, bestows a jewel on the Queen, and concludes with,
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.
The splendid Masque of Oberon, presented in 1610, introduces the Fays in union with the Satyrs, Sylvans, and the rural deities of classic antiquity; but the Fay is here, as one of them says, not
The coarse and country fairy,
That doth haunt the hearth and dairy;
it is Oberon, the prince of Fairy-land, who, at the crowing of the cock, advances in a magnificent chariot drawn by white bears, attended by Knights and Fays. As the car advances, the Satyrs begin to leap and jump, and a Sylvan thus speaks:—
Give place, and silence; you were rude too late—
This is a night of greatness and of state;
Not to be mixed with light and skipping sport—
A night of homage to the British court,
And ceremony due to Arthur’s chair,
From our bright master, Oberon the Fair,
Who with these knights, attendants here preserved
In Fairy-land, for good they have deserved
Of yond’ high throne, are come of right to pay
Their annual vows, and all their glories lay
At ’s feet.
Another Sylvan says,
Stand forth, bright faies and elves, and tune your lay
Unto his name; then let your nimble feet
Tread subtile circles, that may always meet
In point to him.
In the Sad Shepherd, Alken says,
There in the stocks of trees white fays403 do dwell,
And span-long elves that dance about a pool,
With each a little changeling in their arms!
The Masque of Love Restored presents us “Robin Good-fellow, 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,” and he appears therefore with his broom and his canles.
In Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess we read of
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.
And in the Little French Lawyer (iii. 1), one says, “You walk like Robin Goodfellow all the house over, and every man afraid of you.”
In Randolph’s Pastoral of Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry, a “knavish boy,” called Dorylas, makes a fool of a “fantastique sheapherd,” Jocastus, by pretending to be Oberon, king of Fairy. In Act i., Scene 3, Jocastus’ brother, Mopsus, “a foolish augur,” thus addresses him:—
Mop. Jocastus, I love Thestylis abominably,
The mouth of my affection waters at her.
Jo. Be wary, Mopsus, learn of me to scorn
The mortals; choose a better match: go love
Some fairy lady! Princely Oberon
Shall stand thy friend, and beauteous Mab, his queen,
Give thee a maid of honour.
Mop. How, Jocastus?
Marry a puppet? Wed a mote i’ the sun?
Go look a wife in nutshells? Woo a gnat,
That’s nothing but a voice? No, no, Jocastus,
I must have flesh and blood, and will have Thestylis:
A fig for fairies!
Thestylis enters, and while she and Mopsus converse, Jocastus muses. At length he exclaims,
Jo. It cannot choose but strangely please his highness.
The. What are you studying of Jocastus, ha?
Jo. A rare device; a masque to entertain
His Grace of Fairy with.
The. A masque! What is’t?
Jo. An anti-masque of fleas, which I have taught
To dance corrantos on a spider’s thread.
And then a jig of pismires
Is excellent.
Enter Dorylas. He salutes Mopsus, and then
Dor. Like health unto the president of the jigs.
I hope King Oberon and his joyall Mab
Are well.
Jo. They are. I never saw their Graces
Eat such a meal before.
Dor. E’en much good do’t them!
Jo. They’re rid a hunting.
Dor. Hare or deer, my lord?
Jo. Neither. A brace of snails of the first head.