Act III Scene 4
Dorylas With a Bevy of Fairies
Dor. How like you now, my Grace? Is not my countenance
Royal and full of majesty? Walk not I
Like the young prince of pygmies? Ha, my knaves,
We’ll fill our pockets. Look, look yonder, elves;
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 ourself
Do climb the trees. Thus princely Oberon
Ascends his throne of state.
Elves. Nos beata Fauni proles,
Quibus non est magna moles,
Quamvis Lunam incolamus.
Hortos sæpe frequentamus.
Furto cuncta magis bella,
Furto dulcior puella,
Furto omnia decora,
Furto poma dulciora.
Cum mortales lecto jacent,
Nobis poma noctu placent;
Illa tamen sunt ingrata
Nisi furto sint parata.
Jocastus and his man Bromius come upon the Elves while plundering the orchard: the latter is for employing his cudgel on the occasion, but Jocastus is overwhelmed by the condescension of the princely Oberon in coming to his orchard, when
His Grace had orchards of his own more precious
Than mortals can have any.
The Elves, by his master’s permission, pinch Bromius, singing,
Quoniam per te violamur,
Ungues hic experiamur;
Statim dices tibi datam
Cutem valde variatam.
Finally, when the coast is clear, Oberon cries,
So we are got clean off; come, noble peers
Of Fairy, come, attend our royal Grace.
Let’s go and share our fruit with our queen Mab
And the other dairy-maids; where of this theme
We will discourse amidst our cakes and cream.
Cum tot poma habeamus,
Triumphos læti jam canamus;
Faunos ego credam ortos,
Tantum ut frequentent hortos.
I domum, Oberon, ad illas,
Quæ nos manent nunc, ancillas,
Quarum osculemur sinum,
Inter poma lac et vinum.
In the old play of Fuimus Troes are the following lines:404
Fairies small,
Two foot tall,
With caps red
On their head,
Danse around
On the ground.
The pastoral poets also employed the Fairy Mythology. Had they used it exclusively, giving up the Nymphs, Satyrs, and all the rural rout of antiquity, and joined with it faithful pictures of the scenery England then presented, with just delineations of the manners and character of the peasantry, the pastoral poetry of that age would have been as unrivalled as its drama. But a blind admiration of classic models, and a fondness for allegory, were the besetting sins of the poets. They have, however, left a few gems in this way.
Britannia’s Pastorals furnish the following passages:405
Near to this wood there lay a pleasant mead,
Where fairies often did their measures tread,
Which in the meadows made such circles green,
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
A hillock rise, where oft the fairy-queen
At twilight sate, and did command her elves
To pinch those maids that had not swept their shelves;
And, further, if, by maiden’s oversight,
Within doors water was 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 who had perform’d each thing,
She in the water-pail bade leave a ring.
Song 2.
Or of the faiery troops which nimbly play,
And by the springs dance out the summer’s day,
Teaching the little birds to build their nests,
And in their singing how to keepen rests.
Song 4.
As men by fairies led fallen in a dream.
Ibid.
In his Shepherd’s Pipe, also, Brown thus speaks of the Fairies:—
Many times he hath been seen
With the fairies on the green,
And to them his pipe did sound
While they danced in a round.
Mickle solace they would make him,
And at midnight often wake him
And convey him from his room
To a field of yellow-broom;
Or into the meadows where
Mints perfume the gentle air,
And where Flora spreads her treasure;
There they would begin their measure.
If it chanced night’s sable shrouds
Muffled Cynthia up in clouds,
Safely home they then would see him,
And from brakes and quagmires free him.
But Drayton is the poet after Shakespeare for whom the Fairies had the greatest attractions. Even in the Polyolbion he does not neglect them. In Song xxi., Ringdale, in Cambridgeshire, says,
For in my very midst there is a swelling ground
About which Ceres’ nymphs dance many a wanton round;
The frisking fairy there, as on the light air borne,
Oft run at barley-break upon the cars of corn;
And catching drops of dew in their lascivious chases,
Do cast the liquid pearl in one another’s faces.
And in Song iv., he had spoken of
The feasts that underground the faëry did him (Arthur) make,
And there how he enjoyed the Lady of the Lake.
Nymphidia is a delicious piece of airy and fanciful invention. The description of Oberon’s palace in the air, Mab’s amours with the gentle Pigwiggin, the mad freaks of the jealous Oberon, the pygmy Orlando, the mutual artifices of Puck and the Fairy maids of honour, Hop, Mop, Pip, Trip, and Co., and the furious combat of Oberon and the doughty Pigwiggin, mounted on their earwig chargers—present altogether an unequalled fancy-piece, set in the very best and most appropriate frame of metre.
It contains, moreover, several traits of traditionary Fairy lore, such as in these lines:—
Hence shadows, seeming idle shapes
Of little frisking elves and apes,
To earth do make their wanton skapes
As hope of pastime hastes them;
Which maids think on the hearth they see,
When fires well near consumed be,
There dancing hays by two and three,
Just as their fancy casts them.406
These make our girls their sluttery rue,
By pinching them both black and blue,
And put a penny in their shoe.
The house for cleanly sweeping;
And in their courses make that round,
In meadows and in marshes found,
Of them so call’d the fairy ground,
Of which they have the keeping.
These, when a child haps to be got,
That after proves an idiot,
When folk perceive it thriveth not,
The fault therein to smother,
Some silly, doating, brainless calf,
That understands things by the half,
Says that the fairy left this aulf,
And took away the other.
And in these:—
Scarce set on shore but therewithal
He meeteth Puck, whom most men call
Hobgoblin, and on him doth fall
With words from frenzy spoken;
“Ho! ho!” quoth Puck, “God save your Grace!
Who drest you in this piteous case?
He thus that spoiled my sovereign’s face,
I would his neck were broken.
This Puck seems but a dreaming dolt.
Still walking like a ragged colt,
And oft out of a bush doth bolt,
Of purpose to deceive us;
And leading us, makes us to stray
Long winter nights out of the way;
And when we stick in mire and clay,
He doth with laughter leave us.
In his Poet’s Elysium there is some beautiful Fairy poetry, which we do not recollect to have seen noticed any where. This work is divided into ten Nymphals, or pastoral dialogues. The Poet’s Elysium is, we are told, a paradise upon earth, inhabited by Poets, Nymphs, and the Muses.
The poet’s paradise this is,
To which but few can come,
The Muses’ only bower of bliss,
Their dear Elysium.
In the eighth Nymphal,
A nymph is married to a fay,
Great preparations for the day,
All rites of nuptials they recite you
To the bridal, and invite you.
The dialogue commences between the nymphs Mertilla and Claia:—
M. But will our Tita wed this fay?
C. Yes, and to-morrow is the day.
M. But why should she bestow herself
Upon this dwarfish fairy elf?
C. Why, by her smallness, you may find
That she is of the fairy kind;
And therefore apt to choose her make
Whence she did her beginning take;
Besides he’s deft and wondrous airy,
And of the noblest of the fairy,407
Chief of the Crickets,408 of much fame,
In Fairy a most ancient name.
The nymphs now proceed to describe the bridal array of Tita: her jewels are to be dew-drops; her head-dress the “yellows in the full-blown rose;” her gown
Of pansy, pink, and primrose leaves,
Most curiously laid on in threaves;
her train the “cast slough of a snake;” her canopy composed of “moons from the peacock’s tail,” and “feathers from the pheasant’s head;”
Mix’d with the plume (of so high price),
The precious bird of paradise;
and it shall be
Borne o’er our head (by our inquiry)
By elfs, the fittest of the fairy.
Her buskins of the “dainty shell” of the lady-cow. The musicians are to be the nightingale, lark, thrush, and other songsters of the grove.
But for still music, we will keep
The wren and titmouse, which to sleep
Shall sing the bride when she’s alone,
The rest into their chambers gone;
And like those upon ropes that walk
On gossamer from stalk to stalk,
The tripping fairy tricks shall play
The evening of the wedding day.
Finally, the bride-bed is to be of roses; the curtains, tester, and all, of the “flower imperial;” the fringe hung with harebells; the pillows of lilies, “with down stuft of the butterfly;”
For our Tita is to-day,
To be married to a fay.
In Nymphal iii.,
The fairies are hopping,
The small flowers cropping,
And with dew dropping,
Skip thorow the greaves.
At barley-break they play
Merrily all the day:
At night themselves they lay
Upon the soft leaves.
And in Nymphal vi. the forester says,
The dryads, hamadryads, the satyrs, and the fawns,
Oft play at hide-and-seek before me on the lawns;
The frisking fairy oft, when horned Cynthia shines,
Before me as I walk dance wanton matachines.
Herrick is generally regarded as the Fairy-poet, par excellence; but, in our opinion, without sufficient reason, for Drayton’s Fairy pieces are much superior to his. Indeed Herrick’s Fairy-poetry is by no means his best; and we doubt if he has anything to exceed in that way, or perhaps equal, the light and fanciful King Oberon’s Apparel of Smith.409
Milton disdained not to sing
How faëry Mab the junkets eat.
She was pinch’d and pull’d, she said;
And he, by friar’s lantern led,410
Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat
To earn his cream bowl duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath thresh’d the corn
That ten day-labourers could not end;
Then lies him down, the lubber fiend,
And stretch’d out all the chimney’s length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
And, crop-full, out of doors he flings,
Ere the first cock his matin rings.
Regardless of Mr. Gifford’s sneer at “those who may undertake the unprofitable drudgery of tracing out the property of every word, and phrase, and idea in Milton,”411 we will venture to trace a little here, and beg the reader to compare this passage with one quoted above from Harsenet, and to say if the resemblance be accidental. The truth is, Milton, reared in London, probably knew the popular superstitions chiefly or altogether from books; and almost every idea in this passage may be found in books that he must have read.
In the hands of Dryden the Elves of Chaucer lose their indefiniteness. In the opening of the Wife of Bath her Tale,
The king of elves and little fairy queen
Gamboled on heaths and danced on every green.
And
In vain the dairy now with mint is dressed,
The dairy-maid expects no fairy guest
To skim the bowls, and after pay the feast.
She sighs, and shakes her empty shoes in vain,
No silver penny to reward her pain.
In the Flower and the Leaf, unauthorised by the old bard, he makes the knights and dames, the servants of the Daisy and of the Agnus Castus, Fairies, subject, like the Italian Fate, to “cruel Demogorgon.”
Pope took equal liberties with his original, as may be seen by a comparison of the following verses with those quoted above:—
About this spring, if ancient fame say true,
The dapper elves their moonlight sports pursue:
Their pigmy king and little fairy queen
In circling dances gamboled on the green,
While tuneful sprites a merry concert made,
And airy music warbled through the shade.
January and May, 459.
It so befel, in that fair morning tide,
The fairies sported on the garden’s side,
And in the midst their monarch and his bride.
So featly tripp’d the light-foot ladies round,
The knight so nimbly o’er the greensward bound,
That scarce they bent the flowers or touch’d the ground.
The dances ended, all the fairy train
For pinks and daisies search’d the flowery plain.412
Ibid., 617.
With the Kensington Garden413 of Tickell, Pope’s contemporary, our Fairy-poetry may be said to have terminated.414 Collins, Beattie, and a few other poets of the last century make occasional allusions to it, and some attempts to revive it have been made in the present century. But vain are such efforts, the belief is gone, and divested of it such poetry can produce no effect. The Fairies have shared the fate of the gods of ancient Hellas.