How To Draw Fairies From Shakespeare Easy

Shakespeare'due south Fairies
From Folk-lore of Shakespeare by T. F. Thiselton Dyer: New York, Harper.

The wealth of Shakespeare's luxuriant imagination and glowing linguistic communication seems to have been poured forth in the graphic accounts which he has given u.s.a. of the fairy tribe. Indeed, the profusion of poetic imagery with which he has so richly clad his fairy characters is unrivalled, and the "Midsummer Nighttime's Dream" holds a unique position in so far equally it contains the finest modern artistic realisation of the fairy kingdom. Mr. Dowden in his Shakespeare Primer (1877, pp. 71,72) justly remarks: "Equally the two extremes of exquisite delicacy, of dainty elegance, and, on the other paw, of thick-witted grossness and clumsiness, stand the fairy tribe, and the group of Athenian handicraftsmen. The world of the poet's dream includes the 2 -- a Titania, and a Lesser the weaver -- and can bring them into grotesque conjunction. No such fairy poetry existed anywhere in English language literature before Shakespeare. The tiny elves, to whom a cowslip is tall, for whom the third part of a minute is an important sectionalization of time, have a miniature perfection which is charming. They delight in all beautiful and squeamish things, and state of war with things that creep and things that fly, if they be uncomely; their lives are gay with fine frolic and frail revelry." Puck, the jester of fairyland, stands apart from the balance, the recognisable "lob of spirits," a crude, "fawn-faced, shock-pated little swain, dainty-limbed shapes effectually him." Judging, then, from the elaborate business relationship which the poet has bequeathed u.s. of the fairies, it is evident that the subject was one in which he took a special interest. Indeed, the graphic pictures he has handed down to the states of

"Elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless human foot,
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demy-puppets that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites," &c.,

prove how intimately he was acquainted with the history of these little people, and what a consummate knowledge he possessed of the superstitious fancies which had clustered round them. In Shakespeare's twenty-four hour period, as well, information technology must be remembered, fairies were much in way; and, as Johnson remarks, mutual tradition had made them familiar. It has also been observed that well acquainted, from the rural habits of his early life, with the notions of the peasantry respecting these beings, he saw that they were capable of being applied to a production of a species of the wonderful. Hence, every bit Mr. Halliwell Phillipps¹ has then aptly written, "he founded his elfin globe on the prettiest of the people'south traditions, and has clothed information technology in the ever-living flowers of his own exuberant fancy." Referring to the fairy mythology in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," information technology is described past Mr. Keightley² equally an endeavor to blend "the elves of the village with the fays of romance. His fairies agree with the former in their atomic stature -- diminished, indeed, to dimensions inappreciable by village gossips -- in their fondness for dancing, their beloved of cleanliness, and their child-abstracting propensities. Like the fays, they form a customs, ruled over past the princely Oberon and the off-white Titania. At that place is a court and chivalry; Oberon would take the queen's sweet changeling to be a "knight of his train to trace the forest wild." Like earthly monarchs, he has his jester, "the shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow."

Of the fairy characters mentioned by Shakespeare may be mentioned Oberon, male monarch of fairyland, and Titania his queen. They are represented as keeping rival courts in consequence of a quarrel, the cause of which is thus told by Puck ("Midsummer Night's Dream," ii. i):

"The male monarch doth proceed his revels here to-night:
Take mind the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing brutal and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweetness a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would take the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
Only she perforce withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy;
And now they never run across in grove or greenish,
Past fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen," &c.

Oberon first appears in the old French romance of "Huon de Bourdeaux," and is identical with Elberich, the dwarf king of the German story of Otnit in the Heldenbuch. The name Elberich, or, as it appears in the "Nibelungenlied," Albrich, was changed, in passing into French, showtime into Auberich, so into Auberon, and finally became our Oberon. He is introduced past Spenser in the "Fairy Queen" (Book two., cant, i., st. 6), where he describes Sir Guyon:

"Well could he tournay, and in lists fence,
And knighthood tooke of practiced Sir Huon's hand,
When with King Oberon he came to faery land."

And in the tenth canto of the same book (stanza 75) he is the allegorical representative of Henry VIII. The wise Elficleos left 2 sons,

"of which faire Elferon,
The eldest brother, did untimely dy;
Whose emptie place the mightie Oberon
Doubly supplide, in spousall and dominion."

"Oboram, Rex of Fayeries," is i of the characters in Greene's "James the Fourth."³

The name Titania for the queen of the fairies appears to accept been the invention of Shakespeare, for, every bit Mr. Ritson⁴ remarks, she is not "so called past any other author." Why, however, the poet designated her by this title, presents, according to Mr. Keightley,⁵ no difficulty: "It was," he says, "the belief of those days that the fairies were the same as the classic nymphs, the attendants of Diana. The Fairy Queen was therefore the same as Diana whom Ovid (Met. iii. 173) styles Titania." In Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale," Pluto is the Male monarch of Faerie, and his queen, Proserpina, "who danced and sang about the well under the laurel in Jan's garden."⁶

In "Romeo and Juliet" (i. 4) she is known by the more than familiar appellation, Queen Mab. "I dream'd a dream to-night," says Romeo, whereupon Mercutio replies, in that well-known famous passage

"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you"

-- this being the earliest instance in whicch Mab is used to designate the fairy queen. Mr. Thorns⁷ thinks that the origin of this name is to be constitute in the Celtic, and that it contains a singled-out allusion to the diminutive class of the elfin sovereign. Mab, both in Welsh and in the kindred dialects of Brittany, signifies a kid or infant, and hence it is a befitting epithet to 1 who

"Comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman."

Mr. Keightley suggests that Mab may be a contraction of Habundia, who, Hey woods says, ruled over the fairies; and another derivation is from Mabel, of which Mab is an abbreviation.

Amongst the references to Queen Mab, nosotros may mention Drayton's "Nymphidia"

"Hence Oberon, him sport to make,
(Their rest when weary mortals take,
And none but only fairies wake),
Descendeth for his pleasure:
And Mab, his merry queen, past night
Bestrides young folks that lie upright," etc.

Ben Jonson, in his "Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope," in 1603, describes every bit "tripping upwardly the lawn a bevy of fairies, attention on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an bogus ring that in that location was cut in the path, began to dance effectually." In the same masque the queen is thus characterized by a satyr:

"This is Mab, the mistress fairy,
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can assistance or hurt the cherning
Every bit she please, without discerning," etc.

Like Puck, Shakespeare has invested Queen Mab with mischievous properties, Which "place her with the night hag of popular superstition," and she is represented as

"Platting the manes of horses in the night."

The merry Puck, who is so prominent an actor in "A Midsummer Night'south Dream," is the mischief-loving sprite, the jester of the fairy court, whose characteristics are roguery and sportiveness. In his description of him, Shakespeare, every bit Mr. Thoms points out, "has embodied almost every attribute with which the imagination of the people has invested the fairy race; and has neither omitted one trait necessary to give brilliancy and distinctness to the likeness, nor sought to heighten its effect by the slightest exaggeration. For, carefully and elaborately as he has finished the picture, he has not in it invested the 'lob of spirits' with one souvenir or quality which the popular voice of the age was not unanimous in bestowing upon him." Thus (two. i) the fairy says:

"Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite,
Call'd Robin Goodfellow: are you not he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk; and sometimes labour in the quern,
And bootless brand the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the beverage to bear no froth;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
Y'all do their piece of work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you lot he?"

The name "Puck" was formerly practical to the whole race of fairies, and non to whatsoever individual sprite — puck, or pouke, being an old word for devil, in which sense information technology is used in the "Vision of Piers Plowman:"

"Out of the poukes pondfold
No maynprise may us feeche."

The Icelandic puki is the same word, and in Friesland and Jutland the domestic spirit is chosen Puk past the peasantry. In Devonshire, Piskey is the name for a fairy, with which we may compare the Cornish Pixey. In Worcestershire, too, we read how the peasantry are occasionally "poake-ledden," that is, misled by a mischievous spirit called poake. And, co-ordinate to Grose's "Provincial Glossary," in Hampshire they requite the proper name of Filly-pixey to a supposed spirit or fairy, which, in the shape of a horse, neighs, and misleads horses into bogs. The Irish gaelic, again, have their Pooka,⁸ and the Welsh their Pwcca — both words derived from Pouke or Puck. Mr. Keightley⁹ thinks, too, that the Scottish pawkey, sly, knowing, may belong to the same list of words. It is axiomatic, then, that the term Puck was in bygone years extensively practical to the fairy race, an appellation still found in the west of England. Referring to its use in Wales, "there is a Welsh tradition to the effect that Shakespeare received his cognition of the Cambrian fairies from his friend Richard Toll, son of Sir John Price, of the Priory of Brecon." It is fifty-fifty claimed that Cwm Pwcca, or Puck Valley, a part of the romantic glen of the Clydach, in Breconshire, is the original scene of the "Midsummer Night'due south Dream."¹⁰

Another of Puck'southward names was Robin Goodfellow, and one of the nigh valuable illustrations nosotros have of the "Midsummer-Nighttime's Dream" is a blackness-letter of the alphabet tract published in London, 1628, under the title of "Robin Goodfellow: His Mad Pranks, and Merry Jests, full of honest mirth, and is a fit medicine for melancholy."¹¹ Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,¹² speaking of Robin Goodfellow, says, "there can be no doubt that in the time of Shakespeare the fairies held a more prominent position in our pop literature than can be at present concluded from the pieces on the discipline that have descended to us." The author of "Tarlton'south News out of Purgatory," printed in 1590, assures u.s. that Robin Goodfellow was "famosed in every erstwhile wives relate for his mad merry pranks;" and nosotros learn from "Henslowe's Diary" that Chettle was the writer of a drama on the adventures of that "merry wanderer of the nighttime." These have disappeared; and fourth dimension has dealt so harshly with the retention of poor Robin that nosotros might about imagine his spirit was withal leading us astray over massive volumes of antiquity, in a delusive search afterward documents forever lost; or, rather, perchance, it is his penalization for the useless journeys he has given our ancestors, misleading nighttime-wanderers, "and laughing at their damage."^thirteen He is mentioned by Drayton in his "Nymphidia:"

"He meeteth Puck, which virtually men call
Hob-goblin, and on him doth fall," etc.,

"hob beingness the familiar or atomic form of Robert and Robin, and so that Hobgoblin is equivalent to Robin the Goblin, i.e., Robin Goodfellow."^xiv Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," alludes to him thus: "A bigger kinde there is of them, called with us hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows, that would, in superstitious times, grinde corne for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any mode of drudgery work." Under his proper noun of Robin Goodfellow, Puck is well characterized in Jonson's masque of "Love Restored."

Another epithet applied to Puck is "Lob," as in the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" (ii. i), where he is addressed by the fairy equally

"Thou lob of spirits."¹⁵

With this we may compare the "lubber-fiend" of Milton, and the following in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle" (3. four): "In that location is a pretty tale of a witch that had the devil'southward mark most her, that had a giant to be her son, that was called Lob-lye-by-the-Fire." Grimm^xvi mentions a spirit, named the "Good Lubber," to whom the bones of animals used to be offered at Manseld, in Germany. In one case more than, the phrase of "existence in," or "getting into Lob's pound," is piece of cake of explanation, presuming Lob to be a fairy epithet — the term being equivalent to Poake-ledden or Pixy-led. In "Hudibras" this term is employed as a name for the stocks in which the knight puts Crowdero:

"Crowdero, whom in irons bound,
Thou basely threw'st into Lob' south pound."

It occurs, also, in Massinger's "Duke of Milan" (iii. 2), where it means "backside the arras:"

"Who forc'd the gentleman, to salvage her credit,
To ally her, and say he was the political party
Found in Lob's pound."

The allusion by Shakespeare to the "Will-o'-the-Wisp," where he speaks of Puck as "sometime a burn," is noticed elsewhere, this beingness one of the forms nether which this fairy was supposed to play his midnight pranks.

Referring, in the next identify, to the several names of Shakespeare'due south fairies, we may quote from "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv. three), where Mrs. Page speaks of "urchins, ouphes, and fairies" -- urchin having been an appellation for i class of fairies. In the "Maydes Metamorphosis" of Lyiy (1600), nosotros notice fairies, elves, and urchins separately accommodated with dances for their use. The following is the urchins dance:

"By the moone we sport and play,
With the night begins our day;
As we frisk the dew doth fall, Trip it, lilliputian urchins all,
Lightly as the trivial bee.
Two by ii, and three by iii.
And about goe wee, goe wee."

In "The Tempest" (i. 2) their actions are too express to the nighttime:

"Urchins
Shall, for that vast of dark that they may work,
All do on thee."

The children employed to torment Falstaff, in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv. 4), were to be dressed in these fairy shapes.

Mr. Douce regards the word urchin, when used to designate a fairy, as of Celtic origin, with which view Mr. Thoms compares the urisks of Highland fairies.

The term ouphe, according to Grimm, is but another form of the cognate elf, which corresponds with the Center High-High german ulf, in the plural ulve. He further proves the identity of this ulf with alp, and with our English language elf, from a Swedish song published by Asdwiddson, in his "Drove of Swedish Ballads," in one version of which the elfin king is called Herr Elfver, and in the second Herr Ulfver.

The name elf, which is frequently used by Shakespeare, is the aforementioned as the Anglo-Saxon alf, the Old High-German and the Centre High-German ulf. "Fairies and elvs," says Toilet, "are often mentioned together in the poets without whatever distinction of character that I tin can remember."

The other fairies, Peas-blossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed probably owe their appellations to the poet himself.

How fully Shakespeare has described the characteristics of the fairy tribe, besides giving a detailed business relationship of their habits and doings, may be gathered from the following pages, in which we have briefly enumerated the various items of fairy lore as scattered through the poet's writings.

Beauty, then, united with power, was 1 of the pop characteristics of the fairy tribe. Such was that of the "Fairy Queen" of Spenser, and of Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." In "Antony and Cleopatra" (iv. eight), Antony, on seeing Cleopatra enter, says to Scarus:

"To this bang-up fairy I'll commend thy acts,
Make her thanks bless thee."

In "Cymbeline" (3. half dozen), when the two brothers discover Imogen in their cave, Belarius exclaims:

"But that it eats our victuals, I should recall
Here were a fairy."¹⁷

And he and then adds:

"By Jupiter, an angel! or, if not,
An earthly paragon! behold divineness
No elderberry than a male child."

The fairies, as represented in many of our onetime legends and folk-tales, are generally noticeable for their dazzler, the same beingness the case with all their surroundings. As Sir Walter Scott,¹⁸ besides, says, "Their pageants and court entertainments comprehended all that the imagination could conceive of what were accounted gallant and splendid. At their processions they paraded more beautiful steeds than those of mere earthly parentage. The hawks and hounds which they employed in their chase were of the kickoff race. At their daily banquets, the board was set forth with a splendor which the proudest kings of the earth dared not aspire to, and the hall of their dancers echoed to the about exquisite music."

Mr. Douce quotes from the romance "Lancelot of the Lake," where the author, speaking of the days of Rex Arthur, says, "En celui temps estoient appellees faees selles qui sentre-mettoient denchantemens et de charmes, et moult en estoit pour lors principalement en la Grande Bretaigne, et savoient la strength et la vertu des paroles, des pierres, et des herbes, parquoy elles estoient tenues et jeunesse et en beaulte, et en grandes richesses comme elles devisoient."

"This perpetual youth and beauty," he adds, "cannot well be separated from a country of immortality;" another characteristic ascribed to the fairy race. Information technology is probably alluded to by Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream' (two.i):

"The human mortals desire their winter here."

And further on (ii. i), when speaking of the changeling's mother, she says:

"But she, being mortal, of that male child did dice."

Again, a fairy addresses Bottom the weaver (iii. i) —

"Hail, mortal!"

— an indication that she was not and then herself. The very fact, indeed, that fairies "call themselves spirits, ghosts, or shadows, seems to be a proof of their immortality." Thus Puck styles Oberon "male monarch of shadows," and this monarch asserts of himself and his subjects —

"Simply we are spirits of another sort."

Fletcher, in the "Faithful Shepherdess," describes (i. 2) —

"A virtuous well, about whose menses'ry banks
The nimble-footed fairies trip the light fantastic their rounds,
Past the pale moonshine, dipping often
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying fllesh, and dull mortality."

Ariosto, in his "Orlando Furioso" (book xliii. stanza 98) says:

"I am a fayrie, and to make you know,
To be a fayrie what it doth import.
We cannot dye, how erstwhile and so always we grow.
Of paines and harmes of ev'rie other sort
Nosotros gustatory modality, onelie no death we nature ow."

An important feature of the fairy race was their power of vanishing at will, and of assuming various forms. In "A Midsummer Dark's Dream" Oberon says:

"I am invisible
And I will overhear their briefing."

Puck relates how he was in the addiction of taking all kinds of outlandish forms; and in the "Storm," Shakespeare has bequeathed to usa a graphic account of Ariel's eccentricities. "Also," says Mr. Spalding,²⁰ "appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving in such a manner equally to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea, crying, 'Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!' he assumes the forms of a h2o nymph (i. 2), a harpy (iii. 3), and as well the Goddess Ceres (4. i), while the foreign shapes, masquers, and even the hounds that hunt and worry the would-be king and viceroys of the isle, are Ariel's 'meaner fellows.'" Poor Caliban complains of Prospero's spirits (two. 2):

"For every trifle are they set upon me;
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me.
And afterwards seize with teeth me: and so like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my bare-human foot style, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness."

That fairies are sometimes exceedingly diminutive is fully shown by Shakespeare, who gives several instances of this peculiarity. Thus Queen Mab, in "Romeo and Juliet," to which passage we take already had occasion to allude (i. 4), is said to come

"In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman."^nineteen

And Puck tells us, in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (2. i), that when Oberon and Titania meet,

"they practise square, that all their elves, for fright,
Creep into acorn cups, and hide them at that place."

Farther on (ii. 3) the duties imposed by Titania upon her train point to their tiny character:

"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 rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats."

And when enamoured of Lesser, she directs her elves that they should —

"Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries.
With majestic grapes, light-green figs, and mulberries;
The honey bags steal from the humble-bees.
And for night tapers ingather their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes.
To take my love to bed, and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes."

We may compare, too, Ariel'southward well-known vocal in "The Storm" (v. i):

"Where the bee sucks, at that place suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I prevarication;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat'south dorsum I do wing
After summertime merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

Again, from the following passage in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv. iv) where Mrs. Page, later on conferring with her husband, suggests that —

"Nan Page my daughter, and my footling son,
And 3 or four more than of their growth, we'll apparel
Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies, green and white.
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads.
And rattles in their easily."

information technology is axiomatic that in Shakespeare'south day fairies were supposed to exist of the size of children. The notion of their diminutiveness, too, information technology appears was not confined to this land,^xx but existed in Denmark," for in the ballad of "Eline of Villenskov" we read:

"Out then spake the smallest Trold;
No bigger than an ant;—
Oh! hither is come up a Christian man,
His schemes I'll sure foreclose."

Once again, various stories are electric current in Germany descriptive of the fairy dwarfs; one of the most noted beingness that relating to Elberich, who aided the Emperor Otnit to gain the daughter of the Paynim Soldan of Syria.²¹

The haunts of the fairies on globe are generally supposed to exist the most romantic and rural that can be selected; such a spot existence the place of Titania's repose described by Oberon in "A Midsummer Night'south Dream" (two. i):²²

"a depository financial institution where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the dark,
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."

Titania also tells how the fairy race meet

"on colina, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain, or past rushy brook.
Or in the beached margent of the sea."

In "The Tempest" (five. i), we take the following beautiful invocation past Prospero:

"Ye elves of hills, brooks, continuing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and practice fly him
When he comes dorsum —"

Their haunts, withal, varied in different localities, merely their favorite home was in the interior of conical green hills, on the slopes of which they danced past moonlight. Milton, in the "Paradise Lost" (book I.), speaks of

"fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale form, they, on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music amuse his ear;
At in one case with joy and fear his heart rebounds."

The Irish fairies occasionally inhabited the aboriginal burial places known every bit tumuli or barrows, while some of the Scottish fairies took upward their dwelling under the "door-stane" or threshold of some particular house, to the inmates of which they administered adept offices.²³

The then-called fairy-rings in former pastures²⁴ — little circles of a brighter light-green, within which it was supposed the fairies dance by night — are now known to result from the outspreading propagation of a particular mushroom, the fairy-ringed mucus, by which the footing is manured for a richer following vegetation. An immense deal of legendary lore, still, has clustered circular this curious miracle, popular superstition attributing it to the merry roundelays of the moonlight fairies.²⁵ In "The Tempest" (v. i) Prospero invokes the fairies as the "demy-puppets" that

"By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites ; and you lot, whose pastime Is to brand midnight-mushrooms."

....As Mr. Thoms says, in his "Three Notelets on Shakespeare" (1865, pp. forty, 41), "the writings of Shakespeare abound in graphic notices of these fairy revels, couched in the highest strains of poetry; and a comparing of these with some of the pop legends which the industry of Continental antiquaries has preserved will show u.s.a. clearly that these delightful sketches of elfin enjoyment have been drawn past a manus as faithful as it is masterly."

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Footnote 1: "Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of ' A Midsummer Dark's Dream,'" 1845.

Footnote ii: "Fairy Mythology," p. 325.

Footnote iii: Aldis Wright's "Midsummer Night's Dream," 1877, Preface, pp. xv., xvi.; Ritson's "Fairy Mythology," 1875, pp. 22, 23.

Footnote iv: Essay on Fairies in "Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare," p. 23.

Footnote 5: "Fairy Mythology," 1878, p. 325.

Footnote six: Notes to "A Midsummer Night's Dream," by Aldis Wright, 1877. Preface, p. xvi.

Footnote 7: "3 Notelets on Shakespeare," pp. 100-107.

Footnote 8: Run into Croker'southward "Fairy Legends of South of Republic of ireland," 1862, p. 135.

Footnote 9: "Fairy Mythology," 1878, p. 316.

Footnote ten: Wirt Sikes'due south "British Goblins," 1880, p. 20.

Footnote xi: This is reprinted in Hazlitt'south "Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances, illustrating Shakespeare and other English Writers," 1875, p. 173.

Footnote 12: "Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of the Midsummer-Night's Dream," printed 'for the Shakespeare Club, p. viii.

Footnote 13: Thoms'southward "3 Notelets on Shakespeare," p. 88.

Footnote 14: Mr. Dyce considers that Lob is descriptive of the contrast between Puck'due south foursquare effigy and the blusterous shapes of the other fairies.

Footnote 15: "Deutsche Mythologie," p. 492.

Footnote xvi: See Keightley's "Fairy Mythology," pp. 318, 319.

Footnote 17: Showing, as Mr. Ritson says, that they never ate.

Footnote xviii: "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft," 1831, p. 121.

Footnote 19: Agate was used metaphorically for a very atomic person, in innuendo to the small figures cut in agate for rings. In "2 Henry Iv" (i. two), Falstaff says: "I was never manned with an agate till now; but I will inset you neither in gilded nor argent, but in vile clothes, and send y'all back again to your main, for a jewel." In "Much Ado Nigh Nothing" (iii. i) Hero speaks of a man equally being "low, an agate very vilely cut."

Footnote twenty: Come across Grimm'due south " Deutsche Mythologie."

Footnote 21: Thoms's "Three Notelets on Shakespeare," 1865, pp. 38, 39.

Footnote 22: Encounter Keightley's "Fairy Mythology," 1878, p. 208.

Footnote 23: Gunyon's "Illustrations of Scottish History, Life, and Superstitions," p. 299.

Footnote 24: Amidst the various conjectures every bit to the cause of these verdant circles, some have ascribed them to lightning; others maintained that they are occasioned past ants. See Miss Baker'south "Northamptonshire Glossary," vol. i. p. 218 ; Make'southward "Pop. Antiq.," 1849, vol. ii. pp. 480- 483; and likewise the " Phytologist," 1862, pp. 236-238.

How to cite this article:
Dyer, T. F. Thiselton. Folk-lore of Shakespeare. New York: Harper, 1884.
Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000. (engagement when you lot accessed the data) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/fairiesshakespeare.html >.

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