Thomas Dyer - Folk-lore of Shakespeare

An important feature of the fairy race was their power of vanishing at will, and of assuming various forms. In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” Oberon says:

Puck relates how he was in the habit of taking all kinds of outlandish forms; and in the “Tempest,” Shakespeare has bequeathed to us a graphic account of Ariel’s eccentricities. “Besides,” says Mr. Spalding, 23 23 “Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 50. “appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving in such a manner as 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 water nymph (i. 2), a harpy (iii. 3), and also the Goddess Ceres (iv. 1), while the strange shapes, masquers, and even the hounds that hunt and worry the would-be king and viceroys of the island, are Ariel’s ‘meaner fellows.’” Poor Caliban complains of Prospero’s spirits (ii. 2):

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 have already had occasion to allude (i. 4), is said to come

And Puck tells us, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), that when Oberon and Titania meet,

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

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

We may compare, too, Ariel’s well-known song in “The Tempest” (v. 1):

Again, from the following passage in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 4) where Mrs. Page, after conferring with her husband, suggests that —

it is evident that in Shakespeare’s day fairies were supposed to be of the size of children. The notion of their diminutiveness, too, it appears was not confined to this country, 25 25 See Grimm’s “Deutsche Mythologie.” but existed in Denmark, 26 26 Thoms’s “Three Notelets on Shakespeare,” 1865, pp. 38, 39. for in the ballad of “Eline of Villenskov” we read:

Again, various stories are current in Germany descriptive of the fairy dwarfs; one of the most noted being that relating to Elberich, who aided the Emperor Otnit to gain the daughter of the Paynim Soldan of Syria. 27 27 See Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology,” 1878, p. 208.

The haunt of the fairies on earth are generally supposed to be the most romantic and rural that can be selected; such a spot being the place of Titania’s repose described by Oberon in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1): 28 28 See also Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” 1852, vol. iii. p. 32, etc.

Titania also tells how the fairy race meet

In “The Tempest” (v. 1), we have the following beautiful invocation by Prospero:

Their haunts, however, varied in different localities, but their favorite abode was in the interior of conical green hills, on the slopes of which they danced by moonlight. Milton, in the “Paradise Lost” (book i.), speaks of

The Irish fairies occasionally inhabited the ancient burial-places known as tumuli or barrows, while some of the Scottish fairies took up their abode under the “door-stane” or threshold of some particular house, to the inmates of which they administered good offices. 29 29 Gunyon’s “Illustrations of Scottish History, Life, and Superstitions,” p. 299.

The so-called fairy-rings in old pastures 30 30 Chambers’s “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 671. – little circles of a brighter green, within which it was supposed the fairies dance by night – are now known to result from the out-spreading propagation of a particular mushroom, the fairy-ringed fungus, by which the ground is manured for a richer following vegetation. An immense deal of legendary lore, however, has clustered round this curious phenomenon, popular superstition attributing it to the merry roundelays of the moonlight fairies. 31 31 Among the various conjectures as to the cause of these verdant circles, some have ascribed them to lightning; others maintained that they are occasioned by ants. See Miss Baker’s “Northamptonshire Glossary,” vol. i. p. 218; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 480-483; and also the “Phytologist,” 1862, pp. 236-238. In “The Tempest” (v. 1) Prospero invokes the fairies as the “demy-puppets” that