Fide´lio, Leono´ra, wife of Fernando Florestan. She assumed the name of Fidelio, and dressed in male attire when her husband was a state prisoner, that she might enter the service of Rocco the jailer, and hold intercourse with her husband.—Beethoven, Fidelio (1791).
Fides (2 syl.), mother of John of Leyden. Believing that the prophet-ruler of Westphalia had caused her son’s death, she went to Munster to curse him. Seeing the ruler pass, she recognized in him her own son; but the son pretended not to know his mother, and Fidês, to save him annoyance, professed to have made a mistake. She was put into a dungeon, where John visited her, and when he set fire to his palace, Fidês rushed into the flames, and both perished together.—Meyerbeer, Le Prophete (1849).
Fidessa, the companion of Sansfoy; but when the Red Cross Knight slew that “faithless Saracen,” Fidessa told him she was the only daughter of an emperor of Italy; that she was betrothed to a rich and wise king; and that her betrothed being slain, she had set forth to find the body, in order that she might decently inter it. She said that in her wanderings Sansfoy had met her and compelled her to be his companion: but she thanked the knight for having come to her rescue. The Red Cross Knight, wholly deluded by this plausible tale, assured Fidessa of his sympathy and protection: but she turned out to be Duessa, the daughter of Falsehood and Shame. The sequel must be sought under the word Duessa.—Spenser, Faëry Queen, i. 2 (1590).
Fido, Faith personified, the foster-son of Acŏë (“hearing,” Rom. x. 17); his foster-sister is Meditation. Fully described in canto ix. of The Purple Island (1633), by Phineas Fletcher. (Latin, fidês, “faith.”)
Field of the Forty Footsteps, at the back of the British Museum, once called Southampton Fields. The tradition is that two brothers, in the Monmouth rebellion, took different sides, and engaged each other in fight. Both were killed, and forty impressions of their feet were traceable in the field for years afterwards.
⁂ The Misses Porter wrote a novel called The Field of the Forty Footsteps, and the Messrs. Mayhew took the same subject for a melodrama.
Fielding (Mrs.), a little querulous old lady with a peevish face, who, in consequence of having once been better off, or of laboring under the impression that she might have been, if something in the indigo trade had happened differently, was very genteel and patronizing indeed. When she dressed for a party, she wore gloves, and a cap of state “almost as tall, and quite as stiff as a mitre.”
May Fielding, her daughter, very pretty and innocent. She was engaged to Edward Plummer, but heard that he had died in South America, and consented to marry Tackleton the toy merchant. A few days before the day fixed for the wedding, Edward Plummer returned, and they were married. Tackleton gave them as a present the cake he had ordered for his own wedding feast.—C. Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth (1845).
Fielding of the Drama, George Farquhar, author of The Beaux’ Stratagem, etc. (1678-1707).
Fielding’s Proverbs. These were in reality compiled by W. Henry Ireland, the Shakespeare impostor, who published Miscellaneous Papers and Instruments, under the hand and seal of William Shakespeare, including the tragedy of King Lear and a small fragment of Hamlet, from the original, 1796, folio, £4 4s. The whole was a barefaced forgery.