Mr. Keightley suggests that Mab may be a contraction of Habundia, who, Heywood says, ruled over the fairies; and another derivation is from Mabel, of which Mab is an abbreviation.
Among the references to Queen Mab we 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, by night
Bestrides young folks that lie upright,” etc.
Ben Jonson, in his “Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope,” in 1603, describes as “tripping up the lawn a bevy of fairies, attending on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring that there was cut in the path, began to dance around.” 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 help or hurt the cherning
As she please, without discerning,” etc.
Like Puck, Shakespeare has invested Queen Mab with mischievous properties, which “identify 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’s Dream,” is the mischief-loving sprite, the jester of the fairy court, whose characteristics are roguery and sportiveness. In his description of him, Shakespeare, as 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 gift or quality which the popular voice of the age was not unanimous in bestowing upon him.” Thus (ii. 1) 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 make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?”
The name “Puck” was formerly applied to the whole race of fairies, and not to any individual sprite—puck, or pouke, being an old word for devil, in which sense it is used in the “Vision of Piers Plowman:”