In A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, a fairy addresses Bottom the weaver—
“Hail, mortal, hail!”
which sufficiently shows she was not so herself.
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, in the same play, calls Oberon,
“——King of shadows,”
and in the old song just mentioned,
“The King of ghosts and shadows,”
and this mighty monarch asserts of himself, and his subjects,
“But we are spirits of another sort.”
The fairies, as we already see, were male and female. Their government was monarchical, and Oberon, the King of Fairyland, must have been a sovereign of very extensive territory. The name of his queen was Titania. Both are mentioned by Shakespeare, being personages of no little importance in the above play, where they, in an ill-humour, thus encounter: