| Obe. | Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania. |
| Tita. | What, jealous Oberon? Fairy, skip hence; I have forsworn his bed and company. |
That the name [Oberon] was not the invention of our great dramatist is sufficiently proved. The allegorical Spenser gives it to King Henry the Eighth. Robert Greene was the author of a play entitled “The Scottishe history of James the Fourthe ... intermixed with a pleasant comedie presented by Oberon, king of the fairies.” He is, likewise, a character in the old French romances of Huon de Bourdeaux, and Ogier le Danois; and there even seems to be one upon his own exploits, Roman d’ Auberon. What authority, however, Shakespeare had for the name Titania, it does not appear, nor is she so called by any other writer. He himself, at the same time, as well as many others, gives to the queen of fairies the name of Mab, though no one, except Drayton, mentions her as the wife of Oberon:
“O then, I see, queen Mab hath been with you,
She is the fairy’s midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinner’s legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider’s web;
The collars, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams:
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film:
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love!
... This is that very Mab,
That plats the manes of horses in the night;
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”
(Romeo and Juliet.)
Ben Jonson, in his “Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope,” in 1603, describes to come “tripping up the lawn a bevy of fairies attending on Mab their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring that was there cut in the path, began to dance around.”—(Works, v. 201.)
In the same masque the queen is thus characterised by a satyr:—
“This is Mab, the mistress fairy,
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can hurt or help the churning,
(As she please) without discerning.
She that pinches country-wenches
If they rub not clean their benches,
And with sharper nails remembers
When they rake not up their embers;
But, if so they chance to feast her,
In a shoe she drops a tester.
This is she that empties cradles,
Takes out children, puts in ladles;
Trains forth midwives in their slumber,
With a sieve the holes to number;
And thus leads them from her boroughs,
Home through ponds and water-furrows.
She can start our franklin’s daughters,
In their sleep, with shrieks and laughters,
And on sweet St. Agnes’ night
Feed them with a promised sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.”
Fairies, they tell you, have frequently been heard and seen—nay, that there are some living who were stolen away by them, and confined seven years. According to the description they give who pretend to have seen them, they are in the shape of men, exceeding little. They are always clad in green, and frequent the woods and fields; when they make cakes (which is a work they have been often heard at) they are very noisy; and when they have done, they are full of mirth and pastime. But generally they dance in moonlight when mortals are asleep and not capable of seeing them, as may be observed on the following morn—their dancing-places being very distinguishable. For as they dance hand in hand, and so make a circle in their dance, so next day there will be seen rings and circles on the grass.—(Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares, Newcastle, 1725, 8vo, p. 82.)
These circles are thus described by Browne, the author of Britannia’s Pastorals:—