In order to fully appreciate the difficulties of the enterprise, we must understand, first, what it was that he had to do, and, secondly, the means at his command with which to accomplish it.

The fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream are not the fays or fairies of romance like Spenser's Faery Queen, Gloriana, or King Arthur's sister, Morgue la Faye, or the Princess Tryamour in the "Romance of Sir Launfal," or her who unfolded the future to Thomas of Ercildoune beneath the eldyn tree, all of whom are represented as being of the human race, differing from ordinary mortals only in their superlative beauty of form and feature and in their endowment with powers beyond those allotted to men. The fairies of the play, on the contrary, are the elves or fairies of folk-lore with which the people of all England, both rich and poor, and of high and low degree, were already more or less familiar from the tales constantly repeated from their very childhood. These fairies had thus acquired with the people of his day as distinct a personality as that which the most familiar personages of history possess for our minds now, so that a dramatist who should then have represented an Oberon or Puck differing in any respect from the popular notion in regard to him, would have been open to the same criticism that would be encountered by one making a wide departure from the well-known facts of history in such plays as Julius Cæsar and King Richard the Third. In the one case as in the other, his task was merely to represent, illustrate, and embellish characters already well known, and he was therefore obliged to preserve their identity at all hazards. Julius Cæsar must always be recognizable as the conqueror of the world, and King Richard as the hunchback tyrant. Now let us consider for a moment what was the popular notion about the appearance of the English fairies. "The Fairies of England," says Mr. Keightly in his " Fairy Mythology,' are evidently the Dwarfs of Germany and the North, though they do not appear to have been ever so denominated. Their appella

* p. 281, ed. 1884.

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tion was Elves, subsequently Fairies; but there would seem to have been formerly other terms expressive of them of which hardly a vestige is now remaining in the English language. They were, like their northern kindred, divided into two classes: rural Elves, inhabiting the woods, fields, mountains, and caverns; and the domestic or house spirits, usually called Hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows."

However conflicting the local traditions and beliefs might be in other respects, they all agreed in one particular. The elves were very little people. Gervase of Tilbury, nephew of Henry II. of England and Chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire under Otho IV., writing about the beginning of the thirteenth century, describes a kind of goblins in England called Portuni as less than half an inch in stature, but with faces wrinkled like those of old men. And the author of "Round about our Coal-fire," an old tract quoted in " Brand's Popular Antiquities," but now, so far as known, no longer extant, says:

"My grandmother has often told me of fairies dancing upon our green, and they were little, little creatures, clothed in green.

"The moment any one saw them, and took notice of them, they were struck blind of an eye. They lived underground, and generally came out of a mole-hill.

"They had fine music always among themselves, and danced in a moonshiny night around, or in a ring, as one may see at this day upon every common in England where mushrooms grow."

This is a pretty good epitome of the popular belief which prevailed throughout England concerning the rural elves or fairies from long before Shakespeare's time, and which doubtless continues to be held in some parts of the country, among the peasantry, even down to the present day. Ideas as to their size differed somewhat, but from all we can gather they were generally thought to be from six inches to two feet in height. The Hobgoblins or Robin Goodfellows were supposed to be rather larger. Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy,"* writ

*p. 47.

ten about 1621, after referring to what Parcelsus says about the fairies, which in Germany "do usually walk in little coats some two foot long," adds, "A bigger kind there is of them called with us Hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows that would, in those superstitious times, grind corn for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work."

Although these Robin Goodfellows were sometimes spoken of as a class of fairies, as evidence the quotation from Burton above given and the following from Nash's Terrors of the Night, 1594, "The Robin Goodfellows, elfes, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age, which idolatrous former days and the phantastical world of Greece ycleped fawnes, satyrs, dryades, and hamadryads, did most of their merry pranks in the night,” yet it would seem that shortly before Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream there had grown up a disposition to personify the whole class of Robin Goodfellows in one particular sprite bearing that name. He is described in Tarlton's News out of Purgatory, printed in 1590, as "famoused in every old wives' chronicle for his mad and merry pranks," and is thus spoken of by Reginald Scott* in 1584: "Indeed your grandam's maids were wont to set a bowl of milk before him (Incubus) and his cousin Robin Goodfellow for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight, and you have also heard that he would chafe exceedingly, if the maid or goodwife of the house, having compassion on his nakedness, laid away clothes for him beside his mess of white bread and milk, which was his standing fee." The fullest and most interesting account of him, however, is found in an old and very rare blackletter pamphlet printed at London in 1628, entitled "Robin Goodfellow, his Mad Pranks and Merry Jests," which Mr. Collier reprinted in 1841 for the Percy Society, as did also the late Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Illustrations of Fairy Mythology published by the Shakespeare Society in 1845. While from certain references to the use of tobacco made in one of the songs occurring in the second part of this work, it is evident that

* Discoverie of Witchcraft, IV., Ch. 10.

this part was written some years after A Midsummer Night's Dream, I think Messrs. Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, and Keightly are undoubtedly correct in concluding from internal evidence that the composition of the first part dates back to a period anterior to the play, and that Shakespeare must have either seen an earlier edition of this first part of the book or have been familiar with the traditions it records. In this work Robin Goodfellow is represented as the son of a "proper young wench by a hee-fayrie, a king or something of that kind among them,” who early develops a spirit of mischief, and when only six years of age runs off from home in order to escape a whipping, which his mother had promised him. He is endowed by his fairy parent with the power of transforming himself into whatever shape he pleases, and at once engages in a series of pranks such as are related of himself by Puck in the play. In the second part he is mentioned as being on one occasion much offended because a maid whose work he had been doing for her, observing that he was rather bare of clothing, sought to express her sense of obligation for his kindness to her by making him a waistcoat. His appearance was believed to be that of a child of six years old, whose costume consisted of a broom, usually carried on his shoulder, and nothing more.

It is worthy of notice that in the second part Robin's father is several times called "Obreon," while in the first he is never distinguished by a proper name.

Such was the material which came ready made to Shakespeare's hand. A touch of his magic genius endowed the humble fairies of the simple country folk with all the qualities and possessions of the fairies of romance with which the nobility had been made familiar through Spenser's Faëry Queen, and transmuted them into those Fairies of Poetry, which are of all creations of the human imagination the most fanciful and charming. He transported them to Fairyland, where he set up a kingdom for them, and as Puck was the only one of these elves who up to this time possessed a name and a personality, he had to provide them with a king and queen.

About the year 1570 appeared an English translation, by Lord Berners, of the old French romance of Huon of Bordeaux. One of the characters in this was Oberon, the King of Fairyland. Dr. Grimm has shown that this Oberon is evidently the same as the dwarf Albrich who figures in the Nibelungen Lied. In translating the name into French the first syllable, Al, naturally became Au, and the German diminutive ich was changed to its French equivalence on, which gives us Auberon; the transition from which to Oberon is obvious. That this derivation is correct is demonstrated by the great similarity between this Oberon in Huon of Bordeaux and the dwarf King Elberich in the old romance of Ortnit or Otnit in the German Heldenbuch. According to Oberon's account of himself in Huon of Bordeaux, he was the son of Julius Cæsar and a fairy known as "The Ladie of the Secret Isle," whose elder son is incidentally mentioned as the father of Alexander the Great. We are further told that at Oberon's birth the fairies all bestowed wondrous gifts upon him, but one of them, who had not been invited to be present upon the auspicious occasion, declared that he should stop growing when he attained the age of three years, and in consequence, although he lived for many centuries, he always preserved the same very juvenile appearance, but, as some compensation for this, his face was the most beautiful on earth. What more natural than for Shakespeare to select this Oberon, so well known to the nobility of his day as a fairy king, through Lord Berners' translation of Huon of Bordeaux, to rule in Fairyland over the rural elves so familiar to the common people? And what more appropriate ruler for these elves, deriving their origin from the Northland dwarfs, than Oberon or Albrich the original dwarf king? The name of Titania, his queen, as pointed out by Mr. Keightly,* is found in Ovid as another appellation for Diana, and was evidently selected because of the belief which widely prevailed in Shakespeare's time that the fairies were the same as the nymphs described in Greek mythology as attending on that goddess when she hunted

* Fairy Mythology, p. 325, ed. 1884.