The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England
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The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England Jennifer Louise Ailles 2007 This work is licensed by Jennifer L. Ailles under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. How to Cite This Document: Ailles, Jennifer L. The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England. 2007. figshare. 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.760610 The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England by Jennifer Louise Ailles Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Supervised by Professor Rosemary Kegl Department of English The College Arts & Sciences University of Rochester Rochester, New York 2007 ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Diane Ailles for always being supportive in any way that she could--most importantly, being there at the other end of the phone to listen. There is no way I could have made it through without you, Mom. This dissertation is also dedicated to Pagan and Jazel Ailles who have been my constant companions and familiars throughout my Ph.D. iii Curriculum Vitae Jennifer L. Ailles was born in Sherbourne Township, Ontario, Canada on June 28, 1972. She attended the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario, Canada) from 1991-1993 and 1996-1998, and graduated with a Combined Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy in 1998 with Honours. She also completed her Masters of Arts in English and Performance Studies at the University of Guelph in 2000, winning the School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English Distinguished Thesis Award for Research. She came to the University of Rochester in the Fall of 2000 and began studies in the doctoral program in English. She received a Ph.D. Tuition Scholarship and a Department of English Ph.D. Fellowship from 2000 to 2005, followed by a Dissertation Fellowship from 2005-2007. She was also awarded a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada from 2001 to 2004. She pursued her research in gender and early modern cultural studies under the direction of Professor Rosemary Kegl and received the Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester in 2004. She also earned the Susan B. Anthony Institute Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies in 2006. While at the University of Rochester she was a research assistant for Professor Lisa Cartwright on the project “Mothers and Other Smoking Guns . : Public Health Media Campaigns Aimed at Pregnant Women Who Smoke” (2001). She was also the Project Manager and a Research Associate for the archival project iv “Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare” at the University of Guelph, under the direction of Professor Daniel Fischlin (2001-2002). At the University of Rochester she taught numerous courses for the English Department, the College Writing Program, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, Learning Assistance Services, the Office of Minority Student Affairs, and the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music. v Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank my primary advisor Professor Rosemary Kegl for her insightful comments and willingness to let me work through the early modern English history of Queen Mab at my own pace from the time I participated in her course on Women Dramatists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Professor Jonathan Baldo was my second reader and I would like to thank him for his continued support from the time of my qualifying exams through the duration of the dissertation writing process. David Walsh generously came on as my external examiner. I would also like to thank Professor Sarah Higley, who read the earliest version of this work on Mab and dis/ease, and Professor Karen Beckman who were on my qualifying examination committee and asked insightful questions about the early vision of this project. Further intellectual and emotional support, on campus and off and some from abroad, has come from numerous people including the entire Ailles family, especially Diane Ailles, Alison Ailles, Hari Khalsa, and Carol Ailles, Anjili Babbar, Brett Boyko, Vasudha Bharadwaj, Eva Cadavid, Joy Davis, Catherine Field, Kevin Finora, Daniel Fischlin, Hal Gladfelder, Tom Hahn, Emily Huber, Gilbert Kirton, Patrick LaPierre, Alan Lupack, Cathryn Meyer, Russell Peck, Kathy Picciano, Shirley Ricker, Chuck Ripley, Nicole Saunders, Louise Wingrove and everyone at Learning Assistance Services. vi This project could not have been completed without access to the valuable resources at the University of Rochester’s library system, particularly the Rush Rhees Library and Rossell Hope Robbins Library/Koller-Collins Center for English Studies. A special thanks goes to the Inter-library loan staff for tracking down various adaptations of Mab from across North America and beyond in some cases. In addition, I attended the Folger Institute’s Dissertation Seminar “Researching the Archive,” led by David Scott Kastan and Linda Levy Peck, from 2003 to 2004. Participation in the seminar allowed me access to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s rich materials. The participants of the seminar provided valuable feedback on early dissertation research. The participants included: Brandi Adams, Brinda Charry, Jane Degenhardt, Catherine Field, Elizabeth Gross, Rachel Holmberg, Melissa Hull, Joseph Navitsky, Elissa Oh, Maura Tarnoff, and Sarah Wall-Randell. During the 2002 session of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, Sander Gilman and Vincent Pecora pointed me to some valuable sources in relation to disease, weather, and the supernatural that informed earlier discussions of this study. Garth Vaughan and Holly Hammett- Vaughan also provided help in tracking down information about the first train on the Nova Scotia Railway, which was named “Queen Mab.” Parts of this dissertation were presented at the British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 2005 as part of the “Subjects and Histories” panel and at the Shakespeare Association of America vii meeting in Philadelphia in 2006 as part of the “Shakespeare and the Visual Sense” seminar. I thank those audiences and panel members for their suggestions and comments. Financial support for this project came from The University of Rochester College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Doctoral Fellowship), and the Bank of Mom. viii Abstract The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England Jennifer L. Ailles Advisor: Professor Rosemary Kegl University of Rochester, 2007 Shakespeare’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet is usually read as a discourse about the miniature Fairy Queen who acts as a metaphorical midwife, delivering dreams to individuals. In The Fairy/Queen/Mab I argue, first, that Shakespeare’s Queen Mab is not a fairy; instead, she is a daemonic hag figure, one that has a precedent in the anonymous play The Historie of Jacob and Esau. The mythology that posits the figure of Mab as the Fairy Queen is the result of critical and editorial conflation by scholars of stories and representations, beginning with Jonson’s Entertainment at Althrope, that occurred after Romeo and Juliet was written and performed. The first part of my study examines how Mab became known as the Fairy Queen by later authors and critics. In the second part, I argue that the figure of Mab, first as a midwife and hag, and then later as a fairy, is used to represent and mediate queenship, particularly that of Queen Elizabeth I. Looking at works by Randolph, Cavendish, Drayton, and Herrick, in addition to those already mentioned, I use mediation theory to examine the discourses of queenship that are presented though each author’s use and ix representation of Mab. Each author manipulates the mythology of Mab that is presented in earlier texts to inform their own depiction, highlighting negative or positive elements to problematize pro- or anti-monarchical sentiments in relation to neo-Elizabethan nostalgia for the ideal Tudor court. This study builds on the examinations of queenship by critics such as Susan Doran, Carole Levin, and Julia M. Walker that examine representations and discourses surrounding Elizabeth and how they functioned during her reign and after when James, Charles, and the Interregnum government ruled. This is the first full length study of Queen Mab’s revisionist historiography and the first extended study to consider the transformation of Mab into the Fairy Queen in relation to Elizabeth and then her further mediation, transformation, and pluralization. x Table of Contents Dedication ii Curriculum Vitae iii Acknowledgements v Abstract viii Table of Contents x Introduction The Fairy/Queen/Mab: “Queen of the Old Ways” 1 Chapter 2 The Mythography of Mab: “Nothing but vain fantasy” 37 Chapter 3 “I thought such a witche would do such businesse”: Mab the Midwife as Mediating Agent in Jacob and Esau and Romeo and Juliet 76 Chapter 4 “Long live Oriana / T’exceed, whom she succeeds, our late Diana”: Transforming Queenship in Jonson’s Entertainment at Althrope 120 Chapter 5 “There Mab is Queen of all, by Natures will”: Pluralizing The Fairy Queen Mab in Early Modern England 143 Conclusion 202 Works Cited 213 Appendix List of Mabs Referred to in this Study 248 Introduction--The Fairy/Queen/Mab: “Queen of the Old Ways”1 He climbed through the smoking hole in the door, and walked out into the corridor. Frik was there waiting, and Merlin stood beside him. The people around him were puzzled at the disruption of their day, but already beginning to forget what had just happened.