The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England
Jennifer Louise Ailles
2007
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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. Everyone knew there was
really no such thing as magic. And none of them had ever heard of Mab,
or the Old Ways.
James Mallory
Merlin Part 3: The End of Magic (263)
Merlin and the “Queen of the Old Ways”
The 1998 television miniseries Merlin, directed by Steve Barron, narrates the
Arthurian legend from the perspective of the famous wizard. The two-part series, which was produced by Hallmark Entertainment and NBC, traces Merlin’s life from infancy to old age. Led by Sam Neill as Merlin, this star-studded production would not be particularly noteworthy except for the peculiar explanation given for
Merlin’s origin and how he came to be created. Merlin’s specific parentage is
1 Barron, Steve, dir. Merlin. (Sam Neill and Miranda Richardson). USA/UK.
Hallmark Entertainment and NBC, 1998. 2
unknown. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version of the Arthurian
Legends, Historia Regum Britanniae, Merlin is the offspring of a mortal woman and a demonic father, an incubus. In Merlin the filmmakers follow the precedent of his being the offspring of both a mortal and a non-mortal, but they alter it by granting him female parents: a poor human who carries him to term and a royal fairy who actually creates him in her crystal lair and then magically impregnates the mortal. Merlin’s mortal mother is Elissa, and she dies upon his birth.
According to the miniseries, Merlin’s true mother, his primary creator, is the
Fairy Queen Mab.
Miranda Richardson portrays both Queen Mab and her sister the Lady of the Lake in the film. Queen Mab is human-sized, wears very dark, dramatic, and somewhat campy makeup and clothing, and is always accompanied by a gnome named Frik, played by Martin Short. According to the film Mab is the “Queen of the Old Ways” (Barron),2 and she is concerned that the old pagan traditions of magic are dying and being replaced by the Christian religion that has entered into
England. She seeks “to create a leader for the people . . . a powerful wizard who’ll save Britain and bring the people back to us and the Old Ways” so they do not forget her, thus renewing her power and energy. Mab creates Merlin out of magic in her crystal cave, but she uses a human to give him tangible life. When Merlin is
2 Unless otherwise noted all references will be to Barron’s miniseries. 3
born to Elissa, Mab names him and leaves him in the care of the mortal
Ambrosia3 until he is old enough to discover his magical nature on his own, at which time he is trained by Mab and Frik in magic. The rest of the series details
Merlin and Mab’s conflicting roles in the births and deaths of Arthur and
Mordred, the rise and fall of Camelot, and Merlin’s quest to be with his true love
Nimue. The majority of the miniseries follows traditional Arthuriana,4 but Mab’s inclusion in the story, including her parentage of Merlin, is unique to this version.
There is no known record of Merlin being the Fairy Queen Mab’s “son.”
Historically, Mab is connected to Merlin and Arthurian Legend only in relation to the creation of Tom Thumb. In different versions of the tale of Tom Thumb, the
Fairy Queen either blesses the miniature child or creates him at the behest of
3 Monmouth’s Merlin is drawn from the Welsh stories of the prophet Myrddin and the fatherless warrior Ambrosius, which became Merlin Ambrosius. In the mini-series the heritage of Ambrosius is maintained through the naming of
Merlin’s caretaker as Ambrosia.
4 By using the term “traditional Arthuriana” I am referring to the common features of the stories that relate to Arthur’s life, the use of the sword Excalibur,
Guinevere’s affair with Lancelot, Merlin’s role as Arthur’s trusted advisor, the creation of Camelot and the formation of the Knights of the Round Table, and the search for the Holy Grail. 4
Merlin, in a manner similar to how Mab creates Merlin in the series. Though
Tom Thumb is mentioned in earlier sources, such as Reginald Scot’s 1584 The
Discoverie of Witchcraft (Book VII Chapter XV)5 and Samuel Harsnett’s 1603 A
Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures, as part of lists of folklore creatures, the earliest recorded prose version of his story is in Richard Johnson’s
The History of Tom Thumbe, the Little, for his small stature surnamed, King
Arthurs Dwarfe: Whose Life and adventures, containe many strange and wonderful accidents, published for the merry time-spenders, published in 1621.6
In these early versions the Fairy Queen is not known as Queen Mab. The generic
Fairy Queen in Tom Thumb’s stories does not become identified as Queen Mab until Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia or The Court of Faery, which was published in 1627. An example of a recent version of “Tom Thumb” appears in the 2003
Random House Children’s Treasury: Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, & Nonsense
5 Scot’s chapter is about how people come to fear bugs and mystical creatures.
“Tom Thumbe” is listed along with satyrs, dwarfs, Robin Goodfellow, imps, witches, and fairies.
6 In 1630 Johnson’s story was adapted and republished as Tom Thumbe, His Life and Death: Wherein is declared many Maruailous Acts of Manhood, full of wonder, and strange merriments: Which little Knight liued in King Arthurs Time, and famous in the Court of Great-Brittaine. 5
Verse, edited by Alice Mills. In this re-write, which is very similar to earlier versions, the Fairy Queen is Queen Mab, a colleague of Merlin’s who wants to thank an old couple for their charity and kindness with the super-small child. The story hints at Merlin and Mab’s comical and malicious sides since he “smile[s] at the idea of a boy no bigger than a man’s thumb” (338) and she “was also much amused at the thought” (338). Mab’s role in Tom Thumb is now standard in late twentieth and early twenty-first century versions where Mab is now the common name of the Fairy Queen.7
The Merlin miniseries does not contain Tom Thumb; therefore, the inclusion of Queen Mab as the Fairy Queen and as Merlin’s mother is even more unusual. This intrusion of Mab into the realm of Arthur would not be an issue except that a growing number of viewers accept the Hallmark presentation as more authoritative than some of the preceding versions that they may have seen or read. Hallmark Entertainment, in partnership with NBC, has revived the miniseries with its recreations of literary epics such as Gulliver’s Travels, The
Odyssey, and Crime and Punishment. Robert Halmi, Sr., the Executive Producer of Merlin and several other miniseries, notes in the “Foreword” to Merlin: The
Shooting Script, that
7 For more on the history of the Tom Thumb see Harry Weiss’s Three Hundred
Years of Tom Thumb (1932). 6
Gulliver’s Travels, with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen,
marked Hallmark Entertainment’s first miniseries outing with
NBC, and it was a major critical and ratings success. . .They not
only understood our company’s goal of transforming classic
literature into top-rate entertainment, they made it their goal, too!
They’re not meddlers, they’re contributors, collaborators.
They understand that to break through the clutter of today’s noisy
and jammed television landscape, you have to do something that’s
big, something that says “quality,” something that stands out in the
madding, heavily-cloned program crowd.
. . .
I believe Merlin--with all its evocative themes of myth and
magic--will once again entertain (and hopefully inform)
Americans. (quoted in Khmara and Stevens vii-viii).
These two companies have the capital to create entertaining CGI enhanced productions that are seen by mass audiences on television and DVD. They also bring in specialists, such as Lauren Boothby who was the “Legend Advisor” and
Andrea Barron who did “Research” on Merlin, to help with the crafting and
“inform[ing]” of the story. Whether these specialists really are experts in the field 7
or not their addition to the credits provides a sense of authenticity and “quality,” as Halmi calls it, to the production.
The “transform[ation] of classic literature into top-rate entertainment”
(Halmi quoted in Khmara and Stevens vii) is not necessarily a bad thing.
Transformation and interpretation is a necessary part of adapting a work, especially across media, and (re)presenting it for a new audience. All acts of adaptation have effects, though, and one of the common effects is the negation and/or supplementation of earlier versions. Particularly in the case of literary texts that are (re)created in film, the literary sources that the films seek to emulate and inspire audiences to explore tend to be superceded by those films due to the ease of access to the visual material. It takes a lot more time and effort to read and engage with a literary version of a story than it does to watch a miniseries.
When the film audience is given a sense that the film version is somehow more complete than previous versions, they are more than likely to accept what is presented as “the story” without realizing or acknowledging the numerous versions that preceded the film or the interpretive acts that created the adaptation.
Though less than a decade old, one of the effects of the miniseries Merlin is that it has single-handedly re-written the mythology of the Arthurian Legend for a large audience to incorporate the Fairy Queen Mab as a standard and significant character. This revision has been naturalized even for some viewers 8
who are versed in more than the basic story of Arthur, since that knowledge of
Arthuriana would begin with an introduction to the multiple versions of the saga by Monmouth, Nennius, and Thomas Malory, among many others. The multiplicity of sources allows for the reordering of events and the inclusion of new characters with little questioning by all but the most learned in the field.
This connection and placement of Mab within Arthuriana due to the
Merlin miniseries is demonstrated through my own experience in the classroom.
When I teach courses on witchcraft I often assign various movies for students to analyze as part of their term research papers. Along with classics such as Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Wizard of Oz, and the Witches of Eastwick, I often assign John Boorman’s Excalibur, released in 1981, so that we can discuss the roles of Merlin and Morgan Le Fay, or Morgana as she is called in Boorman’s version, in the history of witchcraft and, in particular, how their representations have changed from the medieval period through to the late twentieth century.
Both Merlin and Morgan Le Fay have undergone numerous transformations over the years as various authors have adapted and (re)presented the figures, emphasizing certain aspects and occluding others.
In the last two terms that I have assigned Excalibur, several students, trying to locate the film within their cultural knowledge, have commented,
“That’s the one with Queen Mab in it,” or ask, “Isn’t Queen Mab Merlin’s mom?” 9
There’s only one source they could possibly be thinking of, and it most certainly is not Boorman’s film. After quickly exclaiming, “No, that’s not the one with
Queen Mab in it,” I ask my students if they happened to have watched the TV miniseries Merlin, starring Sam Neill, and the answer is invariably “yes.” One student even tried to avoid watching Excalibur because he assumed the stories were the same; he was pretty shocked when he received his research paper proposal back with a “request” to start again with the assigned film. For students whose primary exposure to Arthurian Legend is through the Hallmark
Entertainment/NBC miniseries, Mab now is a part of Merlin’s genealogy; his origins and mythography have been retroactively rewritten.
In turn, according to the Merlin miniseries, Merlin, with the help of Frik, has rewritten Mab’s mythography. In the movie, Mab’s quest is to reclaim her powers by convincing the masses to turn from the new-found Christianity and return to the “Old Ways.” Her son and champion rebels against her once he realizes that she has killed or harmed everyone that is close to him, mainly his birth mother, his aunt Ambrosia, and eventually Nimue. Though Merlin is a pagan and does not embrace Christianity, he does not want Mab to win either; thus
Merlin and Mab are in opposition throughout the series with the fate of Arthur and Camelot in the midst. By the end of the series, after both Mordred and Arthur have fallen, Frik, who is also betrayed by Mab when she kills his love Morgan Le 10
Fay, joins Merlin for one final battle against Mab in the Round Table Room at
Camelot. As Mab attacks Merlin with magic,
MERLIN never retaliates. He just lets MAB expend her waning
powers.
MAB advances on MERLIN who retreats
MAB: I might be weaker, Merlin, but I can still deal with these
poor humans . . . Are you going to use your swords, clubs,
pikes and axes on me?
MERLIN: No, we’re going to forget you, Mab.
. . . The doors are smashed down so we see the Great Hall.
MERLIN signals to FRIK as GAWAIN and the TROOPS packed
in the Great Hall, simply turn their backs on MAB.
MAB: Merlin, what’re you doing?
MERLIN: You can’t fight us or frighten us . . . you’re just not
important enough anymore . . . We forget you, Queen Mab
. . . go join your sister in the lake and be forgotten.
He turns his back on MAB who screams in rage and fear.
(Khmara and Steevens 194-195)
Merlin and Frik battle Mab by forgetting her and getting the people she so desperately wanted to win back to physically turn from her and forget her too. By 11
actively negating Mab, the miniseries shows how the characters have revised her mythology to exclude her. Merlin also shows how Mab may have been forgotten in the real history of Arthurian Legend.
The three-part novelization of the series by James Mallory, ironically his real name, gives more details about how Mab’s mythology is literally rewritten by
Merlin and Frik, which is subtly included in the film version through the story’s framing tale. Besides physically rejecting her, Merlin and Frik actively revise her tale so that she is excluded from history. Time freezes for Merlin and Mab during their battle in the chamber of the Round Table, while for Frik and the others outside the room, time moves on. During this time, Frik becomes a story teller:
“[h]e was first Gawain’s court poet, then Constan’s, then a traveling bard”
(Mallory, “End” 261). Frik
told many tales of the wondrous King Arthur, who had defeated
many foes, fought giants and dragons and enchanters, and brought
peace and plenty to Britain by saying might must always be used
in the service of right. He told of Arthur’s beautiful wife
Guinevere, who had loved Arthur’s champion Lancelot. He told
of Arthur’s wizard, Merlin, the last of the great enchanters, who
had gained the miraculous sword Excalibur and given it to Arthur
so that he might prove himself the true King. He told of Herne 12
and Morgan, of Uther and Igrain, of the Lady of the Lake and the
Old Man of the Mountain, but in all his tales and stories, Frik
wrote nothing of Mab. No one remembered her.
. . .
Arthur’s story lived on in all of their hearts, each
generation telling it over afresh and adding new signs and wonders
to it. They told of the wicked and beautiful enchantress Morgan le
Fay, but there were no tales told of the Fairy Queen who had given
Morgan her power.
No one remembered Mab at all.
. . . Frik made sure that the people of Britain forgot her
completely. (Mallory, “End” 261-262).
As the primary court poet of the descendants of Arthur’s court, Frik literally creates the primary Arthurian Legends and edits out Mab’s participation as the
Fairy Queen and as Merlin’s parent. His tales are picked up and disseminated by those who hear his stories and later generations of poets, such as Monmouth, who added Merlin’s story to the realm of Arthur in the real world, altered and adapted the Legends. Once he is free of Mab and the chamber, Merlin also participates in this revisionist history. The whole of the miniseries is framed by “Old Merlin” telling the story of his life to a crowd of listeners in a village square. By 13
purposefully revising the Fairy Queen Mab’s mythology, Merlin and Frik occlude her real history.
Merlin and Frik’s attempts to eradicate Mab involve the process of mediation. At its most basic, mediation involves describing and analyzing the discourse between two entities or terms. The act of mediation is the negotiation, manipulation, and/or representation of information from one term to the other. A mediator is the point of contact between the terms, often figured as being in media res, as an emissary, agent, or author that is in the middle of things. It is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “[a]gency or action as an intermediary; the state or fact of serving as an intermediate agent, a means of action, or a medium of transmission; instrumentality.”
François Debrix posits mediation as a method or ritual practice. Debrix argues that “[u]nderstood as ‘contested spaces’ for action, and identity in society, rituals of mediation do not simply connect or differentiate. Instead, these rituals initiate novel forms of thought, announce the emergence of different aesthetic sensitivities, usher in new creative possibilities, and make visible radical political choices” (xxv). Debrix delineates three main methods or rituals of mediation-- rituals of representation, rituals of transformation, and rituals of pluralization-- where the mediator works to affect particular goals. Rituals of representation stand in or attempt to present information directly from one term to the other, 14
while rituals of transformation use mediation to purposely alter the terms or the relationship between the entities. The ritual of pluralization moves beyond the ritual of representation and the ritual of transformation to create new mediations.
This methodology is also at the heart of adaptations, which work to invoke an original while creating something new--all the while engaging in multiple acts of mediation to produce meaning.8
8 Regarding the usage of “mediation,” in the October 2005 issue of PMLA
Marianne Hirsch has “A Conversation with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and
Diana Taylor,” about the usefulness of various terms, “such as textuality, discourse, narrative, and representation” (1497), to literary and cultural studies.
Those terms are so overused and pregnant with meaning as to be almost irrelevant; instead, she posits the word “mediation” as an alternative that has yet to be fully manipulated or exploited. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett states,
“[m]edia and related terms (mediation, remediation, media practices) have long and complicated histories. While we certainly use these terms, they have not yet risen to the status of keywords in our fields” (1501). Hirsch refers to Jeffrey
Shandler who defines mediation as “more dynamic . . .; it is transactive and multiply relational, as opposed to representation, which still implies a relation of at least desired fidelity to an original, and thus still suffers from a burden of accuracy” (1497). Discussing a volume on representations of the Holocaust, 15
Hirsch notes that “[m]ediation--multiple mediation--is a given, but the reference point is the relation between the vital and meaningful notion of representation, on the one hand, and a no less complex conception of history, on the other” (1498).
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, “[w]hile mediation does not offer a way out of the impasse [between representation and history], it does offer a way around it, by changing the topic of conversation and directing our attention to other aspects of the phenomena” (1500). She goes further to ask:
Is mediation the best term for capturing what interests us about this
material (on Anne Frank’s diary)? Perhaps not, but representation
would not take us where we want to go. We are not looking for
the perfect term or the perfect concept. We like the tension and
torque of problematic ones like media and mediation, which force
us to work with and against their sedimented meanings in new,
old, and multifarious situations. By deliberately submitting
ourselves to a handicap--by bracketing representation--we are
forced to approach this material not a representation. There are
other senses besides the visual (and more than the five senses we
have long assumed). There are other modalities besides texts and
images. There are other practices besides reading and looking. 16
Frik and Merlin act as mediating agents in the miniseries when they aggressively revise the mythology of Camelot to exclude the Fairy Queen Mab.
As the official court poet, Frik is trusted to tell his audience the most authentic history of the foundation tales of Arthur and Merlin, but his position also enables him to purposefully transform the story as he does to exclude Mab. Similarly,
Merlin, relating his life in the frame story of the series also allows him to manipulate and transform the events, though the television audience is privileged with flashbacks that add veracity to his tales--something that is denied the onscreen listeners in the village. By the time Merlin recounts his life story, his audience has already been subject to pluralized versions of the Arthurian Legend.
These adaptations of Frik’s original court tales have been augmented beyond his control and have further excluded Mab as they have developed over time and distance. As a result, the characters and plot lines of Arthuriana have become so overdetermined as fiction and myths that Merlin begins his story with: “Listen!
Once upon a time...No, that’s not the way to start, you’ll think this is a fairy-tale and it isn’t.” Merlin and Frik’s original quest to have the Fairy Queen Mab forgotten through their mediated stories is so successful that Merlin is quite safe in retelling his tale of Mab since, as the epigraph to this chapter reveals, even
There are other turns besides the textual and the pictorial. (1502-
1503). 17
when the Round Table room is finally breached, the people outside the door have already forgotten Mab’s existence; they cannot even acknowledge the disruption that they are experiencing. Ironically, by incorporating the Fairy Queen Mab into the Merlin miniseries, especially by making her such a prominent character who is purposefully forgotten, the filmmakers have reposited her and made her a part of the viewing audience’s memories (again). This act of inclusion that is part of this pluralization of the Arthurian Legend is in direct opposition to Merlin and
Frik’s desires as Mab is once again given power through acknowledgment.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the Source for Mab?
If Mab is not part of the known Arthurian Legends and has only been added to them via the Merlin miniseries; or, if she was originally “Queen of the Old Ways” before Camelot and was purposefully eradicated from Merlin’s heritage through mediation of the oral and literary tales as the miniseries suggests, how did the
Merlin filmmakers come to know of the Fairy Queen Mab?
The most familiar source for Mab is William Shakespeare’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet.9 The Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet is one
9 Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. 1593-96. The Norton Shakespeare (Based on the Oxford Edition).
Eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. 18
of the most famous orations found in the works of Shakespeare. Delivered by
Mercutio on the way to the Capulet Ball, in answer to Benvolio’s question
“Queen Mab, what’s she?” (1.4.54),10 it is a whimsical discourse describing the tiny figure of Queen Mab, the “fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55). Filled with images of
“little atomi” (1.4.58), “moonshine’s wat’ry beams” (1.4.62), and “a small grey- coated gnat” (1.4.65), the depiction of Mab’s world also evokes scenes of “cutting foreign throats” (1.4.83), “bak[ing] the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs” (1.4.90), and “children of an idle brain” (1.4.97). The cacophony of images has led critics to wonder about the place of the speech in the play since the landscape of dreams and fairies seems far away from the play’s feuding families in “fair Verona”
(“Prologue” 2).
Shakespeare adapted his play in the early 1590s primarily from Arthur
Brooke’s 1562 narrative poem Romeus and Juliet. Neither fairies nor Queen Mab are mentioned in Brooke’s poem. Though Brooke’s poem includes the character of Mercutio, the whole scene involving the Montagues and Mercutio heading to
Unless otherwise noted all references to Romeo and Juliet will be from this edition.
10 Benovolio’s question is not always included in editions or always attributed to him. The question “Queen Mab, what’s she?” that precedes and begs Mercutio’s elaborate description is included in Q1 and not in Q2. 19
the Ball was added for the stage by Shakespeare. The Queen Mab speech is therefore seen as a product of Shakespeare’s imaginative genius. Roma Gill, in the “Introduction” to the Oxford School Shakespeare edition of the play, states that “[t]he speech is sheer invention. It has no particular relevance to the action of the play--except to allow enough time for Capulet’s guests to eat their supper.
The speech has to be enjoyed for itself. There is no deeply significant meaning”
(xiii). Jay Halio echoes Gill’s sense of the irrelevant nature of Shakespeare’s fanciful speech when he states:
The most spectacular imagery in Romeo and Juliet undoubtedly
occurs in Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech (1.4.53-95). Often
regarded as an “interlude” or digression, it seems to serve no
dramatic purpose. Although some critics have sprung to its
defense, and no dramatic performance would dare omit it
altogether, it remains a set speech, calling attention to itself and its
speaker, but not moving the action of the play forward. (“Guide”
57).
Joan Ozark Holmer goes further to declare that the speech “is not only unnecessary for the forward action of the play, but it actually interrupts the flow of action” (“Vain” 69). The speech is seen as so extraneous that it was cut completely by some later adaptors, in spite of Halio’s claim that “no dramatic 20
performance would dare omit it.” For example, Goethe, in his tradaptation of the play removed the speech for the sake of “the economy of the play” (quoted in
McArthur 38). To achieve this “economy” Goethe “concentrate[d] and [brought] into harmony the interesting parts, since Shakespeare, in accordance with his genius, his age, and his audience, dared put together a lot of inharmonious tomfoolery--in fact, had to, to conciliate the fashionable theatrical spirit” (quoted in McArthur 38).
Though some critics and adaptors like Goethe have seen the discourse on
Mab as “inharmonious tomfoolery,” others have argued that the speech is significant internally and externally. Internally, the diatribe is a marker of
Mercutio’s character as a pagan mediary situated between the rival families. I will address this aspect in Chapter Three. Externally, the Mab speech is seen as a new conceptualization of fairies during the Elizabethan era.
Much of the Queen Mab speech’s extrinsic value has been seen in
Shakespeare’s presumed reconceptualization of the fairy realm. Specifically,
Shakespeare is considered responsible for making fairies small and relatively benign. Before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet and its companion, A 21
Midsummer Night’s Dream,11 fairies had been seen as human- or at least dwarf- sized, and they were also known to be mischievous, malignant, and vengeful to those who did not set out the proper offering such as a pail of milk. Dr. Johnson, in his edition of the plays, writes that “Shakespeare added a new grace to fairy lore; he almost remodelled and re-invented it” (lii). Muir notes that “[t]he diminutive fairies were apparently invented by Shakespeare himself when he wrote the Queen Mab speech for Mercutio” (31). Frank Kermode adds that the speech “was written at a time when, on the evidence of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Shakespeare was thinking of miniature fairies, wondering perhaps how to get them down to the size he wanted (fairies were normally imagined as far bigger) and here willing to consider them in a rather bawdy context” (55).12
11 Unless otherwise noted all references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be from The Norton Shakespeare (Based on the Oxford Edition). Eds. Stephen
Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
12 For extended studies of fairy mythology see Minor White Latham’s The
Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare
(1930), any of Katharine Briggs’s classic studies, including An Encyclopedia of
Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures
(1976), The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among
Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (1959), and The Fairies in 22
Since the precise dates of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and
Juliet are subject to debate, critics have long disputed which one Shakespeare wrote first. Both plays contain stories of forbidden love and were drawn in part from the same source material of Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. The references to the fairy realm in the Queen Mab speech also solidify the link with A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, which features the fairy court of Titania and Oberon and the miniature fairies, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed. Blakemore
Evans in the New Cambridge Shakespeare cites Harold Brooks, who “favours the view that Romeo is probably the earlier. He points out that Mercutio’s Queen
Mab speech seems more like an anticipation of the fairy world of the Dream than a recollection, and that the early parts of the Dream contain what seem to be echoes of Romeo, echoes that grow less obvious as the play progresses”
(“Introduction” 5).
Tradition and Literature (1967), Alwyn and Brinley Rees’s Celtic Heritage:
Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (1961), Thomas Keightley’s Fairy
Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries
(1833), W. Y. Evans Wentz’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), and
Diane Purkiss’s At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies,
Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (2001). 23
Samuel Hemingway posits the opposite: that Romeo and Juliet was written later. According to Hemingway,
The only thing in Romeo and Juliet which seems to me clearly to
be borrowed from the Dream is Mercutio’s description of Queen
Mab. It has the exquisite delicacy and daintiness of the descriptive
passages of the Dream, but it is not an integral part of Romeo and
Juliet, and there is no particular reason why, in this play,
Shakespeare should be thinking of fairies or fairy-land. Moreover,
if he had already conceived and created Queen Mab when he
wrote the Dream, would he not probably have made some
reference to her in the fairy scenes of the latter? This is by no
means, however, an unsurmountable difficulty in the
establishment of our main thesis, for the first edition of Romeo and
Juliet was published after the composition of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, and the very episodic nature of the Queen Mab
speech makes it quite possible that it was a late addition. (80).
Hemingway does not hold himself to a strict view of linear composition since he ties his discussion to the notion of the Mab speech as a set-piece that could be inserted into the stage or textual version of the play at any time. A third option would be that Shakespeare wrote the plays contemporaneously and that he was 24
using the two plays to revise and work out both the tragic and the comic versions of the same plot material as he amalgamated classical and contemporary folk-lore beliefs into both. The order of composition between these two plays remains one of conjecture and though the Queen Mab speech serves as a potential marker in the composition history, the inclusion of the minute Queen Mab and her connection to the realm of fairies does not, as I will illuminate below.
Regardless of which play was written and seen first on stage,
Shakespeare’s act of mediation in revising the fairy realm is seen as a watershed moment in English folk-lore and artistic representations of fairies. Latham offers a summary of the scholarship up to 1930 regarding Shakespeare’s presumed fashioning of the land of fairy. According to Latham:
1. In England, in the 16th century, there were two
conceptions of fairyland: ‘that of Shakespeare, who paints the
Fairies, in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and elsewhere, as minute
ethereal beings, ... who hide themselves in the hollow of a nut, or
the petals of a flower’; and that of popular tradition.
2. Shakespeare’s conception of the fairies was adopted by
many of the poets of his time and has, ‘through them...become
traditional in English poetry and English art.’ 25
3. Thanks to Shakespeare, ‘the modern English conception
of the fairies is different from the conception prevalent in other
countries, and infinitely more picturesque and pleasant.’
4. However Shakespeare modified the characteristics of the
fairies of popular mythology, the traditional fairies of 16th century
England were, in their original state, diminutive in size or small
and distinguished by a certain amiability. (10-11).
In more recent scholarship Holmer challenges and qualifies the notion of
Shakespeare being the first to make fairies small. She points out,
The idea of small fairies does not originate with Shakespeare.
They appear in old folk-lore traditions, recorded in the late Middle
Ages by authors such as Giraldis Cambrensis and Gervase of
Tilbury, and particularly in Welsh lore; John Lyly often is credited
with being the first to introduce into Elizabethan drama the small
fairies, who would be aptly played by the smaller of his boy
actors. Lyly’s language, however, reveals that his small fairies in
Endimion are not meant to be imagined as extremely diminutive,
but rather as childlike in their stature because he calls them “fair
babies.” Shakespeare breaks new dramatic ground in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet when he 26
combines the subject of mortal’s dreams and small fairies (Titania
and Oberon, who can assume mortal size) and with very
diminutive fairies (in Dream the courtly attendants who can wear
coats of bats’ wings and in Romeo the agate-stone-sized Queen
Mab). (“Vain” 49).
In spite of Holmer’s attempt to rectify the conclusions put forth by Latham, she posits that Lyly’s small fairies would still be human-sized since he called them
“babies” and they appeared on stage as boy-sized. Likewise, since they appear on stage, the small fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream could also be assumed to be human-sized, or at least boy-sized, even if they are metaphorically discussed as being the size of bugs and flowers. In contrast, Queen Mab never appears on stage so it is quite possible to consider her “In shape no bigger than an agate stone” (1.4.56) as truly diminutive. The ascription to Shakespeare of the change in fairy size and attitude has become such a commonplace that Laurie Rozakis in
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Shakespeare includes it:
Renaissance fairies weren’t the tiny sweet creatures we think of
today. Neither were they the cute animated figures born in
Disney’s studio, shimmering on gossamer wings and sprinkling
fairy dust in their wake. 27
No, Elizabethan fairies were life-sized creatures, malicious and
fiendish. . . . So how did we get the cute little fairies we know and
love today? You guessed it; Shakespeare created them. (110-111)
Furthermore, Rozakis attributes the same characteristics that Latham does to
Shakespeare: “The fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are Shakespeare’s invention. Shakespeare’s fairies differ from Elizabethan fairies in three important ways: They are tiny. They are associated with flowers. They are benevolent, not wicked” (Rozakis 111).
This alteration in the size and demeanor of the fairies was popularized by those who followed Shakespeare such as Robert Herrick (Hesperides), John
Milton (“L’Allegro”), and Margaret Cavendish (“The Fairy Queen”), and, as
Latham notes above, the imagery has been transported and pluralized since
Shakespeare’s time through fine art and literature around the globe. Today, in the early twenty-first century, images of Shakespeare’s Queen Mab and his fairies can be found in children’s literature (Tracey West’s “Pixie Tricks” series), Japanese plays (Kara Jūrō’s Demon Fantasy), graphic novels (Neil Gaiman’s Sandman), and third-wave feminist music (Barbie’s Other Shoe by Canadian group Queen
Mab). This movement of the folk-lore figures beyond English drama seems to be foretold by Shakespeare’s fairies themselves where one of the fairies in A 28
Midsummer Night’s Dream chimes to Puck, in answer to his question, “How now, spirit, whither wander you?” (2.1.1):
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire:
I do wander everywhere
Swifter than the moones sphere,
And I serve the Fairy Queen (2.1.2-8).
The fairies travel everywhere and they traverse time, as Frik and Merlin’s stories do, since they are “Swifter than the moones sphere.” Wherever the fairies go, though, they serve the Fairy Queen. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the Fairy
Queen is Titania, and in Romeo and Juliet she is presumed to be Queen Mab, but are Titania and Queen Mab the same figure? Are they both the Fairy Queen?
Marjorie Garber, in her all-encompassing survey of the Bard, Shakespeare
After All, assumes Queen Mab is the Fairy Queen. Garber claims that the “notion of a mischievous Fairy Queen who tangles the manes of horses in the night links
Queen Mab to folk superstition and to the equally tiny fairies in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream” (Shakespeare 204). Numerous editions of Romeo and Juliet gloss Queen Mab as the Fairy Queen and maintain that she is of Celtic origins. 29
For example, the 2000 edition of the Pelican Shakespeare lists “Mab (a Celtic folk name for the fairy queen)” (Holland 25), and the 1998 Signet Classic Edition lists at line 53: “Queen Mab Fairy Queen (Celtic)” (Bryant 24). Even the 1997 Norton edition lists Queen Mab as being “[p]ossibly Celtic, but probably Shakespeare’s invention” (Greenblatt et al., “Notes” 884). Since Shakespeare created the Queen
Mab speech, Gill proposes that “[t]his fantastic personage is [also] the creation of
Shakespeare’s imagination (there is no such creature in fairy-tales written before this play)” (“Notes” 23). William Thoms concurs with Gill and states, “no earlier instance of Mab being used as the designation of the Fairy Queen has hitherto been discovered than that of Shakespeare in his ‘Romeo and Juliet’” (104).
It is a commonplace now in Shakespearean scholarship that Shakespeare adapted and merged numerous and varying source materials when he wrote his plays and that his “genius” has less to do with creating new elements than in rearranging known ones and presenting them in ways that were very appealing to his audiences. Thus, it is quite possible that Queen Mab is the Celtic Fairy
Queen, another variation of Titania, miniaturized in one play and made to love an
Ass in another. There is a major problem with all of the conjecture about the place of Queen Mab as another version of Shakespeare’s Fairy Queen and about her place in the realm of fairy lore: nowhere in the Queen Mab speech does it say that Queen Mab is a fairy, let alone the Fairy Queen. Mercutio states only that 30
“She is the fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55). In fact, there are no fairies mentioned directly in the speech at all. Beyond the “fairies’ midwife” there are only the
“fairies’ coachmakers” (1.4.70): “the joiner squirrel or old grub” (1.4.69). The reading of Queen Mab as a fairy, and especially as the Fairy Queen, is one of the most perpetuated mis-readings in Shakespeare.
So Who and/or What is Mab?
If Queen Mab is not the Fairy Queen then who is she and where does she come from? What is the relationship between Mab and the fairy realm and between
Mab and queenship? Furthermore, how has her mythography been mediated, transformed, and pluralized by various mediating agents so that she has become the Fairy Queen Mab with whom contemporary audiences are familiar?
This study involves examining the intersections of Fairy/Queen/Mab-- examining Mab in relation to the fairy realm and in relation to queenship, and her role as a mediator between the boundaries and borders of those terms and aspects of culture. Implicit in any discussion of the Fairy Queen or queenship in Early
Modern England is the invocation and examination of Queen Elizabeth I, who was associated with the figure as the magical and glorious monarch. Thus, the second focus of this study is how the various authors employ the figure of the
Fairy/Queen/Mab to mediate or manipulate the representation and iconography of 31
Elizabeth during her own time and later during the periods of James I/VI, Charles
I, and the Interregnum. Since significantly more work has been done on the representation of the Fairy Queen, this study focuses more on the figure of the relatively neglected Queen Mab, her origins, and her connection to the representation of the monarchy and of Queen Elizabeth in particular.
Most scholarship on Mab derives from source studies of Romeo and Juliet.
Many of these studies are circular, repeatedly citing a handful of sources (John
Brand, William Beauford, Thomas Keightley, Johann Heinrich Voss, and William
Thoms) that attempt to locate Mab’s origins within pagan and/or Celtic folklore.
These sources do not offer a conclusive origin of Mab. Chapter Two, “The
Mythography of Mab: ‘Nothing but vain fantasy,’” begins with an examination of these sources and how their progressive conflation by later editors and scholars, such as W. P. Reeves, Katharine Briggs, and Brian Gibbons, has led to the continued mediated mis-reading of Shakespeare’s Mab as the Fairy Queen.
Whether intentional or not the critical history of Mab as the Fairy Queen is as overdetermined as Frik and Merlin’s version of the Arthurian Legends is exclusive of Mab.
This study builds on recent examinations of Queen Elizabeth I by Julia M.
Walker, Louis Montrose, John Watkins, Susan Doran, Carole Levin, Michael
Dobson, to name a few, that extend the earlier examinations of Frances Yates and 32
Roy Strong on representations of Elizabeth.13 The newer studies, capitalizing on the renewed interest in Elizabeth that coincided with the celebration of the quadricentennial of her death in 2003, also delve into the negative images as well as the positive commemorations of this powerful queen. This is the first full
13 For detailed studies on the representations and symbolic heritage of Queen
Elizabeth I see: Julia M. Walker’s edition Dissing Elizabeth: Negative
Representations of Gloriana (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (1998) and her
The Elizabeth Icon 1603-2003 (2004), Louis Montrose’s The Subject of Elizabeth:
Authority, Gender, and Representation (2006), John Watkins’s Representing
Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (2002), Susan
Doran and Thomas S. Freeman’s collection The Myth of Elizabeth (2003), Carole
Levin’s “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (1994) and her collections edited with Jo Eldridge Carney and Debra
Barrett-Graves Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (2003) and “High and
Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations
(2003), Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson’s England’s Elizabeth: An
Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (2003), to name a few that extend the earlier seminal examinations of Queen Elizabeth I by Frances Yates (“Queen Elizabeth as Astraea” 1947) and Roy Strong (his numerous studies of Elizabeth’s portraits and iconography are indispensable). 33
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 in literary texts.
In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare blatantly tells the audience who Queen
Mab actually is: he has Mercutio state that she is “the fairies midwife” and that she “is the hag” (1.4.92). Hags, or witches, are part of the supernatural realm that is associated with both midwives and fairies in early modern England. Contrary to the critical assumption that Mab is Shakespeare’s creation, Mab’s connection to witchcraft, magic, and midwifery leads to an examination of the only known, and often ignored, literary reference to Mab that predates Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet: The Historie of Jacob and Esau, which appears to have been first performed in 1558 and subsequently published in 1568. In Jacob and Esau there is a character named Deborra who is also referred to as Mab and as a “heg”
(5.6/1555), and I argue that Shakespeare drew upon her when he wrote his play.
What is known of Mab from these two plays is that, as a hag and midwife, she is a mediatory figure. Therefore, in Chapter Three, “‘I thought such a witche would do such businesse’: Mab the Midwife as Mediating Agent in Jacob and Esau and Romeo and Juliet,” I examine Mab’s role as she mediates between the natural and supernatural realms, the inner and outer body, and, most importantly for this 34
study, between the individual person and the collective state body led by
Elizabeth.
Chapter Four examines how Mab has come to be known as the Queen of the Fairies by later writers and critics after Shakespeare. Mab became the Fairy
Queen soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. In “‘Long live Oriana /
T’exceed, whom she succeeds, our late Diana’: Transforming Queenship in
Jonson’s Entertainment at Althrope,”14 I argue that Ben Jonson was the first to merge the figure of Mab with the figure of the glorious Fairy Queen and that he did so in an attempt to manipulate, or to transform, the mythology of Gloriana that
King James I/VI encountered throughout his reign. Elizabeth’s mediation through
Mab represents the transfer of power to James as the newly deceased queen arises via the Faery Queen Mab to meet Queen Anne and Prince Henry at Althrope, symbolically passing on the monarchy and helping to join two nations under the new monarch.
Early modern English authors, including Michael Drayton in his
Nymphidia or The Court of Faery, Robert Herrick in Hesperides, Thomas
Randolph in his Amyntas, John Milton in “L’Allegro,” and Margaret Cavendish in
14 The spelling of Althrope varies, changing primarily from Althrope to Althorpe in the seventeenth century. Most sources refer to Jonson’s Entertainment using the former spelling, which I also use in this study. 35
her “Fairy Queen” poems immediately pick up on and popularize Jonson’s Fairy
Queen Mab, and they continue to mediate and pluralize the associated image of
Elizabeth, and of queenship in general. In Chapter Five, “‘There Mab is Queen of all, by Natures will’: Pluralizing The Fairy Queen Mab in Early Modern
England,” I look at how each author’s vision of the Fairy Queen Mab reduces her physical size, keeping her associated with the pagan realms of the forest and a simulacrum of court life, and away from real power in a time when the English monarchy faced civil strife and literal devaluation. In response to neo-Elizabethan nostalgia that wished for a married queen who would have assured Tudor succession, and thus potentially avoided the vices and civil war associated with
Charles I, Mab, as Elizabeth, is married to Oberon, as James I, to create the idyllic queen and king of fairyland. The marriage of the two monarchs establishes the best of both the Elizabethan and Jacobean realms.
Throughout all of her pluralized forms, from hag-midwife, to full-sized fairy queen, and later as the miniature queen of fairyland and mate of Oberon,
Mab has been used to mediate and transform the representation of Queen
Elizabeth I. Now that the Fairy Queen Mab has been brought forth “through the smoking hole in the door” (Mallory, “End” 263), it is time to remind everyone that there is “such a thing as magic” (Mallory, “End” 263) and that Mab, “Queen 36
of the Old Ways” (Barron), has always been there behind the door fighting for people to remember her. 37
Chapter 2--The Mythography of Mab: “Nothing but vain
fantasy”15
Mark Youshyo
Ha! ha! a dream, most melancholy wight!
The offspring of a pint of London stout!
I’ll tell you how such things are brought about.
Queen Mab is a comical elf,
Perpetually holding a revel;
She used to annoy my sweet self,
But I’ve pitch’d her of late to the devil.
She thinks nought of galloping o’er
The nose of a man with her waggon,
When he’s treating himself to a snore,
Or sleeping hard after a flagon.
Rumpti iddity, &c.
--Horace Amelius Lloyd,
Rummio and Judy; or, Oh This Love! This Love! This Love! A Serio-
Comic-Parodi-Tragedi-Farcical Burlesque. In two Acts. (1841) (1.2).
15 Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet 1.4.98. 38
Few scholars have extensively examined the figure of Mab; their works have consisted mainly of etymological studies or attempts to clarify the relationship between Q1 and Q2, the two primary variations of Romeo and Juliet.16 Many of the studies are repetitive and, along with almost all annotated editions of the play, cite the same critics and earlier sources, giving the illusion of certainty when there
16 The speech is approximately fifty lines in length, depending on whether one is looking at a version based on Q1, published in 1597, or Q2 from 1599, or a combination of the two editions. Q1, the “bad” quarto, is set in verse and is assumed to be a memorial version of the play and Q2 is seen as the more authoritative “good” quarto that rectifies and standardizes much of Q1. In a play with comparatively few differences between “bad” and “good” quartos, the Queen
Mab speech contains numerous alterations in Q2, including the change of verse to prose and the repetition and addition of figures. These changes may only be the result of faulty casting off or they may signal that the speech is a set piece that was inserted into the play after its completion. See Jay L. Halio’s “Handy-Dandy:
Q1/Q2 Romeo and Juliet,” Andrew Cairncross’s “The Text of Romeo and Juliet:
The Queen Mab Speech,” or Paul Werstine’s “Narratives About Printed
Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos” for more on the editorial debate regarding the Quartos. 39
is very little known about who or what Queen Mab is. Part of the problem when dealing with Mab and trying to discover her origins is the perpetual assumption that the key to Mab’s identity lies in the realm of fairy, when it is quite possible that Mab originally, or at least up to Shakespeare, had nothing or little to do with fairies. It is quite possible, as my epigraph suggests, that she is the “offspring of a pint of London stout” (Lloyd 1.2) and that Queen Mab and her role as the “fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55) is “nothing but vain fantasy” (1.4.98), the product of a drunken
Mercutio/Mark Youshyo--a stance that many productions of the play would support.17 It is also quite possible that Mab was known to Shakespeare and his audience as a version of the Fairy Queen, but the Mab that is presented in Romeo and Juliet is never designated as a fairy, let alone the Fairy Queen. Without textual proof no claim can ever be positively made that Shakespeare’s Queen Mab is the Fairy Queen. The known history of Queen Mab has been subject to the same process of mediation that Merlin and Frik undertook in the miniseries
Merlin, with the result being that a lot of her history has been lost, combined, or
17 Some of the performances of Romeo and Juliet that have emphasized the intoxication of Mercutio include George Cukor’s 1936 film where John
Barrymore plays up his drunkenness and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version where
Queen Mab is a drug (ecstasy) that Harold Perrineau’s Mercutio gives to Romeo and the Montague Boys. 40
occluded. In this chapter I will sort through the mythography of Mab to show how it has been mediated by the various critics.
Under “M” for “Mab”...
Since many of the critics turn to the Oxford English Dictionary as part of their study of Mab, I will also begin with this canonical text. According to the OED,
“mab” is “A slattern; a promiscuous woman.” The OED’s definition is based on a reading of Jacob and Esau where Mab is referred to as an “old rotten witch”
(4.5/1528) along with the definition of “mab” found in the second edition of John
Ray’s North Country Words, published in 1691. In Ray’s catalogue, he defines
“Mab, v. to dress carelessly. Mabs are slatterns” (54). Ray does not list any source for this definition nor is there any mention of fairies. The earliest reference for a “slattern,” from 1639, states that it is “[a] woman or girl untidy and slovenly in person, habits, or surroundings; a slut” (OED). The OED’s reference to Jacob and Esau does not illuminate how a “rotten witch” is “promiscuous” or a
“slattern”; it, instead, relies on unexpressed common assumptions relating to witchcraft.18
The OED also cites the New Canting Dictionary, published in 1725, which lists “Mob, or Mab, a Wench or Harlot.” This entry continues the promiscuous
18 See Chapter Three for more on Mab as a witch or hag figure. 41
reading of Mab, but it does not explain how “Mab” is conflated with “Mob,” which according to the OED also refers to “[a] wench, a slattern; a promiscuous woman; a prostitute.” The word “slattern” did not gain usage until over forty years after Shakespeare wrote the “Queen Mab” speech, and the word “mob” was not in use until 1655. Neither of these post-Shakespearean references in the OED clarify the connection of Mab to a slattern. It seems that the only link between
Mab and slatterns, or sluts, is the quotation that the OED gives from Romeo and
Juliet: “That very Mab that . . . bakes the Elklocks [or elf-locks] in foule sluttish haires.” The etymology that the OED provides is entirely related to formal names and not to the moralizing of women’s sexual practices that are outlined by the substantiating definitions: “Origin uncertain; perh. < the female forename Mab, shortened in Middle English < Mabel (orig. with a short a) < Amabel.” The OED concludes its main entry with similar sexual citations from John T. Brockett’s
Glossary of North Country Words, published in 1825, which lists “Mab, a slattern.
Perhaps in derision of Queen Mab,” and A. Trumble’s Slang Dictionary, from
1881, which likewise lists “Mab, a harlot.” The other definition that the OED provides for Mab is a “mab-cap,” or a “mob-cap” (to be “mobled”), which refers to “a cap which ties under the chin worn by elderly women” (from Brockett). The
OED also includes a note from Malone’s edition of Hamlet, which states that
“[t]he ordinary morning head-dress of ladies continued to be distinguished by the 42
name of a mab, to almost the end of the reign of George the second.” This version of Mab, to be “mobled” or “mab-capped,” also in use after Shakespeare, refers to a piece of clothing and not a living creature, fairy or otherwise.
Beyond the references cited in the OED, the main critical readings of Mab start with John Brand’s Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain:
Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar and Provincial Customs,
Ceremonies, and Superstitions, published in 1777 with a later volume edited by
Sir Henry Ellis in 1849. Brand devotes only three references to Mab, two of which are excerpts from imaginative texts, namely Romeo and Juliet and Josua
Poole’s patch-work poetic collection English Parnassus.19 The third reference is mentioned repeatedly in the notations of Mab. In the third volume, Brand notes, as part of a discussion of “elf-fire” (397) or “Ignis Fatuus” (397), that “[i]n
Warwickshire, Mab-led (pronounced mob-led) signifies led astray by a Will o’ the wisp” (397). Brand makes no connection in his text between Queen Mab and the elf-fire or the “Will o’ the wisp”; neither does Shakespeare in Mercutio’s speech.
This statement, though, is frequently included, out of context, in critical glosses and is used to reinforce the linkage of Mab to mob, as in the OED.
19 See Chapter Five for more on Poole’s mediation of early modern English works in his collection. 43
W. Gifford in his notes to Ben Jonson’s The Satyr or The Entertainment at
Althrope argues that Brand’s description of Mab comes from Jonson’s description in The Entertainment, which has been passed down and copied without attribution so that it has become a mysterious and long lost source. In note “4 This is Mab,
&c.” Gifford states,
This fairy mythology, which has been copied by Milton, and
which has sufficient beauty to make it familiar to every reader of
poetry, is quoted by Mr. Brand in his “Popular Antiquities,” from
a scarce book in his possession! This is also the case with many
other passages of Jonson, which are given with all due mystery, at
the hundredth hand, from some “rare treatise in the author’s
collection.” (443).
The fairy mythology that Gifford is referring to is attributed to Poole by Brand
(Vol. II 497), but it is, as Gifford purports, actually from Jonson’s Satyr and demonstrates how the sources have become merged over the years.20
William Beauford’s (Beaufort) Ancient Topography of Ireland, published in 1783, is an oft-cited yet hardly examined text. Beauford’s work is an alphabetical encyclopedia of sorts, listing creatures and things in Ireland. Under
20 See Chapter Four for more on Jonson’s Entertainment at Althrope. 44
“M,” Beauford provides a very elaborate explanation that appears to later critics as if it is discussing the Celtic origin of Mab:
MOGH, Magh, Mabh or Moghum, from mOgh or mOghum, that is
wisdom or fruitfulnes, whence Magh a plain or place capable of
producing the vegetable productions of the earth. In the old Irish
and Celtic mythology the chief of the Genii who presided over the
various productions of nature, and signified the genial influence of
the sun or that universal vivifying spirit which exists throughout
the universe, being supposed to nourish and bring forth the animal
and vegetable productions of the earth. This divinity received
several names according to the different departments it was
supposed to occupy; when considered as the active principle of
nature, it was denominated Mogh or wisdom, being the same as
the Greek Minerva or Pallas; when the earth or mother of nature, it
was denominated by the Irish Tlacht and Eadhna, by the Britons
Andate, by the Greeks, Ceres, Cybele and Vesta, by the Persians
Astarte, by the Egyptians Isis, by the Italians Ops, by the
Samothracians Cotis, and by the Saxons Eostar. When presiding
over the forests and chief of the Fiodh Rhehe, it was denominated
by the Irish Mabh, by the Greeks Diana, and by the Romans Pan. 45
When considered as the genius of Plenty, it was called by the Irish
Satarn or Satharn, being the Saturn of the Greeks and Romans,
and when taken for the influence of the solar rays, it was
denominated by the Irish Mortinne or the great or good fire, being
the Mercury of the Greeks and Romans. (394)
Beauford’s entry, which I have given in its entirety since few have read it, is really discussing a universal life force that seems, by the list of names evoked, to be an almost all-inclusive list of gods and goddesses from around the world.
Beauford makes the reading more specific by explaining that the “Irish Mabh” that “presid[es] over the forests and [is] chief of the Fiodh Rhehe” is connected to fairies under another entry:
FIODHA RHEHE, pronounced fairy, that is, Sylvan divinities,
from Fiodha woods, and Rhehe divinities. The Fiodha Rhehe, in
the ancient Celtic mythology were subordinate genii who presided
over the vegetable productions of nature, and the animals of the
forest. They were the satyrs and elves of the Greeks and Romans;
the chief of whom was Pan or Pallas, called by the ancient Irish,
Modh, Magh, or Mabh. The notion of fairies so prevalent amongst
the country people at this day is the remains of this heathen
superstition. (350). 46
Beauford draws heavily on Charles Vallancey’s Essay on the Celtic Language.
Vallancey’s essay cites many of the gods and goddesses mentioned in Beauford’s definitions, which Beauford seems to have drawn from and amalgamated at his discretion. The specific source for Mabh being the chief of the Fiodh Rhehe is not included in his essay, nor is a reference to “mabh.” The one reference to
“mab” is part of a translation of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which Vallancey uses for linguistic comparisons, and the word “mab” is the translation for “son,” a connection that I will discuss below. Part of the problem in examining the older texts is the visual slippage between b and h, which is almost closed in many scripts, so that it is confused with b. Vallancey makes numerous references to the other three related terms (“Mogh,” “Magh,” and “Moghum”), which are variations on the word “power” (6): “the Irish oigh-macht, or oigh-magh, the former signifying a powerful champion, the latter a champion of the plains” (6).
Further complicating the connection and slippage between the words is the fact that the “g” is pronounced silently so that “Oigh-magh, [is] pronounced Oigh- mah” (6), but visually the word looks like “mab.” Vallancey goes further to note that Oigh-magh “is derived [from] the old Latin magus” (6). The connection to magus, in turn, ties Beauford’s definition back to the realm of magic, sorcery, and priestly figures, many of whom are mentioned in his citation, but few of whom have anything to do with the realm of fairy. 47
Thomas Keightley, in Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and
Superstition of Various Countries (1833) states, “[i]n Romeo and Juliet the lively and gallant Mercutio mentions a fairy personage, who has since attained to great celebrity and completely dethroned Titania, we mean Queen Mab, a dame of credit and renown in Faery” (Vol. 2 135) Keightley provides a note to “Mab” which draws on Johann Heinrich Voss:
“Mab,” says Voss, one of the German translators of Shakespeare,
“is not the Fairy-queen, the same with Titania, as some misled by
the word queen, have thought. That word in old English, as in
Danish, designates the female sex.” True, but where does it or
the Danish quinde occur in the sense of Frau, by which he
renders it? Queen and quean are, by the way, the same, and
merely signified woman. How opposite are their meanings now!
This remark of Voss would never have presented itself to a
native, and it shows how diffident foreigners should be when
commenting on works in a living language. The origin of Mab is
very uncertain. Is it a contraction of Habundia, who, Heywood
tells us, ruled over the Fairies? (Vol. 2 135).
Voss, in his Werke, published between 1818-1829, comes closest to stating that
Queen Mab is not the Fairy Queen, or at least not in the same sense that Titania is, 48
but Keightley disregards Voss’s comments on the basis of erroneous translation.
In contrast to Keightley contemporary critics often read “queen” as a sexualized and denigrated name. For example, the 1997 Norton edition of Romeo and Juliet, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, draws on a varied sense of “queen” and on the slattern reading of Mab from the OED to posit that “‘Quean’ meant ‘whore,’ and
‘Mab’ was a stereotypical name for prostitutes” (Greenblatt, “Notes” 884).
Greenblatt’s definition is derived from the post-Shakespearean definition of slattern that I discussed above, and thus not illustrative of Mercutio’s Queen Mab.
After discounting Voss, Keightley then wonders if Mab is a contraction of
Thomas Heywood’s Habundia and that “Hab” somehow becomes “Mab.”
Heywood mentions Habundia when discussing water spirits in the Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, a divine poem about the fall of Lucifer, published in 1635. In the poem Heywood describes the spirits:
Spirits that haue o’re Water gouernment,
Are to Mankinde alike maleuolent:
They trouble Seas, Flouds, Riuers, Brookes, and Wels,
Meeres, Lakes, and loue t’enhabit watry Cels;
Thence noisome and pestiferous vapors raise.
Besides, they Man encounter diuers wayes;
At wrackes somes present are; another sort 49
Ready to crampe their joints that swim for sport.
One kinde of these th’Italians Fatæ name;
Feé the French; We, Sibils; and the same
Others, White Nymphs; and those that haue them seen,
Night-Ladies, some, of which Habundia Queene.
And of this sort are those of which diseusse
Plutarch and (out of him) Sabellicus. (507)
Heywood is also writing long after Shakespeare and cannot be his source. In addition, according to this excerpt, Habundia is queen over some of the water spirited fees or sybils and not over all of the fairy realm as Queen Mab is purported to be. Robert Burton mentions Habundia in his “Digression of Spirits,” in Part I, Section 2 (Mem 1, Subs 2) of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton notes that Habundia is possibly the queen of “[w]ater-devils” and that, as
Heywood notes in his Hierarchie, only “some call them fairies, and say that
Habundia is their queen” (192). Burton clearly separates the water spirits which
“are those naiades or water-nymphs which have been heretofore conversant about waters and rivers” (192) from the “[f]iery” (190), “[a]erial” (191), “[t]errestrial”
(192), and “[s]ubterranean devils” (196). He further states that fairies are classified as terrestrial devils. Burton does not mention Mab, but he does list
Robin Goodfellow, also known as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as one 50
of the types of terrestrial spirits, the others being: “lares, genii, fauns, satyrs, wood-nymphs, foliots, fairies, [and] trolli” (192). The chances that Mab is a contraction of Habundia, which is not even a terrestrial spirit such as those in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, are very slim. If Shakespeare were drawing on the folklore that Burton and Heywood are drawing on for Habundia, it seems reasonable that Mab would be a water-based creature who would be riding in a boat or some sort of water craft as opposed to a “chariot” (1.4.68) and that she would “driveth o’er a [sailor’s] neck” rather than a “soldier’s” (1.4.82).
William Thoms, in his Three Notelets on Shakespeare, published in 1865, is one of the most cited references on Mab since he is quoted at length in the 1871
Variorum edition edited by Horace Howard Furness. Thoms responds to
Keightley’s suggestion of Habundia, and offers another source from which it could be contracted. Thoms claims “I at one time felt inclined to answer in the affirmative Mr. Keightley’s question, Is Mab a contraction of Habundia, who,
Heywood tells us, ruled over the fairies?--more especially since it appeared that
Dame Abonde might possibly have been contracted into Dame Ab, and thence into Mab” (105-106). Here Thoms solidifies Keightley’s mis-reading of
Heywood, stating that Habundia “ruled over the fairies” rather than over the water-spirits. Second, Thoms precedes the OED by noting 51
[a]nother derivation may be from Mabel (of which Mab is, I
believe, a common abbreviation); and respecting which Camden in
his “Remains” says, “Some will have it to be a contraction of the
Italians from Mabella, that is my fair daughter or maid. But
whereas it is written in deeds Amabilia and Mabilia, I think it
cometh from Amabilis, that is, loveable or lovely.” (106).
Thoms is not entirely convinced by his own suppositions regarding the contraction of Mab from either Habundia, which he equates with Dame Abonde or with Amabilis, so he proposes two different Celtic origins for Mab.
First, Thoms draws on Beauford (spelt Beaufort by Thoms) to establish the Celtic origins of Mab. Thoms necessarily condenses Beauford’s argument in his essay, though he gives the definition of the Fiodha Rhehe, quoted above.21 As
21 Thoms’s version of Beauford:
Further consideration, has, however, satisfied me that the origin of
this name Mab is to be found in the Celtic. Beaufort, in his
“Antient Topography of Ireland,” mentions Mabh as the chief of
the Irish fairies. When speaking of the Fiodha Rhehe, he says--
“Fiodha Rhehe pronounced Fairy, that is, sylvan divinities, from
Fiodha woods, and Rhehe. The Fiodha Rhehe, in the ancient
Celtic Mythology, were subordinate genii who presided over the 52
a result of this condensation the connection between Mabh and Mab becomes more concrete since Thoms excises the multiplicity of gods and goddesses that the multi-named figure Mogh/Magh/Mabh/Moghum relates to in various cultures, such as Isis, Ops, Vesta, and Cybele.
vegetable productions of nature and the animals of the forest.
They were the satyrs and elves of the Greeks and Romans; the
chief of whom was Pan or Pallas, called by the ancient Irish,
Modh, Magh, or Mabh. The notion of fairies so prevalent amongst
the country people at this day is the remains of this heathen
superstition.” Afterwards, which is more to our present purpose,
Beaufort clearly identifies Mabh with Diana. He is speaking of
the chief of the genii, who in the old Irish and Celtic Mythology
presided over the various productions of nature, and of the names
which this divinity received according to the different departments
it was suppose to occupy; and he goes on to say, “when presiding
over the forests and chief of the Fiodh Rhehe” (which, as we have
already seen, were fairies, corresponding with the satyrs and elves
of the Greeks and Romans), “it was denominated Mabh by the
Irish, by the Greeks Diana, and by the Romans Pan.” 53
The second way that Thoms establishes a Celtic origin for Mab is through the Welsh language. He notes:
Before meeting with the foregoing passages [from Beauford],
which are certainly curiously illustrative of the present inquiry, I
had satisfied myself of the Celtic origin of the name of Mab,--but
upon very different grounds; for I saw in this designation a distinct
allusion to the diminutive form of the elfin sovereign. Mab, both
in Welsh and in the kindred dialects of Brittany, signifies a child
or infant; and my readers will, I am sure, agree with me that it
would be difficult to find any epithet more befitting one who
“Comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman” (107).
The connection of Mab to a child definitely builds on the sense of smallness of
Shakespeare’s Queen Mab and is independent of the connections to the fairy realm. The connection to children also reinforces the childlike reading of Mab and the assumed benevolent nature of the fairies that Latham and others have assigned to Shakespeare’s fairies.
Thoms posits one other important source for Mab that establishes her connection with the Nightmare, and that contradicts any sense of Mab as adorable 54
and sweet. Thoms cites Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and believes that Shakespeare was drawing from him when he wrote the Queen Mab speech. Thoms claims “that this connection between the powers of the elfin race and the dreaded visitations of the Nightmare arises from no confusion in the mind of Shakespeare, is evident from the fact, that his great predecessor Chaucer has shown us, in a well-known passage of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ that such connection belonged to the Folk-Lore of his times” (94). He goes on to give the passage from Chaucer :
In olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britouns speken great honour,
Al was this lond fulfilled of fayrie:
The elf-queen, with hir jolie compaingne,
Daunced ful oft in many a grene mede.
This was the old oppynyoun as I rede;
I speke of many hundrid yer ago;
but now can no man see noon elves mo.
For now the grete charite and prayeres
Of lymytours and other holy freres,
That sechen every lond and every streem,
As thik as motis in the sonne-beem, 55
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes and boures,
Citees and burghes, castles and hihe toures,
Thropes and bernes, shepnes and dayeries,
That maketh that ther ben no fayeries.
For ther as wont was to walken an elf,
Ther walkith noon but the lymytour himwelf,
In undermeles and in morwenynges
And saith his matyns and his holy thinges
As he goth in his lymytacion.
Wommen may now go saufly up and doun;
In every bussch, and under every tre,
Ther is non other incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem do dishonour. (quoted in Thoms 94-95).
Satirically, this passage points out how fairies and the nightmarish incubus, responsible for women’s sexual dreams and temptations, have gone away and have been replaced by friars who now pose sexual threats to women. Thoms also cites “The Miller’s Tale” and the prayer of Imogen, where “Fairies and the tempters of the night” (quoted in Thoms 95) interact, as another source for the nightmarish Mab. This connection to Mab’s malignant nature as the nightmare and deliverer of dreams, which I will address in Chapter Three, has been 56
frequently acknowledged, and yet often it is overridden by the image of Mab as cute and benign.
With each citation Thom’s arguments, and those he quotes from, namely
Beauford and Keightley, are reduced and paraphrased to support the reading that
Queen Mab is the Fairy Queen and that she has Celtic origins. The Variorum edition of Romeo and Juliet, edited by Furness, is the most important source for summarizing the criticism on the origins of Queen Mab up to 1871, when it was published.22 Since Thoms wrote the most extensive survey of Mab till that time,
Furness quoted his work extensively, with the largest note on the Queen Mab speech being derived from Thoms. In addition to the excerpts already quoted above, Furness includes this beginning note on Mab from Thoms:
“W. J. THOMS (‘Three Notelets on Sh.,’ 1865). We find the Fairy
Queen here invested with the attributes of the Night-mare; and that
this arose from no confusion in Sh.’s mind is clear from the fact
that Chaucer has shown us in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ that such
22 The New Variorum Shakespeare edition of Romeo and Juliet, to be published by the MLA (date unknown), is currently being edited by Paul Werstine and Alan
Galey. Much of what Werstine and Galey will be adding to Furness’s edition will/should overlap with what I have collated for this chapter from over sixty-one editions of the play. 57
connection belonged to the Folk-lore of his times. And the
propriety of this connection is confirmed by an examination of the
popular belief upon the subject as it now exists among the
Continental nations. See ‘Deutsche Sagen’ of the Brothers Grimm,
vol. i, p. 130. The reader will be surprised to learn that no earlier
instance of Mab being used as the designation of the Fairy Queen
has hitherto been discovered than in this passage, more especially
since there can be no doubt that it is a genuine name learned by
Sh. from the Folk-lore of his own time. (See Brand’s Popular
Antiquities, vol. iii, p. 218, ed. 1841.)23
23 The rest of the Variorum entry on Mab from Thoms:
Looking to the general character given of Dame Abunde, or
Habunde, I at one time felt inclined to answer in the affirmative
Keightley’s question [ut supra], more especially since Dame
Abonde might have been contracted into Dame Ab, and thence
into Mab. Another derivation may be from Mabel, of which Mab
is a common abbreviation, and respecting which Camden says,
‘some will have it to be a contraction of the Italians from Mabella,
that is, my fair daughter, or maid. But, whereas it is written in
deeds Amabilia and Mabilia, I think it cometh from Amabilis, that 58
is, lovable or lovely.’ But further consideration has satisfied me that the origin of this name Mab is to be found in the Celtic.
Beaufort, in his ‘Antient Topography of Ireland,’ mentions Mabh as the chief of the Irish fairies. In speaking of the chief of the genii, he says, ‘when presiding over the forests and chief of the
Fiodh Rhehe’ (fairies corresponding with the satyrs and elves of the Greeks and Romans), ‘it was denominated Mabh by the Irish, by the Greeks Diana, and by the Romans Pan.’
Before meeting with these passages I had satisfied myself of the Celtic origin of the name of Mab, but upon different grounds; for I saw in this designation a distinct allusion to the diminutive form of the elfin sovereign. Mab, both in Welsh and in the kindred dialects of Brittany, signifies a child or infant, and it would be difficult to find an epithet that better befits Sh.’s descriptions of the dwarf-like sovereign.
[The above is a very condensed digest of an interesting and thorough examination of the subject, far too long for insertion here in full.] ED. (Furnace, Variorum 60). 59
Furnace is at least open about the fact that even though it is a Variorum edition, he is only giving part of Thom’s take on Mab, as he notes at the end of the entry that it “is a very condensed digest of an interesting and thorough examination of the subject, far too long for insertion here in full” (60). Again, though, the cumulative effect produced by this blatant condensation is that Mab is the Fairy
Queen; she is associated with the Nightmare, commonly found in folk-lore, connected to Dame Abunde, rather than Habundia, lovable, chief of the Irish fairies, and childlike. Furthermore, Furness, via his usage of Thoms, excludes any mention of Mab in Jacob and Esau, the one known reference to Mab that pre- dates Romeo and Juliet.
Furness also condenses the other Variorum entry on Mab, which is from
Keightley.24 The main elements of “queen” equaling just the female sex and the
24 Furness’s note from Keightley:
53. Queen Mab] KTLY. (‘Fairy Mythology,’ vol. ii. p. 135).
‘Mab,’ says Voss, a German translator of Sh., ‘is not the Fairy-
queen. the same with Titania, as some, misled by the word queen,
have thought. That word in Old English, as in Danish, designates
the female sex.’ True, but where does it or the Danish quinde
occur in the sense of Frau, by which he renders it? The origin of 60
connection to Habundia (which is over-ridden by Dame Abonde above) are retained, and later critics perpetuate these linkages. Surprisingly, Furness keeps
Keightley’s reference to Voss and Voss’s belief that Titania and Mab are not the same, but this is something that most critics ignore as the Variorum seemingly supports the idea that Mab is the Fairy Queen.
In 1898, the newly revised edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable refers silently to the debates of Keightley on Voss and Thoms, in reference to Mab being Welsh for “baby.” The entry for Mab states:
The “fairies’ midwife”--i.e. employed by the fairies as midwife of
dreams (to deliver man’s brain of dreams). Thus when Romeo
says, “I dreamed a dream to-night,” Mercutio replies, “Oh, then, I
see Queen Mab hath been with you.” Sir Walter Scott follows in
the same track: “I have a friend who is peculiarly favoured with
the visits of Queen Mab,” meaning with dreams (The Antiquary).
When Mab is called “queen,” it does not mean sovereign, for
Titania was Oberon’s wife, but simply female; both midwives and
monthly nurses were anciently called queens or queans. Quén or
cwén in Saxon means neither more nor less than woman; so “elf-
Mab is very uncertain. Is it a contraction of Habundia, who,
Heywood tells us, ruled over the Fairies? (Furness, Variorum 60). 61
queen,” and the Danish ellequinde, mean female elf, and not
“queen of the elves.” Excellent descriptions of “Mistress Mab” are
given by Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, i. 4), by Ben Jonson, by
Herrick, and by Drayton in Nymphidea. (Mab, Welsh, a baby.).
(Brewer 1898).
Similar to the Variorum, Brewer includes Voss’s contention that Mab is not the
Fairy Queen as is Titania. Brewer further paraphrases Keightley’s correction that queen simply means female and expands it to state firmly that in Danish
“ellequinde, means female elf, and not ‘queen of the elves’” (Brewer 1898). The contention by Voss that Shakespeare’s Queen Mab is not the Fairy Queen, which is the core of my argument here, is included in these three major critiques of Mab
(Keightley, the Variorum, and Brewer), but all of them leave the wording so that it is not entirely clear whether Queen Mab is not the Fairy Queen or just not the same type of Fairy Queen as Titania. The use of a Danish example to illustrate that “queen” does not equal a sovereign in Brewer comes from Keightley’s reading of Voss, but its inclusion distances the example from Shakespeare’s
Queen Mab who is English and not an elf. It is only if one switches to Brewer’s entry on “Fairies” that one sees an unquestioned assertion that Mab is not the
Fairy Queen. Under the list of “good and bad” fairies, the entry for Mab states:
“the fairies’ midwife. Sometimes incorrectly called queen of the fairies” (Brewer 62
1898). Unfortunately the list of fairies and this statement that clarifies Queen
Mab’s identity are missing from the later editions of Brewer’s Dictionary.25
Besides referring to Keightley, many editors refer back to Thoms, either directly or via the Variorum edition, as one of the primary authorities on the speech. In 1900 Edward Dowden’s note to his edition of Romeo and Juliet shows how easily the previous entries and subtleties of debate, however ultimately unsatisfying, have been compressed and made more definitive:
25 In the 14th edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised by Ivor
H. Evans, besides the removal of the fairy list, the entry for “Mab” has been cut down so that the etymological explanation of queen is missing:
Mab (perhaps the Welsh maban, a baby). The “fairies’ midwife”--
i.e. employed by the fairies as midwife to deliver man’s brain of
dreams. Thus when ROMEO says, “I dreamed a dream tonight,”
Mercutio replies, “Oh, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with
you.” When Mab is called “queen” it does not mean sovereign,
for TITANIA as wife of King OBERON was Queen of Faery, but
simply “female” (O.E. quén or cwén, modern quean).
Excellent descriptions of Mab are given by
SHAKESPEARE (Romeo and Juliet, I, iv), by Ben Jonson, by
Herrick, and by Drayton in Nymphidea. (Brewer 686). 63
Queen Mab] Thom (‘Three Notelets on Sh.’) states that no earlier
mention of Mab than the above is known; that no doubt
Shakespeare got the name from folk-lore of his own time; that
Mab in Welsh means an infant; and that Beaufort, in his Ancient
Topography of Ireland, mentions Mabh as the chief of the Irish
fairies. Drayton, with Shakespeare’s description before him,
writes in his happiest manner, of Queen Mab in Nymphidia the
Court of Fayrie. Attempts have made to identify Queen Mab with
Dame Abunde or Habunde; and again with the Irish Queen Maeve.
Sir H. Ellis says that in Warwickshire ‘Mab-led’ (pronounced
Mob-led) signifies led astray by a Will-o’-the-Wisp (Brand,
Popular Antiquities, iii. p. 218, ed. 1841). (Dowden, “Notes” 35).
What Dowden adds to Thoms, Keightley, and Brand is the connection to “Queen
Maeve,” which has become a commonplace substitution for the supposed unknown Celtic origins of Mab in the twentieth century. The only connection between Mab and Maeve that I have come across that pre-dates Dowden’s is found in Benjamin Smith’s 1894-1895 The Century Cyclopedia of Names, an extension of William Dwight Whitney’s The Century Dictionary: An
Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, published first in 1889.
According to the Cyclopedia, the etymology of Mab is: “Mab (mab), Queen. 64
[Orig. Ir. Medb, ‘queen’ of Connaught, mentioned in Irish poems about the year
1100. The ordinary etym. from W. mab, a child, has no basis of fact.]” (Benjamin
634). Benjamin gives a very brief definition that is taken right out of
Shakespeare--“In fairy and folk lore, the fairies’ midwife” (634)--which is followed by a list of texts that she in mentioned in starting with Romeo and Juliet and ending with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab26 that contains no further references to Queen Maeve/Medb. Exactly when Queen Maeve was first suggested as a source for Queen Mab, if not in Smith’s edition, is unknown, but it could not have been established any earlier than the 1871 Variorum edition; otherwise it would have been included in the citations.
W. P. Reeves wrote a note for Modern Language Notes in 1902 regarding
“Shakespeare’s Queen Mab.” In his brief essay, Reeves addresses the ideas already presented, but he specifically focuses on disproving the connection between Queen Mab and Queen Maeve or Medb, queen of Connaught. Reeves states that the connection between Mab and Medb was first “suggested by the entry under Mab in the Century Dictionary of Names” (“Shakespeare’s” 11).
Reeves rejects the connection between Mab and Medb on the basis of “[t]wo
26 Shelley printed and distributed his Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: With
Notes in 1813. Though it is a famous version of Queen Mab, Shelley’s work is beyond the scope of this study. 65
objections . . .[that] appear upon an examination of the Medb saga; the first involves the disparate natures of Mab and Queen Medb, and the second the phonology of Medb, Meadhbh, Mhedhby, as the name is variously written”
(“Shakespeare’s” 12).27 Regarding their “disparate natures” Reeves notes that
“Shakespeare’s Mab is most diminutive; Medb of the Irish stories might well be a giantess for the deeds she works” (“Shakespeare’s 12).
Queen Medb, arguably a real warrior queen, is the heroine of the Táin Bó
Cuailnge, part of the Ulster Cycle. Her most famous tale involves the Cattle Raid of Cooley in which she debates with her husband King Ailill over which of them has the greater possessions. Medb discovers that their possessions are equal except that Ailill has a prized white bull named Finnbennach, who used to belong to Medb, but who refused to be owned by a woman and thus became part of the
King’s herd. To re-equalize their possessions, Medb led her army to capture the greatest bull in Ulster: the Brown Bull of Cuailnge. Ultimately the two bulls, as an allegory of the fighting couple and counties, end up fighting each other across the Irish landscape, destroying it, until the Brown Bull kills the White and then the Brown Bull’s heart bursts as he runs away. In The Warrior Queens, Antonia
27 Note how the changes in name from Medb, Meadhbh, Mhedhby is similar, but altered, from Beauford’s Mogh, Magh, Mabh, and Moghum. 66
Fraser relates how Medb was described to the great Ulster warrior Cúchulainn by one of his peers:
A tall, fair, long-faced woman with soft features came at me . . .
She had a head of yellow hair and two gold birds on her shoulders.
She wore a purple cloak folded about her, with five hands’ breadth
of gold on her back. She carried a light, stinging, sharp-edge lance
in her hand, and she held an iron sword with a woman’s grip over
her head--a massive figure. (17)
Daragh Smyth, in A Guide to Irish Mythology adds to the image of Medb, stating that she is “the most earthy of Irish queens, [she] can be seen as a goddess of war and fertility, [and is] perhaps the greatest of Ireland’s pagan queens” (100).
Smyth elaborates on her potential supernatural aspects:
Although appearing in the stories as an historical character, there
are some legends which give her divine characteristics: just as the
urinating of Aengus’s horse is seen in legend as welling up to form
Lough Neagh, so too the water passed by Medb during the tale of
the Táin welled up to form Fual Medba, meaning literally “Medb’s
urine”, Medb’s further connections with water can be seen in that
a tree by a sacred or holy well is called Bile Medb. Also, she was
under a injunction to bathe every morning in a spring at the end of 67
the island known as Inis Clothrand on Lough Ree. It was whilst
bathing here in the early morning that Furbaide put a piece of
cheese in his sling and hurled it at Medb. The cheese went through
her forehead, into her head, killing her. Thus Furbaide, son of
Clothru, avenged his mother’s death. (100)
Queen Medb, as Reeves argues, is definitely a different figure than Shakespeare’s
Queen Mab: Medb is a warrior woman who is associated with Irish sovereignty and Mab is a miniature midwife who visits people while they sleep. On a strictly textual level, Medb is associated with bulls and birds (and death by a cheese product); none of these appear in Mercutio’s diatribe, even though he mentions numerous creatures, including “atomi” (1.4.58), “grasshoppers” (1.4.61),
“spider[s]” (1.4.63), “crickets” (1.4.64), a “gnat” (1.4.65), “worm” (1.4.65),
“squirrel” and “grub” (1.4.69), “pig[s]” (1.4.79), and “horses” (1.4.89).
Arguably, the saga of Queen Maeve and her husband Ailill in the Táin has more connection to Titania and Oberon’s relationship in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream than to Queen Mab or any relationship in Romeo and Juliet. Specifically, the fight over the Bull is similar to the fight over the changeling boy. The competition between spouses, even though it is Oberon who tries to gain the boy from Titania, leads to the disruption of their relationship and to the disturbance of fairyland and beyond. Titania describes the disorder to Oberon: 68
with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
Therefore the winds, pipoint to us in vain,
As in revenge have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs which, falling in the land,
Hath ever pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.
. . .
The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world
By their increase now knows not which is which;
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension. (2.1.87-116)
The disruption of nature that is caused by the domestic competition and strife between the Fairy Queen and King is ultimately similar to the destruction of 69
Ireland by the two fighting Bulls. The connection to the Táin is furthered by
Shakespeare’s emphasis on Bottom’s transformation into an Ass whom Titania is made to fall in love with. Though not a bull, Bottom is manipulated by Oberon and Puck, out of jealousy, to punish the Fairy Queen for non relinquishing the changeling.
Beyond the “disparate natures” of Mab and Medb, Reeves offers a second objection to the argument that Queen Medb is the Celtic source for Queen Mab-- something that many contemporary scholars of Shakespeare and Irish mythology or fairy lore ignore: that Mab and Medb do not sound alike. Reeves points out:
In Irish texts the name is frequently printed Medb and at first
glance the visual change from Medb to Mab seems natural enough.
Irish db, however, did not represent English db orally, but rather
English v. The spirant nature of the letters is indicated by other
forms of the name. O’Curry renders Mhebhe by Meave.
Carmichael, . . . gives Meve for Maebh. Fiona Macleod has
Maev, and says “the name . . . is variously spelt. The original is
Meadb, or Medbh, and is properly pronounced Māve (rhyming
with wave). (“Shakespeare’s” 12-13).
Reeves continues to list other variations in spelling, all of which sound like Māve rather than Măb. The important point here is that for those critics who posit that 70
Shakespeare drew Mab’s name and nature from oral folk-lore, it is highly unlikely that he drew her name, anyway, from the oral folk-lore of Queen Medb; otherwise, Mab’s name would almost certainly sound like Māve.
In 2004 Shakespeare’s Globe performed Romeo and Juliet according to
“Original Pronunciation (OP)” (Crystal 8) or “Early Modern English (EME)”
(Crystal 12) as opposed to “Received Pronunciation (RP)” (Crystal 26). The production was part of the Globe’s educational mandate to recreate early modern theatrical experiences for contemporary audiences. David Crystal was the primary linguist who transcribed the plays into OP/EME and he provides a transcription of the Queen Mab speech in his book Pronouncing Shakespeare, which encapsulates the experience of mounting the OP/EME productions:
53 O:, then see Queen Mab th been with you.
54 She is the f: s’ midwfe n sh cms
55 In she:pe no: bigge than an agt sto:ne
56 On the fo: efinge v an lde man,
57 Drawn with a team little atoms (179).
The opening lines of the transcription clearly demonstrate that the OP/EME pronunciation of “Queen Mab,” following Reeves’s argument, is the same as the received pronunciation: măb-- not mob, mābe or māve. 71
In 1928, Knox Wilson wrote his short thesis on Shakespeare’s Queen Mab and Some Related Figures in European Folklore. Though his study is left undeveloped in places, Wilson does follow Reeves in addressing the possibility of
Queen Maeve as a source. He also is the first to dispute the Celtic origins of Mab found in Beauford’s Ancient Topography of Ireland, which have been quoted repeatedly. According to Wilson,
Beaufort’s essay was not written to illustrate Shakespeare, nor is
there anything said in it concerning Queen Medb of Connaught.
Of course it does not attempt to give connecting links between
Ireland and England. The quotation from Beaufort, apart from its
context, in Furness’s edition of Romeo and Juliet, looks like a
plausible explanation of the question; so the same quotation does
when it is traced back to Thom’s Three Notelets on Shakespeare.
But upon reading the whole essay on “The Antient Topography of
Ireland,” one finds that Beaufort’s remarks are vague. (30).
Wilson refers to how Thoms quoted Beauford, and Furness subsequently quoted
Thoms to create a sense of veracity that is not warranted. Wilson seems to have been ignored by the critics, and much of the editorial annotations and critical literature relating to Mab has remained repetitive and reductive, promoting the
Celtic origins of Mab, the Fairy Queen. 72
In 1959 Katherine Briggs, in her follow-up to The Anatomy of Puck, The
Fairies in Tradition and Literature, lists Mab in her Appendix as “A dual character. The Queen of the Fairies, in which form she may have some connection with queen Maeve of Ireland, and the prankish fairy of Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson. In the British Museum MS Sloane 1727, she is mentioned as ‘Lady to the
Queen’” (Briggs, “Tradition” 286-287). Briggs expands on the nature of Mab in her Encyclopedia of Fairies, published in 1976:
In the 16th and 17th centuries most of the poets made Queen Mab
the queen of the Fairies, and particularly of the diminutive fairies
of Drayton’s Nimphidia. Shakespeare’s Queen Mab as mentioned
in Romeo and Juliet, the fairies’ midwife, who gives birth to
dreams, is of the same sort, with a coach drawn by insects--a very
much less dignified person than his Titania in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. This minute Queen Mab, however, probably comes
from a Celtic strain and was once much more formidable, the
Mabb of Wales, with possibly some connection with the warlike
Queen Maeve of Ireland. In Ben Jonson’s Entertainment at
Althorpe she is a pixy type of fairy, described as an ‘Elfe’ with no
royalty about her . . .In one of the British Museum magical
manuscripts (Sloane MS. 1727), she is mentioned as ‘Lady to the 73
Queen’. Jabez Allies in his chapter on the Ignis Fatuus in The
Antiquities of Worcestershire says that ‘Mabled’ was used for
pixy-led. Evidently Jonson followed the same tradition. (275-
276).
Briggs connects Mab to other early modern post-Shakespearean versions of
Queen Mab and draws a picture of a variable Mab, who is a midwife, a lady, an elf, a pixy, a fairy similar to, though less dignified than Titania--all with possible
Celtic connections to Mabb of Wales or Queen Maeve of Ireland. Brigg’s inclusion of Drayton and Jonson follows earlier critics who also mention other tales of Queen Mab to illustrate Shakespeare’s Mab. Briggs, though, in her inclusion of these other writers flattens the timeline in production and makes it appear that Drayton and Jonson were writing at the same time, if not before
Shakespeare, and could be possible influences on his creation of the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. Briggs also ignores Mab’s obvious connection to royalty, as the stated Queen of Fairies, in Jonson’s Entertainment at Althrope, which I will examine in Chapter Four.
Briggs and the OED are quoted frequently--almost as often as Thoms,
Beauford, and Keightley in the various editions and folk-lore encyclopedias.28 In
28 Levenson in her edition clearly merges the two: 74
his much noted 1980 Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet, Brian Gibbons again cites Thoms:
The suggestion by W. J. Thoms that this is the Irish fairy, Mabh,
might gain support from H. Ellis’s report of a Warwickshire
phrase Mab-led, meaning led astray by a will o’ the wisp (see
Brand, Popular Antiquities, III. p. 218, ed. 1841). Queen may be
quean, a slattern or low woman, though the line in Jacob and
Esau, V.vi. (1568): ‘Come out thou mother Mab, out olde rotten
witche’ might support Mab’s connection with magic” (109).
Gibbons also draws in debate on “queen,” initiated by Voss and Keightley, but now the OED has been silently brought in with the connection to “slattern[s].”
Queen Mab. Although Mercutio’s wordplay on this name is clear--
Queen/ /Quean=a prostitute, Mab = a promiscuous woman (OED
sb. I)--the folkloric background remains obscure. K. Briggs
suggests that Shakespeare’s ‘minute Queen Mab . . . probably
comes from a Celtic strain and was once much more formidable,
the Mabb of Wales, with possibly some connection with the
warlike Queen MAEVE of Ireland’ (An Encyclopedia of Fairies
(New York, 1976), p.275)”(Levenson, Romeo, “Notes” 184). 75
Ironically, and tellingly, the online OED entry for Mab, which I addressed at the start of this chapter, directs its readers to Gibbons’s edition “[f]or a summary of (ultimately unconvincing) [my emphasis] suggestions which have frequently been made of a Celtic etymology for this use [“mab” is “A slattern; a promiscuous woman.”] sometimes drawing attention also to quot. 1557-8 [Jacob and Esau] at sense 1, see the Arden Shakespeare edition (ed. B. Gibbons, 1980)
109.” Ultimately, even the OED questions the etymology of Mab and the notion that Shakespeare’s Queen Mab is the Fairy Queen. In place of unquestionable, and potentially lost, textual sources, scholars and critics have engaged in intentional and unintentional paraphrasing and condensation to offer a literary rationale that perpetuates the “vain fantasy” (1.4.98) that Shakespeare’s Queen
Mab is the Fairy Queen.
76
Chapter 3--“I thought such a witche would do such businesse”29:
Mab the Midwife as Mediating Agent in Jacob and Esau
and Romeo and Juliet
Well, for this time hether to (God bee thanked) Jacobs hand hath beene
stronge enough to hold Esau by the heel, and if some Midwives helpe out
blooddy Esaus forces once againe, God that hath preserved us so long,
will not, we hope, forsake us now.
John Prime
The Consolations of David Breefly Applied to Queen Elizabeth (sig. C1)
Jacob and Esau
Scholars have continually tried to situate Queen Mab’s origins in William
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet even though there is a dramatic source for Mab that predates Shakespeare’s play. A newe mery and wittie Comedie or Enterlude,
29 The Historie of Iacob and Esau. 1558-1568. Reformation Biblical Drama in
England: The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene; The History of Iacob and Esau: An Old-Spelling Critical Edition. Ed. Paul Whitfield White. New
York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992. 1560. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Jacob and Esau will be from this edition. 77
newely imprinted, treating vpon the Historie of Iacob and Esau, taken out of the xxvii. Chap. of the first booke of Moses entituled Genesis was published in 1568 by Henrie Bynneman. It was originally licensed to be printed by Henry Sutton between 1557 and 1558, at the end of Mary’s reign and the start of Elizabeth’s, and may have been written as early as 1553, at the end of Edward’s reign and the start of Mary’s. The pro-Protestant Biblical play was created for child actors by an unknown playwright--possibly, the children of Eton, Westminster, or the Chapel
Royal. As stated in the title of the play, Jacob and Esau focuses on the story related in Genesis 25, 27 and 28, of how Jacob, the slightly younger and much loved son of Isaac and Rebecca, disrupts the system of primogeniture by tricking his marginally older and malicious twin brother Esau out of his birthright.
Most of the criticism on the play concentrates on the Calvinist content and the function of predestination versus free will in the usurpation of the older brother’s inheritance. Though some critics, such as Helen Thomas in her article
“Jacob and Esau. ‘Rigidly Calvinistic’?,” argue that the play’s homiletic aspects are from Paul’s Epistle in Romans 9, most critics cite Jean Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion as the primary theological influence. The “Prologue” of the play clearly states that the twins were predestined to their fates by the Lord:
But before Iacob and Esau yet borne were,
Or had eyther done good, or yll perpetrate: 78
As the prophet Malachie and Paule witnesse beare,
Iacob was chosen, and Esau reprobate:
Iacob I loue (sayde God) and Esau I hate.
For it is not (sayth Paule) in mans renuing or will,
But in Gods mercy who choseth whome he will. (8-14).
Paul Whitfield White notes that “[a]s a reprobate, Esau is denied the necessary grace to be a righteous and obedient son. In Calvinist terms, his mind has been exposed to the Word, but his heart has not been illuminated by the Spirit”
(“Introduction” xlii).
To fulfil his role as the “chosen” one, Jacob, with the encouragement of his mother Rebecca, persuades Esau to “sell [his] birthright” (2.2.599) for “a meale of grosse and homely pottage” (2.2.594). The starving Esau, who refused to eat before hunting, readily agrees to Jacob’s deal, reasoning, “I defye that birthright that should be of more price, / Than helping of ones selfe” (2.2.623-
624). The transference in inheritance is formally sealed when Rebecca, with the help of several servants, disguises Jacob as Esau and arranges a meal allowing
Isaac to bless Jacob instead of Esau. When Esau arrives late to his own blessing,
Isaac exclaims,
Thy brother Iacob came to me by subtiltee.
And brought me venison, and so preuented thee. 79
I eate with him ere thou camst, and with my good will,
Blessed him I haue, and blessed he shall be still. (5.4.1458-1461).
Isaac’s insistence on honouring the falsely-attained blessing leads Esau to finally realize his rashness in selling off his birthright so cheaply; leaving him to lament,
“Oh, to my yonger brother must I be seruant? / Oh, that euer a man should be so oppressed” (5.4.1489-1490). The play follows the Biblical story of the exchange for the most part, fleshing out the minutia, except that in the Book of Genesis
Jacob traded the pottage for the birthright without his mother’s incitement.
Part of the minutia from the Book of Genesis that is elaborated upon in the play are the roles of the servants who help Rebecca and Jacob arrange the blessing. The playwright added the characters of Mido, Isaac’s helper, and Abra,
Rebecca’s servant, and expanded the role of Deborra, the nurse, significantly from
Genesis 35.8. It is to these characters that Esau expresses his immediate rage over
Jacob’s deception in Act 5, Scene 6, and it is here that the reference to Mab occurs. Esau assumes that the servants are to blame for the situation, and the whole scene is filled with angry invective aimed at the three figures rather than at the true masterminds of the deception.
In the scene, Esau calls on the three to “[c]ome out whores & theues, come out, come out I say” (5.6.1522). Mido is called “litle whoreson ape” (5.6.1524), and Abra is identified as a “litle fende [fiend]” (5.6.1526) and a “skittish Gill” 80
(5.6.1526). It is Deborra, who is “the nurse of Isaacs Tente” according to the dramatis personae (67), to whom Esau refers as Mab when he calls for her to
“come out thou mother Mab, out olde rotten witche, / As white as midnightes arsehole, or virgin pitche” (5.6.1528-1529). Later in the scene, after he has briefly interrogated Mido and Abra, Esau directs his attention to Deborra, further insulting her by calling her “Tib” (5.6.1553) who “shal haue a rappe [rap or rape?]” (1553), which Ragau adds is the “suretiship to get a clappe” (5.3.1554).
He also names her as an “olde heg” (5.6.1555) and “a witche” (5.6.1560), who would readily be involved in “such businesse” (5.6.1560) as being “the cause of all this feast to Esau” (5.6.1558), which is really, as Deborra points out, “Iacobs feast” (5.6.1559) now that Jacob is Isaac’s heir.
Most importantly, though, this scene exposes Deborra as Mab and her connection to witchcraft and midwifery. In the midst of the scene Esau asks her about his and his brother’s birth: “Is it true that when I and my brother were first borne, / And I by Gods ordinaunce came forth him beforne, / Iacob came forthwith, holding me fast by the hele?” (5.6.1565-1567). To which Deborra answers, “It is true, I was there, and saw it very wele” (5.6.1568). Through her response Deborra reveals that she was not only present at the birth of the twins as a gossip or nurse, but that she was close enough to see “very wele” the actual birth. Only a midwife or doctor would have close enough proximity to Rebecca’s 81
womb to see that one twin was “holding [the other] fast by the hele.” Caroline
Bicks, in Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England, notes that “[t]he gossip, the nurse, the midwife and the mother (distinct women to be sure) at times become interchangeable” (12). Furthermore, she notes that “[a]lthough any birth attendant was theoretically privy to a new mother’s secrets, the midwife had an acknowledged duty to handle bodies and interpret their secrets” (Bicks 12).
Deborra’s knowledge of the infants’ secret and her ability to understand and authorize it as a divine sign further supports her positioning, not only as a nurse but also as a midwife to Rebecca.
Deborra shares a key characteristic with Mercutio’s Queen Mab: they are both hags or witches who operate as midwives. It is not known whether
Shakespeare saw or read Jacob and Esau and I have yet to see a critic cite the play in a source study for Romeo and Juliet. One reason he might have known about Jacob and Esau is that it is the first known historical or “period costume” drama. White notes that “[a]ccording to the title page, the players are ‘to be consydered to be Hebrews, and so should be apparailed with attire,’ which indicates the first known attempt in an English play at ‘period costume’”
(“Introduction” xxxviii). Shakespeare wrote numerous historical plays, and he might have been aware of the historical precedent set by Jacob and Esau, along with its content and characters. 82
In the rest of this chapter I will examine the related figures of Deborra and
Queen Mab. Specifically, as midwives, both Mabs are mediating agents who move across and between several borders or “contested spaces” (Debrix xxv), including the inner and outer body of mothers, the natural and supernatural realms associated with fairies and hags, and, most significant for this study, between the individual person and the collective state body, which is under the control of
Elizabeth as the monarch during the performance of these plays.
Midwives as Mediating Agents
The primary border that a midwife negotiates is the liminal area of a woman’s body during pregnancy and childbirth. Midwives are responsible for helping women through the birthing process and physically manipulating the bodies of the mother and the fetus to enable a successful birth. Literally, they help mediate the movement of the child from inside the womb to outside the mother’s body. Mary
Russo notes that “[t]he fascination with the maternal body in childbirth, the fear of and repulsion from it, . . . constitutes. . . a privileged sight of liminality and defilement” (326). Julia Kristeva further states that the act of birth involves
something horrible to see at the impossible doors of the invisible--
the mother’s body. The scene of scenes is here not the so-called
primal scene but the one of giving birth, incest turned inside out, 83
flayed identity. Giving birth: the height of bloodshed and life,
scorching moment of hesitation (between inside and outside, ego
and other, life and death), horror and beauty, sexuality and the
blunt negation of the sexual. (155)
Bicks notes that beyond the actual birth “[t]he midwife was expected to correct physiological defects and thus assist in the production of ‘natural’ forms” (96).
Furthermore, “[w]hen women handled the newborn head and body they potentially shaped both in ways that inextricably linked the future subject to natural or depraved (and perhaps monstrous) origins” (Bicks 96).30 Deborra’s mediation of Jacob and Esau’s births, one fortuitous and the other “depraved,” enabled Jacob to maintain his grip on Esau’s heel, which shaped his later usurpation of Esau’s birthright.
Since birth involves the ultimate borderland between life and death, early modern midwives were responsible for protecting the souls of their infant charges, and thus a second boundary that the midwife mediates is between the natural and supernatural realms. According to François Debrix, “[t]he mediator--he who occupies the site of mediation--is a ‘go-between’ who enables the passage of
30 See Caroline Bicks’s Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England for an extended study on early modern midwifery. 84
human subjects from one plane of existence (the physical world) to the next (the metaphysical world)” (xxvii) and vice versa.
Birth involves the movement from one plane to another as a soul enters the highly vexed realm of earthly sin. Demonic spirits, such as devils, were understood to be lurking about the birth chamber waiting to claim the souls of new-borns, while fairies threatened to steal beautiful and unbaptised children and to replace them with changelings. Katharine Briggs notes that “next to unchristened children, nursing mothers who had not yet been churched were in the greatest danger. These were carried away in to Fairyland to give suck to fairy babies” (Tradition 141).31 Midwives were responsible for the immediate spiritual needs of the unborn and the newly born, especially if the mother died in childbirth. According to Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, midwives were required by the Church to perform Caesarean operations if a women died during childbirth so that the child could be baptized. She notes that,
[t]he Council of Canterbury in 1236 stipulated that in case of the
mother’s death her body should be cut and the child extracted. The
mother’s mouth should be held open during this procedure. The
31 Briggs also notes that “[h]uman milk is much esteemed by the fairies; there seemed to be a notion that it might give fairy babies the chance of a human soul”
(Tradition 142). 85
same council urged women to confess themselves before they
went into labor, and midwives were instructed to prepare water for
a possible emergency baptism. Thus the midwife had to be
prepared for the eventuality of a fatal outcome of any birth she
attended. She had to make quick decisions, for the eternal
salvation of the infant was at stake. (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 26).32
As mediating agents, midwives help to negotiate the place of children’s spirits between the physical realms and the supernatural or metaphysical realms of the
32 Blumenfeld-Kosinski points out that these decisions were often vexing for the midwife. She cites a treatise from the Council of Trèves (1310) that outlines the difficulties faced in the birthing chamber:
“Should a woman die during childbirth her body should be opened
immediately and the child be baptized if it is still alive. If it is
already dead it has to be buried outside the cemetery. However, if
one can assume that the child is already dead in its mother’s body
both of them should be buried in consecrated ground.”. . . The
salvation of the child, both physically and spiritually, depended
exclusively on [the midwife]. A mistake in her judgment could
lead to the burial of the child in unconsecrated ground.
(Blumenfeld-Kosinski 26). 86
holy and the demonic. Midwives also “acted as witnesses, protecting the mother from suspicion of foul play should her infant not survive” (Bicks 10) and, presumably, stopping any mothers from taking the life of their infants, as prostitutes and unwed mothers were often accused of doing. Merry Wiesner points out that “‘midwives appear most often in the city records (Ratsbücher) in connection with criminal cases, particularly abortion and infanticide,’ which they were obliged to report. Midwives were thus employed to spy on and denounce the unfortunate women who had to bear the shame of an illegitimate pregnancy”
(quoted in Blumenfeld-Kosinski 116).
In opposition to the role of the midwife as a protector of children’s souls and reporter of criminal women, midwives helped women fulfil “criminal” acts by providing herbal birth control and performing abortions.33 The dual role and
33The vexed nature of Mab as a healer or murderer was transposed in the eighteenth century to the burgeoning medical world. According to Jonathan
Andrews and Andrew Scull, Sarah Mabb was a famous female bone-setter who was known as “Queen Mabb.” Mabb is depicted in William Hogarth’s print The
Company of Undertakers. Andrews and Scull describe Hogarth’s 1737 print as:
representing the doctors of his day as a company of undertakers
assumes the form of a mock coat of arms. Pictured as bewigged
and cane-carrying quacks, a gallery of fellows of the Royal 87
College of Physicians occupies the lower portion of the picture, their gentlemanly airs and (false) claims to curative prowess savagely burlesqued as they array themselves above a caption that reads ‘Et Plurima Mortis Imago’ (everywhere the image of death).
. . [R]eigning over the lot, the bone-setter Sarah Mabb, a.k.a.
‘Crazy Sally,’ the daughter of a country farrier, whose main talents lay (allegedly) in the strength of her forearms and the hardness of her heart, which inured her to the shrieks of the ‘beneficiaries’ of her manipulations. This notorious ‘Harlequin Female Bone-Setter’
(thus costumed here) had recently been taken up by royalty and had attended Queen Caroline. In honor of her accomplishments,
Queen Mabb herself had not long before been invited to preside over a special evening of display at Lincoln’s Inn Fields--in
October 1736--at which she had requested a performance of ‘The
Worm Doctor,’ an unconscious reference to the close connections between medical attendance and mortality that Hogarth must surely have appreciated. Certainly, three lines of a ballad sung about her on the occasion could have directly inspired his satire on the foolishness of those who entrusted their illnesses to the tender 88
impulses of midwives reinforces their function as mediators. Their willingness to provide birth control and abort fetuses and their privileged position in the birthing chamber away from the control of authorities, especially male authorities, helps to associate midwives more concretely with the demonic aspects of the supernatural-
-particularly witchcraft.
Thomas Forbes, in The Midwife and the Witch, notes that midwives were frequently accused of being witches and that they were responsible for killing infants in the service of Satan. Forbes cites Frommann’s Tractatus de
mercies of profiteers/practitioners who would likely do no more
than speed their passage to the grave:
Zounds! Cries the dame, it hurts not me.
Quacks without art may either blind or kill,
But demonstrations shew that mine is skill....
(Coincidentally, but delightfully so, the New Canting Dictionary
of 1725 defines ‘mab’ as a wench or a harlot.)” (Andrews xviii-
xix).
This “Queen Mabb,” though obviously successful and respected in her bone- setting skills since she attended the monarch, is still negatively vilified as a murderous hack through her association with Queen Mab, her attendant association with witchcraft, and the mis-association with harlotry. 89
fascinatione (1575) which states, “‘The Devil arranges through the midwives not only the abortive death of the fetuses lest they be brought to the holy fond of baptism, but also by their [the midwives’] aid he causes newborn babies secretly to be consecrated to himself’” (127). The connection between witches and midwives was established early in the witch-craze by the Church when “Pope
Innocent’s bull Summis desiderantes insisted that witches ‘cause to perish the off- spring of women.’ This indictment could refer to either abortion or infanticide”
(Blumenfeld-Kosinski 114). Blumenfeld-Kosinski adds that two years after the
Pope’s bull, the Malleus Mallifcarum, or the “Hammer of the Witches” was published, which argued, “‘No one doe more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives’” (115). Specifically, she notes that in “part I, question II of the
Malleus [it states]: ‘That witches who are midwives in various ways kill the child conceived in the womb, and procure and abortion; or if they do not this offer new- born children to devils. Here is set forth the truth concerning four horrible crimes which devils commit against infants, both in the mother’s womb and afterwards”
(Blumenfeld-Kosinski 114).34
34 During witch trials inquisitors often asked the accused or other informants how witch-midwives killed and disposed of the babies during delivery. One description of a midwife’s actions is recorded in the 1437 trial records from a case in Briançon where after “[t]he child was killed; his body was then mixed with 90
Witches were also connected to nurses, such as Deborra, and nursing mothers, particularly in England. Gail Kern Paster points out that “English authorities paid [attention] to the presence on the witch’s body of a ‘bigge,’ or mark, the site where the familiar was said to suck [or nurse] the witch’s blood in payment for his services. A key step in the prosecution of an English witch came when local matrons searched her body for unusual mark, pap, or teatlike growth”
(247), which was often located in the genital region. Furthermore, Paster states,
“[n]ot only do witches resemble lactating mothers, but thanks to the witch- hunters’ fetishistic attention to the witch’s teat, lactating mothers come to resemble witches” (249). Many of these matrons would have been midwives as they were often called upon as witnesses against other women since they had the most practical knowledge of women’s bodies. Thus midwives and nurses mediated across the “contested space” of the natural and supernatural realms as they verified the accusations of witchcraft via the suspect’s body.
Though Deborra is not involved in an actual witchcraft trial in the play,
Esau’s insistence on calling her an “olde heg” (5.6.1555) and a “witche”
‘nightly pollutions,’ menstrual blood, and pubic hair and used for ritual purposes”
(Blumenfeld-Kosinski 115). Blumenfeld-Kosinski points out that the use of the remains as part of a ritual “is crucial, for it distinguishes infanticide by witches from that committed by other women” (115). 91
(5.6.1560) builds on similar accusations that were common in English society.
Furthermore, he also calls her “mother Mab” (5.6.1529). According to Deborah
Willis, calling a witch “mother” was very common. Willis argues that this naming practice is part of a maternal fantasy where the witch is seen “as a mother with two aspects. She is a nurturing mother to her brood of demonic imps but a malevolent antimother to her neighbors and their children. Over and over again in the trial records, the accused women are addressed as ‘Mother’--Mother Grevell,
Mother Turner, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, Mother Stile” (34). Esau draws all of these connections between Deborra as Mab and witchcraft within the one scene. Arguably, his naming of Abra, who also serves Rebecca, as a “litle fende”
(5.6.1526) who “will be a right deuill” (5.6.1545) potentially posits her as a familiar devil to Deborra’s hag figure Mab.35
35 For more on the connections between midwives and witches see Thomas Roger
Forbes’s The Midwife and the Witch (1966), Frances Dolan’s Dangerous
Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700 (1994),
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s Not of Woman Born: Representations of
Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (1990), and Deborah
Willis’s Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early
Modern England (1995). 92
A third “contested space” (Debrix xxv), and the most significant for this study, is mediation between the individual person and the collective state body, enabled by a midwife, and in this case by Mab specifically. As “mother Mab,”
Deborra is a midwife to other humans, particularly Rebecca. Her place in the family as a nurse who is part of the domestic order also makes her a threatening figure. Frances Dolan notes, for witches and “servants, too, their familiarity with their ‘superiors’’ bodily needs and vulnerabilities--even bodily wastes--was feared to empower them” (Dolan 174). Deborra, along with Abra and Mido, is very familiar with the workings of Rebecca and Isaac’s household, which is why they are asked to help Jacob usurp Esau. Esau is following the established cultural fear of the demonic domestic when he accuses the three servants of being “they which haue all this against me wrought” (5.6.1533).
“The Fairies’ Midwife”
In contrast to Deborra, Queen Mab, is the “fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55) and serves the fairy realm. According to Mercutio, though she is not herself a fairy, she assists them. The hag figure Queen Mab “gallops night by night / Through lovers’ brains” (1.4.71-2). She is physically tiny and rides in a “chariot [which] is an empty hazelnut” (1.4.68), that has “wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
/ [and] The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers” (1.4.60-1), and which is 93
“[d]rawn with a team of little atomi” (1.4.58). She is very small and jewel-like, and she is compared to the delicate carvings on “an agate stone / On the forefinger of an alderman” (1.4.56-7). Ambroise Paré, who is famous for writing about monstrosity and marvels, would call Queen Mab “monstrous,” if he wrote about her, since she “appear[s] outside the course of Nature” (3) as a part of the supernatural world of fairies and wild people who live on the margins of society.
Critics often quote George Steevens, who posits that Mab being the
“‘fairies’ midwife’ . . . does not mean the midwife to the fairies, but that she was the person among the fairies whose department it was to deliver the fancies of sleeping men of their dreams, those children of an idle brain” (quoted in Furness
62). Jill Levenson, in the 2000 Oxford Shakespeare edition, argues that “fairies’ midwife allows Mab both functions, and perhaps that of assisting at human births .
. . OED cites to illustrate sb. I, ‘a woman who assists other women in childbirth,’ rather than 3, ‘One who or that which helps to produce or bring anything to birth’” (Romeo, “Notes” 184).36 As a midwife to the fairies, Mab could also be involved in the delivery of fairy babies. Briggs notes that the “human midwife is almost as important to the fairies as the nursing mother; it seems sometimes as if
36 See Marjorie Garber’s Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to
Metamorphosis and Jerome Mandel’s “Dream and Imagination in Shakespeare” for more on Mab as the deliverer of dreams. 94
fairy babies could not be delivered without human aid” (Tradition 142).37 Closer to my reading, Marie Garnier-Giamarchi sees Mab as a mediatory figure:
“Shakespeare’s ‘midwife’ read, laterally, as ‘mid-wife,’ i.e., as the woman-in-the middle rather than literally, as the assistant to childbirth” (149). Furthermore, she notes that “[s]uch a being-in-the-middle calls for no feminist or post-feminist agenda, but for a revision of sexuality along mobile lines. Like the Mercurial god of borders--possibly Welsh borders--Mab voices her liminal status in textual as well as sexual matters” (Garnier-Giamarchi 149). Queen Mab’s position on the border parallels Mercutio’s liminal place, as the Mercurial connection between the Capulet and Montague families in Romeo and Juliet.
The Queen Mab speech is an extension of Mercutio’s character. The speech is significant as an internal marker of Mercutio’s nature. When
Shakespeare adapted Romeo and Juliet he developed Mercutio, who is a cold- handed courtier and potential rival for Juliet’s hand in Arthur Brooke’s poem
Romeus and Juliet, into the passionate best friend and principal defender of
Romeo. Mercutio demonstrates his imagination and bawdy wit through his knowledge of dreams, folk-lore, and the realm of witchcraft as he details the
37 The earliest known version of the midwife tale, where a human is a birth attendant to fairies, and thus privy to the secrets of the birth, is found in Gervase of Tilbury's thirteenth-century Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor. 95
various elements of the speech. Later in the play, he builds on this familiarity with magic and “gossip[s]” (2.1.11) through an “invocation” (2.1.27) of Romeo after the Ball. He proclaims:
Nay, I’ll conjure too.
Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover!
Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh.
Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied.
Cry but ‘Ay me!’ Pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove’.
Speak to my gossip Venus one fair word,
. . .
The ape is dead, and I must conjure him. -- (2.1.6-16)
Mercutio’s ability to call on the supernatural is further cemented when he curses the two families, as he dies, with his trice-stated curse: “A plague o’ both your houses” (3.1.87, 95, 101). The conjuration and curse both recall the mystical and pagan elements of Mercutio’s nature that Shakespeare first exposes during the character’s exposition on Queen Mab.
The linking up of these three supernatural scenes supports Robert Evans’s claim that the speech is “an important part of the whole fabric of the play” (Osier
2). He states further, in contrast to the claims of Jay Halio, Roma Gill, and others, that “[t]he speech does point forward to the dramatic action, and, secondly, it 96
illustrates the fullness of Mercutio’s character, also necessary to the development of the plot . . . It explains Mercutio to the audience, and he in turn directs the audience to the action that is to follow” (Evans, Osier 86). The Mab speech, reinforced by the other scenes, establishes Mercutio’s nature, particularly that he
“has something daemonic in him, in the sense that his quality of life transcends the normal level of being” (Leech 18). According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, a “daemon” is a “supernatural being of a nature intermediate between that of gods and men; an inferior divinity, spirit, genius (including the souls or ghosts of deceased persons, esp. deified heroes).” A “daemon” is not necessarily evil, but it is an intermediary spirit and as such Mercutio is a medium, or “avatar”
(Shakespeare’s 119) as Joseph Porter calls him, between the material and the spiritual worlds in the play. Similarly, as the Prince’s kinsmen, Mercutio is a middle-man, a mediator or ambassador like his namesake Mercury (the messenger of the Gods), between the two feuding families, even though he aligns himself more with Romeo and by extension, the Montagues. It is Mercutio’s centrality, and his status as a mediator, that lets him become a key actor in the plot of the play. The Queen Mab speech is part of Mercutio’s attempt to persuade Romeo to attend the Capulet Ball, which begins the plot of forbidden love with Juliet. It is the same bawdy wit that Mercutio demonstrates in his discourse on the supernatural that eventually leads to his temperamental fight with Tybalt and their 97
deaths in the midst of Act Three, which moves the action from comedy to tragedy and the resulting resolution of the familial and civil conflict.38
In Mercutio’s oration Queen Mab proliferates both “dream[s] of love”
(1.4.72) and nightmares where she “[d]rums in [a man’s] ear, at which he starts and wakes, / And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two” (1.4.86-7). Many of the dreams that Mab evokes are erotic, dealing with the “sexual matters” (149) that Garnier-Giamarchi mentions, as she sits “Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep” (1.4.59), “gallops o’er a lawyer’s lip” (1.4.77), or “when maids lie on their backs, / [she] presses them and learns them first to bear, / Making them women of good carriage” (1.4.92-4). Queen Mab operates as a form of incubus and succubus. According to Wayne Anderson,
Incubus. . . [means] to lie upon, to sit on in order to hatch as an
incubator--metaphorically an evil spirit believed to lie upon persons in
troubled sleep; when carried further, to have sexual intercourse with a
woman at night while she sleeps. The succubus [in contrast] is one
who ‘lies under,’ a demon in female form who has sex with men
withdrawing semen while they sleep. (719)
38 See Joseph Porter’s Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His History and Drama for the most extensive study of Mercutio’s character. 98
As an incubus, Mab takes on the form of a disease. According to Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, “Incubus is a bodilie disease (as hath beene said) although it extend unto the trouble of the mind: which of some is called The
Mare, oppressing manie in their sleepe so sore, as they are not able to call for helpe, or stir themselves under the burthen of that heavie humor” (Booke IV
Chapter XI). Queen Mab visits both men and maids in their dreams and operates as a mutable bisexual and potentially hermaphroditic or transgendered figure of disease capable of inspiring and satisfying anyone’s fantasies as well as causing their grief and love-sickness. This bisexual hermaphrodism is evident in the
Merlin miniseries where Queen Mab, as Merlin’s demonic mother, replaces the paternal incubus who normally sires him.
The name “Queen Mab” has a nominal connection to hermaphroditic or transgendered figures. “Queen” as several critics, such as Thomas Keightley, have tried to argue means “woman,” while “mab,” according to Charles Scott, in his study of English words and the alteration of their consonants, refers to “son of.” Scott notes:
The Welsh ap or ab is an altered form of mab, earlier map, Middle
Welsh map, Old Welsh map, in the earliest form maqvi, which is
properly a genitive form, cognate with Old Irish maqvi, maqqvi,
moqvi; latter maccui, maccu, Middle Irish macc, mac, modern 99
Irish mac, Gaelic mac, Manx mac, Bret. map, Old Gaulish map- in
Mapilus; all from an original Celtic maqvus, maqvas, mac-was,
cognate with Old Teutonic magwus in Goth. magus, boy, servant,
Old Saxon magu, Anglo-Saxon (in poetry) magu, mago, son, boy,
young man, servant, Icel. mögr, son; a word of wide kindred, from
which by feminine formatives we have the words may, maid, and
maiden, all meaning ‘girl.’
The Welsh map, modern mab, a boy, son, appears in
various English surnames, Map, Mapp, Mappe, Mape, Mapes,
Mapps, Mappes, Mabb, Mabbe, Mabs, Mabbs. . . .
As the word meaning ‘son’ the Welsh map, mab naturally
appears in genealogical expressions. In pedigrees it is the regular
term. In such use map or mab came to be reduced to ap or ab. If
the m was not wholly lost, it was liable to the usual positional
mutation, map becoming fap, pronounced vap; accordingly in ME.
records it sometimes appears as vap” (91-92).
“Queen Mab” can thus be read as “woman boy.” Beyond referring to the hermaphroditic nature of the figure, this combination of male and female can also be seen as a metatheatrical reference to the boy players who would have played 100
Queen Mab on stage if she were more than a performative speech act, as they did
Deborra.
Queen Mab goes beyond the mere manufacturing of dreams and enacting erotic visions to actually altering the bodies of those she visits. She “plaits the manes of horses in the night, / And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs, /
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes” (1.4.89-91), and “O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream, / . . . oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues /
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are” (1.4.74-6). Primarily, though,
Mab penetrates the corporeal margins of the minds and bodies of those whom
“she [literally] gallops . . . / Through” (1.4.71-2). Joining Mab on her invasive journeys into the body and mind of her victims are the “team of little atomi”
(1.4.58), or dust motes, and “Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat” (1.4.65).
Mab and her minions pierce the body, invading the mind with dreams and altering the interior and exterior of the host. Dolan notes that
witches could dictate their victims’ behavior, depriving them of
agency, or facilitate demonic possession. Witches were thus
understood as persons separate from or outside of their victims,
yet simultaneously inside of them. Like our conception of the
virus, alien but inside, hostile but included, the construction of the
witch attempted to describe a threat perceived as not precisely 101
locatable, a consequence of the unfixed boundary between self and
other. (184).
By figuring the originator of dreams as an external creature that is small, almost at the “atomi[c]” level of germs and bacteria, and which invades the larger corpus without impunity, Shakespeare provides a pseudo-medical discourse of infection that is closer to what medical scientists now know and postulate about the spread of disease.39
Keith Thomas points to the connection between fairies and disease, noting that the “very word ‘fairy’ was itself used...to convey the idea of a malignant disease of spiritual origin which could be cured only by charming or exorcism
The Anglo-Saxons had described persons smitten with a supernatural malady as
‘elf-shot,’ and the term was applied to sick animals in Celtic areas until modern times” (607). Fairies themselves also caused disease such as a “‘fairy blast’ (when the fairy strikes any one a tumor rises, or they become paralyzed. This is called a
39 See Anna-Julia Zwierlein’s “Queen Mab Under the Microscope: the Invention of Subvisible Worlds in Early Modern Science and Poetry” for more on the fictional bridge between the visibilia and subvisibilia in various proto-scientific writers, including Margaret Cavendish. 102
‘fairy blast’ or a ‘fairy stroke’” (Yeats 156).40 As a hag figure who mediates between the individual and the fairy realm, Mab is a carrier of multiple forms of the fairies’ diseases.
The discourse of disease that Queen Mab mediates is part of a “ritual of representation” (Debrix viii) that negotiates the cultural context of disease in
Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare adapted Romeo and Juliet from Brooke’s poem sometime in the mid 1590s, between 1593 and 1596. During this time there was a major outbreak of bubonic plague that peaked in 1593 and resulted in the frequent closing of the theatres. Leeds Barroll notes that the plague was so disruptive that the “economic impact in 1593-94 is apparent from decreasing numbers [of playing companies]: several companies that were operating in London before the plague of 1593 seem to have disappeared by 1595” (70). By forcing Shakespeare to take time away from the stage, disease thus literally infected, and partially affected, the writing of the play through the inclusion of disease-based content.41
40 See Briggs’s Encyclopedia for more on “Blights and illnesses attributed to the fairies” (25-27).
41 See Leeds Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater and
Wolfgang Klooss’s “Disease and Contamination: Reading Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson From the Margin” for more on the material effects the plague had on
Shakespeare’s writing. 103
As Barroll and, more recently, Margaret Healy and Jonathan Gil Harris,42 have examined, the plague was a dark and dangerous reality of daily life and its energies, not surprisingly, are reflected and mediated in Shakespeare’s work. This connection is shown by Mercutio’s curse on the families. That death was also a commonplace, whether by sword or disease, is demonstrated when Juliet “dies”: no one raises any questions when Juliet is suddenly found dead on the morning of her wedding to Paris. Juliet’s first death, her “unnatural sleep” (5.3.152), is never attributed to the plague though it could have easily been. Instead, the plague leads to her second and real death when Friar John is unable to deliver Friar Laurence’s letter to Romeo in Mantua because he is held in quarantine. Friar John tells Friar
Laurence:
Going to find a barefoot brother out--
One of our order--to associate me
Here in this city visiting the sick,
And finding him, the searchers of the town,
Suspecting that we both were in a house
Where the infectious pestilence did reign,
42 See Margaret Healy’s Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies,
Plagues, and Politics and Jonathan Gil Harris’s Foreign Bodies and the Body
Politic and Sick Economies. 104
Sealed up the doors, and would not let us forth,
So that my speed to Mantua there was stayed. (5.2.5-12)
As a result of the plague’s intervention, Romeo does not receive the Friar’s letter telling him of the reality of Juliet’s “death.” Romeo returns to Verona to die beside his wife in the Capulet tomb, which in turn leads to Juliet’s suicide.
In Elizabethan England, Greenblatt notes, the bubonic plague “was terrifyingly sudden in its onset, rapid in its spread, and almost invariably lethal.
Physicians were helpless in the face of the epidemic, though they prescribed amulets, preservatives, and sweet-smelling substances (on the theory that the plague was carried by noxious vapors)” (Norton Shakespeare 2-3). Shakespeare’s text is firmly based in the latest scientific knowledge of his day. Mercutio’s speech refers to the usage of “sweet smelling substances” to protect the body and ward off disease. Queen Mab is described as becoming “angry” and inflicting
“blisters” when ladies taint “their breaths with sweetmeats.” The use of sweet smelling candies (nuts or pastries) can be read as an attempt to hold the noxious vapors, or the miasma, of the plague at bay, especially while one is sleeping and unable to resist Queen Mab’s menacing powers more directly. Queen Mab’s 105
vindictive and torturous attack on the external body of the ladies is then an expression of her rage at the active attempt to thwart her powers of invasion.43
The figure of Queen Mab provides a socio-cultural explanation for the spread of disease that is tied to the folklore of the fairy realm. Her progenitive role in the propagation of disease is furthered through her role as “the fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55). Queen Mab helps others to breed and if those individuals have been infected by her dreams and visitations then she is helping to spread her own pestilence into the world.
The pestilential nature of the monstrous Mab evokes the grotesque body of those she attends. Following Bakhtin, Russo notes that the pregnant body is “the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change” (Russo 325). Charged with progeny, the pregnant corpus is filled with potentiality that is susceptible to the contagion of Mab’s dreams. Having two minds, a body already penetrated within another body, the gestating body is itself a fearful metaphor for the invasive Queen Mab. As a supernatural midwife,
Queen Mab operates as a daemonic agent, an intermediary figure between good and evil and between the interior and exterior limits of the pregnant body and
43 For a study on the usage of sweet smells and herbs to protect one from noxious and disease carrying vapors see J. P. Conlan’s “Puck’s Dread Broom.” English
Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 33-41. 106
mind. The ability to cross barriers at will makes the Mab figure one of subversion and threat. That Queen Mab is associated with the vexed realm of birth makes her even more powerful and threatening. Mab’s intimate knowledge of the hidden and dangerous world of the female interior posits her as the pre-eminent gynecologist--one who would be especially frightening to those who wished to control corporeal knowledge.
The nightmarish fear of Queen Mab, which is particularly demonstrated through the cumulative and increasing repulsiveness of Mercutio’s discourse that is only stopped through Romeo’s forceful interjection of “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!” (1.4.95), mirrors the larger discourse surrounding the medicalization of disease control and childbirth. Blumenfeld-Kosinski argues that the “Plague led to tightening requirements in the medical profession and, at the same time, to a search for scapegoats in society, women had to relinquish their places of relative autonomy and authority in the healing profession” (119). Queen Mab is a midwife, a healing helper to women, who is subject to the same vilification that afflicted mortal midwives during the middles ages and the early modern period.
Thus, Mab, the carrier and infector of disease, who is a birth attendant to more pestilence, is ultimately labeled, like Deborra, as a “hag” (1.4.92) by Mercutio.
Debrix and Weber note that “[t]he violence of abjection makes use of certain mediated sights . . . in order to foreclose cultural meanings, political 107
possibilities, and gender representations” (Debrix and Weber xiv). Thus, as a scapegoat for the social disruption of the body-politic, as a result of the plague and other infectious diseases, women, midwives, and pagans are all subsumed rightly or wrongly within the culpable abject figure of Queen Mab.
Representing Queen Elizabeth I
Authors are also mediating agents, like Mab and Mercutio, and as such, they mediate the images and representations in their works so that they have internal and external or metaphorical meaning that may or may not be clearly received and interpreted by the audience. As mediator the author has a direct role in the transference of information via the ritual of representation and they affect the outcome of the ritual. According to Debrix and Weber “[r]ituals of representation assume that the operation of mediation is neutral and value-free. The proponents of such a usage argue that mediation’s sole objective is to transfer or confer meaning by relating two domains of experiences, which, at the same time, must be kept separate” (viii). Beyond people who have the specific job of a mediator, many objects are also involved in the transference of meaning, such as characters, symbols, emblems, and other forms of signification. Debrix and Weber also note,
“[t]o fulfill this operation of passage of meaning, mediation is presented as a site that transmits but never alters. According to this method of mediation, mediators 108
are neutral agents of representation” (viii). Though a ritual of reportive representation may appear neutral, with the “agents of mediation” (Debrix and
Weber viii) just passing information from one side of a dichotomous border to the other, from author to audience, the reality is that the mediation is performative and not neutral. Representation is a mediated act, mediation is an active process, and as a social act mediation is never neutral.
For example, when viewing a painting on the wall of a gallery, one may acknowledge the performative ritual of mediation in the artwork and seemingly ignore the mediated aspects of the presentation of the artwork such as its placing on the wall, framing, title or notes, lighting, location with respect to other artworks or architectural elements such as a door or pillar. All of these elements mediate the reading and the reception of the painting by the viewer, however, so that there is never a pure representation, or a pure passing of information from painting to the mind. Raymond Williams, in Keywords, points out this lack of neutrality in two primary layers of mediation:
Mediation is . . . neither neutral nor ‘indirect’ (in the sense of
devious or misleading). It is a direct and necessary activity
between different kinds of activity and consciousness. It has its
own, always specific forms. The distinction is evident in a
comment by Adorno: ‘mediation is in the object itself, not 109
something between the object and that to which it is brought.
What is contained in communications, however, is solely the
relationship between producer and consumer’ (Theses on the
Sociology of Art, 1967). All ‘objects’, and in this context notably
works of art, are mediated by specific social relations but cannot
be reduced to an abstraction of that relationship; the mediation is
positive and in a sense autonomous. (206).
Mediation is in each object or term and it is between the objects and terms.
Arguably, nothing is left unmediated since every thing, concept, and/or action, requires the mediation of a signification system, such as language, for reception and interpretation to occur.
These layers of mediation can occlude or exemplify the discourses that are being (re)presented. As part of rituals of representation, the figures of Mab in both
Jacob and Esau and Romeo and Juliet are used to mediate the representation of
Queen Elizabeth both overtly and covertly.
The story of Jacob and Esau deals with the usurpation of birthright, or succession by a younger brother. Deborra’s role as mother Mab in the narrative is, as the midwife, to authorize the original prophecy by witnessing the secret of the twins’ birth: that Jacob was holding onto Esau’s heal. Second, Deborra helps
Rebecca in assisting Jacob to complete the usurpation by deceiving Isaac and 110
receiving the blessing. Through her mediatory actions as a midwife to the family,
Deborra affects the succession of the family and by extension, since Isaac is a ruler, the larger state. In addition, since Esau is a “reprobate” (“Prologue” 11) and Jacob “a yong man of godly conuersation” (“Dramatis personae”), Deborra’s actions are seen as good for the nation. David Bevington states that the play
“dangerously sanctions any rebellion when divine command may be taken to oversway established order” (112). What would normally be read as a negative disruption of the normative structure, particularly of the doctrine of non- resistance,44 is here celebrated since Jacob’s duplicity was accomplished, with the help of his mother and several other characters, in the name of God. Midwives, like Deborra, can thus help the state when they help the good son usurp the malicious one, but, tying back to John Prime’s warning in my epigraph, they can just as easily mediate the situation to the detriment of society as Jacob ends the play on the run from Esau who had earlier sworn to kill him and re-claim his inheritance.
44 The doctrine of non-resistance involves accepting the status quo as divinely ordained and therefore unquestionable. Regardless of how violent and unjust the system of governance is it should be accepted with love and grace rather than rejected through violence and rebellion. 111
Against this story of usurpation, some critics have seen a parallel to the relationship between Protestantism rising over Catholicism, and the vexed relationship between Queen Mary and her younger sister Queen Elizabeth. White posits that
the dramatist obviously sees in the analogy of the Old Testament
story a two-edged sword against contemporary Catholicism. He
uses the analogy of Jacob’s supremacy over the elder Esau, first of
all, to demonstrate the validity of the doctrine of predestination as
opposed to the Roman doctrine of free will and justification by
works. And secondly, Esau may be seen as the older generation of
English Catholics who have no place in England’s future; Jacob,
on the other hand, stands for Protestant elect who are predestined
to live in prosperity as the new Israel. (“Introduction” xliii).
In this reading, Esau represents the Catholics and Mary while Jacob represents the
Protestants and Elizabeth. Using the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, the play thus supports the usurpation of the chosen Protestant Elizabeth over her reprobate
Catholic sister. Michelle Karen Ephraim notes that Elizabeth saw herself in terms of the twins’ relationship in a letter that she wrote to Henry of Navarre, after he had converted to Catholicism and ascended the French throne. In the letter,
Elizabeth wrote, “‘Ah, it is dangerous to do ill that good may come of it. Yet I 112
hope that sounder inspiration shall come to you. In the meantime I shall not cease to set you in the foremost rank of my devotions that the hands of Esau undo not the blessing of Jacob’” (quoted in Ephraim 303). Ephraim argues that “Elizabeth imagines a vengeful Esau, a figure of Catholic brutality, who threatens to ‘undo’
Jacob’s blessing; her ‘sounder inspiration’ is given shape through allusion to the carnal, primal experience of fraternal rivalry” (303). If Jacob represents
Elizabeth, then Deborra acts as Queen Elizabeth’s metaphorical midwife; and though Elizabeth was not associated with the Fairy Queen when the play was written, from a Shakespearean perspective, Deborra, as Mab, would be the
“fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55).45
The figure of Deborra is also associated with Elizabeth more directly, though. Of all Queen Elizabeth’s mythological associations, Susan Doran notes that “the image of the Virgin Queen, in fact, appeared relatively late in
Elizabeth’s reign” (Monarchy 10). From around 1559 to the early 1580s, Doran states, “Elizabeth had found a model for active female rule in the scriptural figures of Deborah, the Isralite Judge of the Old Testament” (Monarchy 11).
45 Though she does not consider Deborra’s role in the usurpation see Naomi S.
Pasachoff’s chapter on Jacob and Esau in Playwrights, Preachers, and
Politicians: A Study of Four Tudor Old Testament Dramas for one of the most extensive analysis of the play’s political and religious content. 113
Deborah appears in the Book of Judges 4 and 5 and is a prophetess and warrior woman who is remembered as “a providential ruler and the rescuer of the Israelite chosen people from Canaanite idolatry, [which] could readily be identified with
Elizabeth in her attempts to uproot popery and build up the Protestant Church in
England” (Doran, Monarchy 11). The figure of Deborah was a stock figure for
Elizabeth in various entertainments and dramas.46 Ephraim argues that the writer of Jacob and Esau combines the figures of Deborah with Deborra, thereby making a mediated representation of Queen Elizabeth as a nurse and warrior prophetess. Ephraim points out that Elizabeth “often appeared allegorically as a benevolent ‘nurse,’ who would protect her subjects from their Catholic enemies”
(313). She cites James Aske’s Elizabetha Trumphans from 1588 as an example where “Aske allegorizes Mary, Queen of Scots and her co-conspirators as children who have rejected their loyal nurse Elizabeth, and thus abandoned their mother England” (Ephraim 313). According to Aske,
Lament with me for England’s haples lucke:
Her haples lucke through these unnaturall sonnes,
Who seeke to ruine her their mother deare,
And lay in wait to slay their carefull Nurse
46 See Glynne Wickham’s Early English Stages in Five Parts for more on
Deborah as a stock figure. 114
Elizabeth, their Queene and Royall Nurse (quoted in Ephraim
313).
Using the combined character of Deborra to represent and mediate the image of
Elizabeth as both a nurse and prophetic warrior also ties the Queen to the negative aspects of Deborra. Karen Newman notes that “[i]n early modern England, representation was potentially dangerous and politically charged. As Frances
Yates and others have argued, idealized images of Queen Elizabeth were used to consolidate monarchical power: [such as] the much-discussed representations, literary and pictorial, of the queen as Eliza, Diana, and the like” (65). Similarly, negative images work to challenge monarchical power. Purkiss points out that while “Elizabethan paranoia could accuse Catholics of political and other sorcery, but such figurations reflected on Elizabeth too” (Witch 185). Ultimately, Ephraim does not make the connection to Mab since that is not the focus of her study, but if Deborra represents Queen Elizabeth that means that “Mab,” together with all of her associations as a midwife and hag figure, is associated with Elizabeth.47
47 Charles Brockden Brown continues the connection between Deborra and Queen
Mab in his 1799 novel Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. In the novel Mab is an old Native woman, Deb, who stays to maintain property rights of the Indians on land that the main character Huntly’s family, along with many others, occupy. She is an old woman who refused to move along with the rest of 115
Returning to Shakespeare’s Queen Mab, if Mab is both the midwife to
Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth herself, as she is in Jacob and Esau, then
Mercutio’s speech offers a particularly negative representation of the Queen.
Queen Mab poses a threat to the individual that goes beyond the derisive notion of a metaphorical scapegoat who disrupts the larger state. No body can escape Queen Mab. Scot notes “that witches or magicians have power by words, herbs, or imprecations to thrust into the mind or conscience of man, what it shall please them, by vertue of their charmes, hearbs, stones, or familiars” (Booke X
the Indians when the government forced them to re-locate in preference for
European settlers. Each year a bunch of the “savages” come to visit her and the local people put up with her demands for food and the placement of various huts on “their” land because they think of her as a crazy woman. Huntly’s Memoirs relate the time during the annual visit of the natives to Old Deb’s, which results in
Huntly killing several of them while rescuing a kidnapped girl from one of Deb’s huts. We never see Deb, but at the end of the novel she’s given as the reason for attacks on the settlers and the death of the brother of the girl Huntly is writing to.
Huntly is the one who names Deb “Queen Mab” in reference to Shakespeare’s
Queen Mab and her haggish nature. Old Deb, as Mab, stands in as Queen of sorts for the Indians and as a mediatory figure between the Natives and the settlers. 116
Chapter V). Her ability to penetrate any body, particularly that of the human, is shown by the variety of individuals that Mercutio names in his diatribe, including: “an alderman” (1.4.57), “a maid” (1.4.67), “a lawyer” (1.4.77), “a parson” (1.4.80), “a soldier” (1.4.82), and various “ladies” (1.4.74) and
“courtiers” (1.4.73), among others. Mab’s infectious nature is truly like the plague in that no one can really protect themselves from her. An individual may try, like the lady who uses “sweetmeats” (1.4.76), but Mab can still affect the margins of the body with the pervasive threat that once the sweet smells fade away, Mab will be waiting to invade the central core of the corporeal being.
Following further notions of folk belief, Mercutio posits a reason why so many are open to invasion by Queen Mab. In the conclusion to Mercutio’s speech, after Romeo interrupts by telling him that he “talk’st of nothing” (1.4.96),
Mercutio accedes:
True. I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind, . . . (1.4.96-100)
The only way to prevent the mind from being infected by the contagious dreams of Mab is to refrain from idleness. Robert Burton notes that “[i]dleness of the 117
mind is much worse than this of the body; wit without employment is a disease...the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself” (Part 1, Sec. 2, Mem. 2. Subs.
6 243). Citing Seneca, Burton also points out that “‘[a]s in a standing pool worms and filthy creepers increase...so do evil and corrupt thought in an idle person,’ the soul is contaminated” (243). By engaging in activity and maintaining an industrious mind, presumably one dedicated to more sacred themes, then one may avoid “contaminat[ion]” and be able to keep Queen Mab at bay. This prescription of protective industry, which Burton also supports (see Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 4 70-
71), carried over into Elizabethan social praxis as part of the burgeoning
Protestant work ethic. Returning to Shakespeare’s context and the outbreaks of the plague when he was adapting Romeo and Juliet, Greenblatt states that the basic idea supporting the closing of the theatre houses in times of plague “was not only to prevent contagion but also to avoid making an angry God still angrier with the spectacle of idleness” (Norton Shakespeare 3).
The threat of idleness goes beyond incurring God’s wrath. The dreams and desires that are spawned by Queen Mab pose a particular threat to the larger nation state. In general, the “human body [is] the prototype of society, the nation- state, and the city” (Russo 320). By infecting the idle mind with her pestilent dreams, Mab is in a position to propagate desires that could hinder the larger body-politic and subvert the ruling corporeal structures. As Mercutio notes, 118
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscados, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep . . . (1.4.82-5)
Queen Mab can cause a soldier to lust for foreign blood, which benefits the nation, particularly, when the blood is that of a Spanish “neck” attempting to invade the body of the land as the Armada tried to invade England in 1588.
Queen Mab could just as easily turn that same soldier’s blood-lust into a “new mutiny, / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (Prologue 3-4). As a result of the mutability of the mind and body of the people, it is in the nation’s best interest to protect itself from the infection of “[r]ebellious subjects” (1.1.74).
By protecting the individual from Mab and the disease-ridden “children of an idle brain” (1.4.87) that she helps to deliver, the society can help to maintain its wholeness. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, backed by the larger narrative of civil discord in Verona, offers the audience a vicarious exemplar of a corporal state that has been penetrated by social dis-ease. By invoking the associations of witchcraft and midwifery brought together in Deborra’s Mab in Jacob and Esau, and tying it to a discourse of disease, Shakespeare’s Queen Mab speech thus serves as a warning, a socio-cultural prophylactic, against the diseases of idleness 119
and “vain fantasy” (1.4.98) that are mediated through and against Queen
Elizabeth as the head of the monarchy and the Anglican Church.
Though her actual origins seem to be lost to all now, Mab was a hag midwife figure who was so well known to the audience of Jacob and Esau that she was easily incorporated as invective into Esau’s rant, along with the other slurs aimed at Mido and Abra. No explanation is needed to describe who “mother
Mab” (5.6.1528) is. By the time Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet thirty to forty years later, Mab’s origins and cultural history had already begun to be lost; otherwise, there would be no need for Benvolio to ask “Queen Mab, what’s she?”
(1.4.54), nor for Mercutio to give his extended description of all her qualities and to remind the audience that the “fairies’ midwife” (1.4.55) is a “hag” (1.4.92).
Deborra’s Mab in Jacob and Esau is clearly associated with Queen Elizabeth, at least as her metaphorical midwife, if not as the queen herself. Arguably
Shakespeare’s Mab draws on these negative aspects as he mediates the connection between the monarchical state and the individual, though he does not maintain the direct connection to the stock figure of Deborah. The negative connection between the midwife hag figure of Mab and Queen Elizabeth is further maintained and extended by Ben Jonson after Elizabeth’s death in 1603. This connection quickly gives rise to the creation of the Fairy Queen Mab that most are familiar with. 120
Chapter 4--“Long live Oriana / T’exceed, whom she succeeds, our
late Diana”48: Transforming Queenship in Jonson’s
Entertainment at Althrope
HERE! there! and every where!
Some solemnities are near,
That these changes strike mine ear.
Ben Jonson
The Satyr (my emphasis, 1-3).
Transforming Queen Mab into the Fairy Queen
In 1603 Ben Jonson wrote The Satyr, or The Entertainment at Althrope,49 as part of the official procession of King James I and his family from Edinburgh to
48 Jonson, Ben. The Satyr (The Entertainment at Althrope). 1603. The Works of
Ben Ionson with Notes Critical and Explanatory and a Biographical Memoir. Vol
6. Ed. W. Gifford Esq. London: Bickers and Son, 1875. 440-517. Lines 88-89.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from The Satyr will be from this edition.
49 The full title listed in the 1616 Folio is A Particular Entertainment of the
Queene and Prince Their Highnesse at Althrope, at the Right Honourable the
Lord Spencers, on Saterday, being the 25. of June, 1603, as they came first into 121
London after the death of Queen Elizabeth on March 24th 1603. James did not see or participate in the Entertainment as he went to London ahead of Queen Anne and Prince Henry, who stayed at the Spencer estate for a short time. There are three parts to the Entertainment, only two of which were presented. The first part introduces the Queen and Prince to Althrope, where they are met by the titular
Satyr and then formally received by Mab, the Fairy Queen, and her fairy court.
The second part of the Entertainment involves morris dances, clowns, and a speech delivered by the character Nobody on the graces one can attain by being a good dancer and pleasing the court. The third part, which was cut due to time, involves a short address to mark the parting of the Queen and her son from
Althrope.
The most important part of The Entertainment is the opening section, which begins with Queen Anne and Prince Henry being met by the Satyr who announces, “Some solemnities are near” (2) and then compliments them by proclaiming that the Prince has “Cyparissus’ face!” (9) and the Queen “hath
the kingdome. It was originally published in 1604 alongside B. Jonson His Part of the Kings Entertainment in Passing to His Coronation, which was Jonson’s contribution to The Magnificent Entertainment that welcomed James officially into London. 122
Syrinx’ grace!” (10).50 The Satyr then laments that King James is missing, by apostrophizing, “O that Pan were now in place--” (11)51 and again praises the entire family by exclaiming, “Sure they are of heavenly race” (12). After the brief introduction, they are then met by "a bevy of Fairies, attending on Mab their queen" (Jonson, “Staging Directions” 13), who also welcomes them and states publicly, “Hail and welcome, worthiest queen!” (13). After this introduction, the
Satyr immediately begins to berate Mab, telling Queen Anne, “Trust her not, you bonnibell, / She will forty leasings tell” (21-22) and that he “know[s] her pranks right well” (23). Before skipping away into the woods to avoid attack from
Mab’s fairies the Satyr gives a detailed description of the Fairy Queen, and her devilish habits, to the audience. Once the Satyr has been forced away, Mab and her fairies sing an official “well-coming” (78) to Anne, who is called Oriana in
The Entertainment, and then Mab gives her “a simple gift” (91). Mab’s participation in The Satyr concludes with Mab bidding the “Highest, happiest
50 Cyparissus was a youth who was a beloved of Apollo. He accidentally killed a deer given to him by Apollo and the god turned him into the Cypress tree to mark the youth’s grief. Syrinx was a chaste nymph who was turned into reeds to escape the lust of Pan.
51 In Jonson’s later masque Oberon (1611) James is also figured as Pan, while
Prince Henry becomes Oberon, the prince and future king of fairies. 123
queen, farewell” (114) and adding a warning, “But beware you do not tell” (115), about meeting her or the other fairies. The first part of the entertainment finishes with the Satyr reappearing and proclaiming the worth of Lord Spencer and how it is magnified by the presence of the “kingly image” (153) of Prince Henry, who then joins Lord Spencer’s eldest son on a hunt.
As I examined in Chapter Three, the daemonic midwife hag figure Mab is associated with Queen Elizabeth and is used to represent her in Jacob and Esau and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Critics, mainly those working on
Shakespeare since few Jonson scholars spend time on this little entertainment, have often read Jonson’s depiction of Mab as derivative of Shakespeare’s Queen
Mab speech. Geoffrey Bullough, in his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare, claims, “Shakespeare may well have been the inventor of the fairy- cult which appears in late Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry--and to which Jonson and Drayton contributed” (371). Blakemore Evans in his edition of Romeo and
Juliet glosses Queen Mab in his “Supplementary Textual Notes,” stating “[t]he name and other details of the speech, mingled with recollections of MND, are taken over by Ben Jonson in the Entertainment of Althrope” (213). As Evans notes, Jonson’s Mab is derived from Shakespeare, but she is also amalgamated from the mythography of the glorious Fairy Queen as presented in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and elsewhere. 124
It was a commonplace in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century
English culture that Queen Elizabeth was mythologized as the Fairy Queen, along with being the Virgin Queen, Diana, and Gloriana. Jean MacIntyre notes that
“[w]hen James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England, he inherited his crown from a queen who during her long reign had been refashioned into ‘too fairy Cynthia, the miracle of nature, of time, or fortune,’ ‘a fair virgin throned by the west . . . the imperial votaress,’ Phoebe, Diana, Oriana, ‘the mortal moon’” (81). All of these representations, and more, are found in Edmund
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, written between 1590 and 1596. Shakespeare’s
Titania, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also written in the early 1590s, firmly established and built upon the representation of the aging monarch as the glorious and beautiful queen of fairyland. Sometimes she is named as she is in Thomas
Campion’s “Canto Primo” from 1591 where she is the “Fairie Queen Proserpina”
(2) following Chaucer’s versions in The Merchant’s Tale. At the Entertainment at
Elvetham52 she is known as Aureola and in Tom a Lincoln as Caelia. Most often, though, until Jonson’s Entertainment, she was known as the generic Fairy Queen, as she is in the earliest versions of Tom Thumb.
52 The full title being “The Honorable Entertainment given to the Queen’s
Majesty in a Progress, At Elvetham in Hampshire, by the Right Honorable Earl of
Hereford, 1591.” 125
Though the origin of the Fairy Queen Mab has been consistently mis- attributed to Shakespeare, ignoring the earlier source of Jacob and Esau and the textual reality that Queen Mab is not a fairy in Shakespeare’s work, Jonson’s
Entertainment is, in fact, the first known record of Mab unequivocally identified as the Fairy Queen.53
53 There is an earlier reference to Mab, which occurred in 1601 at South Kyme, in
Lincolnshire. According to Martin Ingram, “[a]t South Kyme (Lincolnshire) in
1601 the activities of a lord of misrule and his company escalated into a demonstration against the earl of Lincoln, elaborated by the performance of a derisive play, the exhibition of a mocking rhyme on the maypole, and the preaching of a mock sermon ‘out of the book of Mab’” (95) by Talboys Dimocke.
Ingram notes that the origin of the protest “lay in the earl’s manifold oppressions against his family, neighbours and tenants” (95). No direct connection is made to fairies, witchcraft, or the Fairy Queen in the record of the event, though Jephson
Norreys O’Conner, in Godes Peace and the Queenes (1934) wonders “[i]s it possible that Talboys Dymoke, as one of the audience at a play by Shakespeare, had been impressed to the point of borrowing, or was her merely referring to local folk-lore?” and, more interestingly, “[i]n the latter case, was there extant a book of Mab, or was Dymoke imagining it?” (119). 126
In merging the two figures related to Queen Elizabeth, Mab and the Fairy
Queen, Jonson crosses the border between these two seemingly dichotomous creatures, the positive and beneficial Fairy Queen and the negative and malicious
Mab, and engages in a ritual of transformation to create a new middle term: the
Fairy Queen Mab.
Jonson’s creation of the Fairy Queen Mab exemplifies what Debrix and
Cynthia Weber call a ritual of transformation. These rituals use mediation to purposely alter the terms of the relationship between the entities, rather than trying to present information directly from one term to another as part of a ritual of representation. François Debrix notes that it is “more accurate to label these transformative rituals re-creative or re-imaginative rather than representational.
These mediations are deployed to (re)invent the human self and his or her relation to the world” (xxxi). According to Debrix and Weber, rituals of transformation
“affirm that the method of mediation takes an important part in altering social meaning. Mediation is not a neutral operation that transfers and leaves unchanged the two subject and object positions. Rather, mediation is a rite that enables social change” (viii). These rituals of transformation are blatantly manipulative in their attempts to alter and produce meaning.
Jonson’s Entertainment manipulates the traditional mythologies of the
Fairy Queen and Mab by having the new queen, Anne, meet the old queen 127
Elizabeth, represented by Mab, the Fairy Queen. By having the old queen meet the new, and present her with a gift, Jonson is symbolically passing the monarchy from the old to the new, giving the blessing of the recently deceased queen
Elizabeth, and using prosopopoea to speak on her behalf to welcome the new
“Oriana” and her “race” to England. Notably, Elizabeth was also known as
Oriana, which came from “the radiant Oriana, heroine of Thomas Morley’s famous collection of madigrals, The Triumphes of Oriana” (Strong, “Queen”
251), compiled in 1601. Roy Strong notes that “[t]he impact of a new dynasty resulted in a divergence in the use of the Oriana motif. Those who hoped for the new régime readily adapted Oriana to greet a new queen, Ori-Anna. Those, on the other hand, who lamented the death of Elizabeth likewise continued to call her
Oriana” (“Queen” 258). Jonson is one of the first to celebrate the replacement of the old queen by referring to Anne as “Oriana.” He makes the distinction between the two queens, along with his sentiment, clearer by not only having the old queen meet the new, under the guise of the Fairy Queen Mab, but he also has the fairies sing “Long live Oriana / T’exceed, whome she succeeds, our late Diana” (88-89).
Rituals of transformation can be very personal and intimate, such as the use of meditation to create a change within one’s self-awareness and being.
These rituals can also be very public and demonstrative, such as processions and public rites that mark the passage of time, exchanges or power, or major life 128
events such as weddings and births. The methods of mediation involved in the public rituals of transformation create “social meanings that enable the institutionalization of certain relations of power, domination, and exploitation”
(Debrix xxxii). Jonson’s use of the combined figure of Mab and the Fairy Queen to represent the old queen in welcoming the new royal family is part of public ritual and exchange of power. The Entertainment is an early attempt to transform the “social meaning” of the ever-present mythology of Elizabeth that James confronted throughout his reign. Julie Sanders notes that Jonson worked throughout his career to “move between the domains of court and public theatre, and who, rather than becoming [just] a King’s poet, continued to mediate on politics and popular opinion” (1) too.54 It is significant that the moment that the immaculate Fairy Queen is merged with the horrific hag midwife figure Mab is when the iconography of the old queen and her monarchic power needs to be replaced by the imagery and authority of the monarchy of King James. In effect,
Jonson helps to negotiate and transform the totality of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and her powerful legacy by presenting this new image of the Fairy Queen Mab to
54 For more on Jonson’s life and works see Claude J Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth’s Ben Jonson Revised (1999), Eric Linklater’s Ben Jonson and King
James: Biography and Portrait (1931), David Riggs’s Ben Jonson: A Life
(1989), and James Loxley’s The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson (2002). 129
the court and, by extension, to the public. Jonson furthers the negative mediation by having the Satyr constantly berate the old queen as she is trying to welcome the new, and all that Anne represents, to the English landscape.
Jonson’s new image of the Fairy Queen Mab taints the image and memory of Elizabeth by evoking all the negative pagan aspects that are associated with Mab. Jonson includes the character of the Satyr to mediate the situation, making sure that the negative associations do not go unmissed by the audience.
The Satyr describes Mab to Queen Anne by exclaiming:
“This is Mab, the mistress Fairy;
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can hurt or help the cherning,
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.
. . . 130
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 then leads them from her burrows,
Home through ponds and water-furrows.
. . .
She can start our Franklin’s daughters,
In their sleep, with shrieks and laughters;
And on sweet St. Anna’s night,
Feed them with a promised sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers”. (29-53).
MacIntyre argues that “the iconic virginity emphasized in [Elizabeth’s] lifetime ran so counter to Jacobean emphasis on the marriage of courtiers and countries that its power had to be downgraded” (81). This “downgrad[ing]” is evident in the
Satyr’s description as he mocks Mab’s attempts to “Feed [the Franklin’s daughters] with a promised sight, / Some of husbands, some of lovers” (48-52).
The virginal Fairy Queen, who ironically was also associated with bestiality and 131
adultery, at least in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, here cannot help maidens to find their loves and instead tricks them with “empty dream[s]” (53).
As a midwife, the Fairy Queen Mab also “Trains forth midwives in their slumber, / with a sieve the holes to number” (43-44). According to Richard Levin,
“[l]uring midwives to count the holes in a sieve is not a well-known fairy practice” (249). Levin proposes that the source of the connection to sieves is found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan noting, “‘Sometimes, in meer Lottery, as
Crosse and Pile; counting holes in a sive; dipping of Verses in Homer and Virgil; and innumerable other such vaine conceipts’” (Hobbes quoted in Levin 250).
Counting sieves is a form of prognostication, in which witches and midwives were often accused of engaging. Queen Elizabeth had interdictions against predicting the future, particularly hers, but she also consulted Dr. Dee for astrological and other occult information. Elizabeth was represented holding sieves in a number of portraits, the most famous being The Sieve Portrait from
1583 and attributed to Cornelius Ketel. The sieve is usually seen as a symbol of
Elizabeth’s virginity and chastity, but the connection Levin makes to Hobbes and
“[t]rain[ing]” other women to prophesize, I would argue, provides another link between Queen Elizabeth and Jonson’s representation of the Fairy Queen Mab.
By extension the Satyr’s description of the transformed Fairy Queen Mab also mediates the representation of Elizabeth’s England, where all of these 132
devilish activities, such as theft, physical abuse, abduction of children, predicting the future, and false dreams, occur within the national borders.
One of the most common types of border that is constantly being mediated is the national or geopolitical border of a country, which must be continuously defended and (re)constituted legally and symbolically from within and without.
Conflicts are resolved and avoided through the successful mediation of these political borders by ambassadors and other representatives. Regarding international mediation, Debrix notes that “it refers to specific procedures that find their place in a social context defined as a series of interactions between subjects across territorially recognized units of meaning (nation-states, political blocs and alliances, structures and levels, hegemons and dyads, etc.)” (xxii). In conflict resolution, ambassadors, lawyers, or other emissaries act on behalf of the parties to pass on information directly from one party to another as well as standing in to make decisions for the party they represent.
Mab is an emissary, or ambassador, who represents Queen Elizabeth and
England, while Anne, is an emissary on behalf of herself and her husband James
I/VI. As part of the royal procession into England, the meeting of Mab and Anne helps to avoid conflict and give a royal blessing to the new monarchy. Scotland and England had been in dispute on and off throughout their histories. This friction was alleviated, though not eliminated, by the merging of the countries 133
under the joint rule of James. Andrew Hadfield notes that “[w]hen James did assume the English throne he tried to enforce a constitutional union of Britain in his first parliament, but found that he did not have the power to enforce his prerogative and eradicate centuries of hostility and mutual suspicion, let alone establish a workable means of uniting Scottish and English legal and political traditions” (3). James had to work to moderate and mediate between the two countries during his rule. Queen Anne and the Fairy Queen help in this arbitration by acting as mediating agents and peacemakers during the
Entertainment to firmly establishing the new alliance created by the alignment of the two countries by the passing of a gift when Mab “[g]ives [Anne] a jewel”
(Jonson’s “Staging Directions, 105). The symbolic exchange of the gift between the two queens “celebrates the continuity of values from Tudor to Stuart reign”
(Riddell and Stewart 17). The gift also reinforces the legal exchange of power created by succession, which is further solidified when James is crowned with his own jewels and regalia of state in London.
The exchange of the gift is a socially mediated rite of passage. Debrix notes that “[r]ites of passage guarantee that social hierarchies are preserved or that new ones are created. Social mediations are empowering rituals that give societies leaders and followers, rulers and rules, states and citizens. Additionally, rituals of mediation create political hierarchies and cultural differences that 134
support the deployment of ideological beliefs” (xxiii). The two kingdoms of
England and Scotland did not merge fully into the Kingdom of Great Britain until
1707 when the “Acts of Union” was passed, creating a single London-based government and parliament. As a first step, Jonson’s Satyr creates a space of representative mediation where the international figures meet and, via the gift, two nations, England and Scotland, become one virtual “heavenly race” (11) under a new hierarchal power.55
Just over a decade earlier Queen Elizabeth herself, during the royal progress of 1591, met the Fairy Queen during an entertainment. In The Purpose of
Playing Louis Montrose describes this encounter where Queen Elizabeth received a gift from the Fairy Queen:
At Elvetham, during the royal progress of 1591, none other than
“the Fairy Quene” gave to Elizabeth “a garland, made in fourme of
an imperiall crowne” that she herself had received from “Auberon,
the Fairy King.” After her presentation speech to Queen Elizabeth,
“the Faery Quene and her maides daunce[d] about the Garden,”
55 See Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic
Societies for an examination of how gift exchange operates as part of a ritualized system. 135
singing a song lavishly praising “Elisa . . . the fairest Quene.”
(156).
Montrose also notes, “Queen Elizabeth was always alert to pageants encoding unwanted advice; on this occasion, however, she must have liked what she heard, for ‘shee commanded to heare it sund and to be danced three times over, and called for divers Lords and Ladies to behold it: and then dismist the Actors with thankes, and with a gracious larges’” (Purpose 156). Elizabeth was also presented with a gift in “1575 in Woodstock, a ‘Queen of the Fayry’ ‘very costly apparrelled’ present[ed] a ‘simple token’ of a beautifully embroidered gown ‘of greate price’” (Lamb 168). Jonson continues this tradition of having the queen greeted by the Fairy Queen, but while Elizabeth arguably was meeting her metaphorical doppelgänger, Anne is met by the deceased queen’s transformed representation. In contrast to the negative aspects related by the Satyr about the
Fairy Queen, Jonson has Queen Elizabeth, speaking prosopopoeitically via Mab, praise the new queen:
This is she, this is she
In whose world of grace
Every season, person, place,
That receive her happy be;
For with no less, 136
Than a kingdom’s happiness,
Doth she private Lares bless,
And ours above the rest;
By how much we deserve it least.
Long live Oriana
T’exceed, whom she succeeds, our late Diana. (79-89).
Jonson demonstrates how much happier the kingdom, starting with the “private
Lares,” such as Spencer’s estate, will be under the new monarchy. Having Mab, the queen of the old ways, proclaim the wonderfulness of the new queen and monarch, in a seemingly neutral and celebratory act, veils the highly charged rhetoric at work in this performative scene.
The Entertainment at Althrope is a specific ritual of transformation that operates to welcome the new monarchic family as part of the official procession of James into his new country; it marks his succession, giving authority to him and his family and shows that his worthiness as the new ruler is recognized by the elite, and it allows the new monarchs to promote their own favorites, who in turn will further support and authorize the new leadership of England. Mary Ellen
Lamb argues “[t]he presentation of gifts by fairy queens in entertainments was also understood to explain what was understood but could not be said: the extraordinary cost of entertaining [the monarch] and [the] court severely stretched 137
the resources of [the] hosts” (168). Robert C. Evans points out that The
Entertainment “was written during the crucial early days of James’s reign, when courtiers were jockeying with one another even more vigorously than they usually did to improve or maintain their standings” (237). Specifically, The Satyr, with its central gift exchange, “was part of Robert Spencer’s bid to secure his status under the new regime” (237). The result of this “jockeying” was that Spencer was made a baron “less than a month after the date of this Entertainment”
(Gifford, “Introduction” 440)--in part, presumably, as a thank you for his hospitality and the affirmative messages promoted in The Satyr. Jonson’s
Entertainment helps to establish the power of King James I and his new court as he and his family are transformed into the present and future rulers of the combined nations of England and Scotland.
Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary Crain state that “a ritual can become a
‘contested space for social action and identity politics--an arena for resistance, negotiation and affirmation’” (quoted in Debrix xxiv). Thus the transformative nexus, the place of the mediating agent, is a space full of potentiality: it can confirm, subvert, and/or transpose the hegemonic. Since the transformative is often involved in the mediation of power, it can be highly dangerous and incredibly emancipating. These acts of transformative mediation are so important that Debrix argues “[r]ituals of mediation must be constantly deployed so that 138
social and political transformations can fully take place” (xxxiv) and, arguably, maintained. The same ritual that promotes James and Anne by passing on the glory of Elizabeth, via the welcome and gift exchange, also works to subvert her iconography--to chip away at her mythography--allowing James to be accepted more fully as the monarch and head of the Church of England.
In England, after Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church and created the Anglican Church to allow for his first divorce, witches, as generic heretical others, became, in practice, members of the opposing religion. In Protestant countries, such as England, witchcraft became associated with Catholicism and its elaborate rituals. In England, under all of the monarchs except for Mary, who as a
Catholic targeted Protestants, witches were often Catholic. Fairies were also increasingly seen as related to Catholicism. Timothy Montbriand points out,
“Protestant reformers continued to associate Catholics with a belief in fairies in order to equate Catholic resistance to Protestant enlightenment with medieval superstition” (34). Regina Buccola extends Montbriand’s point further by stating
“[d]uring the early modern period of religious reform, fairy belief came to be reviled as the antithesis of Christianity by Reform Christian sects, particularly
Puritans. Religious reformers equated Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary, the prominence of the saints, and the lavish ceremony of the Catholic mass with the polytheistic pagan tradition and, often, with pagan-linked fairy belief” (160). 139
Even King James dismissed fairy belief as papistry in his Daemonologie where he states, “That fourth kind of spirits, which by the gentiles was called Diana and her wandering court, and amongst us was called the fairy . . . or ‘our good neighbours’, was one of the sorts of illusions that was rifest in the time of papistry” (Book 3, Chapter 5). By attaching Mab to the Fairy Queen, two forms of the supernatural that are associated with old, pre-Anglican, and thus Catholic, beliefs, Jonson combats part of the social resistance to James becoming the new monarch. James was a Protestant, but his wife Anne and his parents, Henry
Stuart and particularly his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, were Catholic. James was known to be more lenient to Catholics than Elizabeth’s policy of in media res that sought to maintain Protestantism, while not aggressively antagonizing those sympathetic to Catholicism. Jonson’s reinforcement and transformation of Queen
Elizabeth’s connection to the supernatural and pagan beliefs as the Fairy Queen
Mab makes her seemingly more Catholic than James and thus makes him slightly more acceptable to the Anglican nation.
The mediated nature of the monarchy and its reliance on rituals of transformation is demonstrated by the reality that a monarch cannot just self- fashion or self-position him or herself as the monarch, even though they may try to self-authorize. It takes a whole apparatus of events to establish authority in the eyes of the court and nation as the true monarch--especially in James’s case as he 140
was Elizabeth’s cousin and not her child, which would have made him a clear successor. He was also seen by many as an enemy Scot. Beyond being crowned
King and Queen, the formal entrance of James and Anne into England was marked very publicly by The Magnificent Entertainment. This grand procession through London had been planned to be presented just after The Satyr but had to be delayed till 1604 due to an outbreak of the plague. In addition to the processions and entertainments that mediated James’s succession he also tried to establish his authority as the rightful King of England, along with the “divine right of kings,” by the republication of The True Law of Free Monarchies and
Basilikon Doron in 1603; they were originally published in 1598 and 1599, respectively. Jonson’s Entertainment was just one of the mediums that was employed by James and his supporters to enact his ritual of transformation into
England’s new monarch.
The form of medium used to present a ritual of transformation affects the reception of the mediation. It matters how a situation or message is mediated and whether it is done via a public or private ritual, on stage, in text, or some other format. When the goal of the mediation is to affect transformation of the socio- politico realm, then some mediums, including public entertainments, are going to be better suited for reaching the masses. On the other hand, some of the most important mediations of society are left to the power of a few select individuals, 141
who normally can only be reached or influenced by an elite circle of the government or court.
As a medium, entertainments “presented loosely connected emblems, disguises, and verses of compliment, either as pageants for the street or as interludes for the house or private garden” (Prendergast 120). Arthur Prendergast also points out that The Satyr “is styled an Entertainment by Jonson himself; but it is longer and far more coherent in design than most of its companions” (122). As an author, Jonson can only control the characters and emblems in his entertainment at a textual or directing level; once the actors start performing, they are mediating the roles via their embodied performance. The actors may also alter words, adding or cutting dialogue, and/or emphasizing aspects through intonation or action that is lost to us now over 400 years later. An entertainment, as a ritual space, also has an added level of mediation since the audience also participates in the production. Since the audience members, such as Queen Anne and Prince
Henry have not necessarily been given lines or directions, their actions and any dialogue is an unscripted response to the presented scenes. The medium of the entertainment supports or enables Jonson’s mediating message by getting right to the heart of the monarchy, by presenting it to them directly and by having them participate as actors in the performance. The nature of the entertainment is relatively private in that it is an elite event for the particular sub-group of the 142
court and household of Althrope, but it is also public in that a lot of people are involved in the production and see the mediation at work, later reading about the event in its published form.
Jonson’s Entertainment was published with a report of the performance that gives some idea of how the performance played out, but this after-the-fact summary also mediates the reading and understanding of the interaction between the characters, their representation, and the multiple levels of mediation at work.
The actual moment of mediation in a live event or first encounter is lost, but it is maintained in memory which is constantly mutating and mediating the experience. A written text or record of a performance is also mediated, but it provides as close to a common text to work from as is possible--even though every reader will mediate the text according to their own understanding, experiences, and needs. Mediation is thus, necessarily, at the heart of the debate between authorial intention and audience reception. Jonson could plan and affect the merging of Mab and the Fairy Queen to represent Queen Elizabeth I, but he could not control the actual performance during the entertainment. Similarly,
Jonson could not control or foresee that his mediated Fairy Queen Mab would be adopted, perpetuated, and further mediated by other authors in the Renaissance seeking to satisfy a nostalgia for the lost Elizabeth.
143
Chapter 5--“There Mab is Queen of all, by Natures will”56:
Pluralizing The Fairy Queen Mab in Early Modern
England
SIR Charles into my chamber coming in,
When I was writing on my Fairy Queen;
I pray, said he, when Queen Mab you doe see,
Present my service to her Majesty:
And tell her, I have heard Fames loud report,
Both of her Beauty, and her stately Court.
When I Queen Mab within my Fancy view’d,
My Thoughts bow’d low, fearing I should be rude;
Kissing her Garment thin, which Fancy made,
Kneeling upon a Thought, like one that pray’d;
In whispers soft I did present
His humble service, which in mirth was sent.
Thus by imagination I have been
In Fairy Court, and seen the Fairy Queen.
56 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. “The Fairy Queen.” Poems and
Fancies. 1653. Menston: Menston Scolar Press, 1972. 97. 144
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.
“SIR Charles into my chamber coming in” (1-14).
Oberon, the Fairy Prince and/or King
After 1603, when Ben Jonson transformed the iconographies of the hag midwife
Mab and the glorious Fairy Queen to create the combined figure of the Fairy
Queen Mab to represent and mediate the memory of Queen Elizabeth, the Fairy
Queen’s popularity receded for a while in favor of images of the Fairy King
Oberon and his court. The Fairy Queen did not disappear, but she was more of a stock figure who often went unnamed. In addition to some of the Fairy Queen texts I mentioned at the start of Chapter Four, Jonson himself included a mock
“Queen of Faery” (1.2.106) in The Alchemist in 1610. In his 1609 Oberon, The
Faery Prince. A Masque of Prince Henry’s, which was written for James’s son and seen by many as a follow-up to The Entertainment at Althrope, the Fairy
Queen is omitted. While Henry is Oberon and James is Arthur (he was referred to as “Pan” in The Entertainment), Anne is mentioned only as the “great empress”
(247) rather than being the Queen of Fairies. Robert M. Adams, the editor of the
1979 Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, points out in his notes to Oberon, “Oberon, prince of Faery in Jonson’s flimsy mythological scheme, represents Prince Henry; his father is therefore King Arthur, i.e., King 145
James. The reader shouldn’t look for either logic or history in these fantastic genealogies” (343). Martin Butler argues that the genealogy is logical and historically significant, since
[a]s the Fairy Prince, Henry’s iconography connects him with the
Fairy Queen, the sainted Elizabeth, triggering resonances which
associated him with more ideologically-motivated policies on
religion and Europe than his father would countenance, and co-
opting for the Prince a mythology of romantic heroism attractive
to those that hoped Henry might be induced to become a more
militaristic and activist monarch than his father. . . If Oberon is
Henry, he is James’s son and heir to the British crown, but if
Henry is Oberon, so to speak, he is heir to Elizabeth. (31).
By making James’s son and successor the metaphorical heir to Elizabeth, Jonson continues the transformative mediation that he began in The Entertainment at
Althrope when the Fairy Queen Mab/Elizabeth first met Anne and Henry on behalf of James and welcomed them to England. The mythology of Henry as
Oberon, though, ceased abruptly with his death a year after the masque. After
Henry’s death the iconography of Oberon was reassigned to his father James instead of being transferred to Charles the new heir. This move foreshadows
Charles’s near destruction of the monarchy mid-century and thus his unworthiness 146
of monarchic association. If Oberon is the heir to the Fairy Queen then, following
Butler, this transference makes James a child of Queen Mab similar to Merlin in the Merlin television miniseries.57 This parental connection stands in for the missing parental connection that would have made James the de facto successor to
Elizabeth.
Oberon is usually figured as the King of the Fairy Realm and the Fairy
Queen’s husband, which makes Jonson’s positioning of him as the Prince and son unusual. “Kynge Oberon” (Boke 65), or Auberon, is a dwarf-sized fairy king that derives from The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux, a French prose romance that was translated into English in 1534 by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners.
Katharine Briggs notes that his “small size was attributed in the romance to the ill offices of an offended fairy at his birth--one of the earliest examples of a wicked fairy at a christening--but, since ‘Auberon’ is the French translation of the
German ‘Alberich,’ it seems likely that Oberon was dwarfish from the beginning”
(Encyclopedia 228). Shakespeare’s Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is human-sized like Titania. Geoffrey Bullough suggests that Shakespeare’s Oberon may also be based on “[Robert] Greene’s James IV where he appears in the
57 See my Introduction for the discussion of Merlin’s relationship to Mab. 147
introductory dialogue and later brings in ‘rounds of fairies’” (370).58 Though
Oberon is married to the Fairy Queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Auberon is not, nor are Greene’s or Jonson’s Oberons--Prince Henry being only sixteen at the time of the masque.
William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (circa 1624) also features a single Oberon. In Book III Oberon is seen at a fairy banquet in this satirical poem, filled with anti-Spanish polemics. Cedric C. Brown and Margherita Piva note that in the midst of all the political commentary “Oberon himself is intent on doing nothing but talk of hunting and horses. The most likely explanation for these features of the fairy banquet . . . is that we are alluding to King James. He had figured as Oberon before, was since 1619 without his queen, and his incessant talk of hunting was notorious” (398). Unlike the other Oberons, Browne’s is miniaturized. Oberon is first described as “Cladd in a sute of speckled gilliflowre.
/ His hatt by some choice master in the trade / Was (like a helmett) of a lilly made” (816-818). The table for the feast is made out of a “mushrome” (733) and the “The trenchers were of little silver spangles” / The salt the small bone of a
58 The full title of Greene’s play is The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth, slaine at Glodden: entermixed with a pleasant comedie, presented by Oboram
King of Fayeries. (1590). 148
fishes backe” (748-749).59 Until this time fairies had been human or dwarf-sized, such as those in The Entertainment at Althrope and Oberon, while some of them could shrink to smaller sizes such as Cobweb and Mustardseed in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. The exact moment when fairies are fully miniaturized is not known, but the alteration occurred sometime during the latter half of James’s reign, possibly even in Browne’s Pastorals.
Altering mythographies and iconographies associated with the representations of Elizabeth and James and making them open to further manipulation and ironic play is part of the third method of mediation described by
François Debrix and Cynthia Weber: the ritual of pluralization. The ritual of pluralization involves “deploying novel uses, or pointing to existing uses, of mediated forms and objects that leave open as many social, cultural, and political possibilities as possible. Far from closing signification, this kind of mediation encourages further debate and discussion” (Debrix and Weber ix). Pluralization is metamediational. As a ritual it manipulates or mediates existing mediating agents and transformations to reveal their mediated nature by displacing them from earlier contexts and applying them to new ones. The ritual of pluralization is at
59 For a detailed examination of Book III of Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals see
Frederic W Moorman’s William Browne: his Britannia’s Pastorals and the
Pastoral Poetry of the Elizabethan Age. 149
work when authors both knowingly adapt and unconsciously propagate the stories and mythologies handed down to them, such as when Frik began telling the tales of Arthuriana, minus Queen Mab, and later authors continued to transform the singular tales into multiple mythologies that often no longer correspond to the earlier versions.
Pluralization is evident in the presentations of the fairy court during the remainder of the English Renaissance. If the Fairy King and Queen are mediated representations of the English monarchs, as suggested by my study, then the extended miniature fairy court represents or mediates the real world court as well.
Eckhard Auberlen notes that “[p]roclamations were repeatedly issued under
James I and Charles I in order to enforce the gentry’s residence in the country”
(204). The attachment of the court to the forest and pastoral realms of the fairies reinforces these proclamations. In the rest of this chapter I will examine how the known references to the Fairy Queen Mab and her Fairy King Oberon were mediated through pluralization between the time of James I/VI’s reign and the
Restoration of the monarchy under his grandson Charles II in 1660.
Drayton’s Nymphidia and The Muses Elizivm
Almost all of the fairy references in England, from the midst of James’s reign up to the Restoration, are about tiny fairies in tiny fairy courts enjoying tiny banquets 150
made out of plant and animal parts. These mediations build on each other in obvious ways while also incorporating new aspects that have been retroactively applied to the earlier history of English fairy representation. It was not until forty years after Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet that the Fairy Queen Mab was finally miniaturized when Michael Drayton brought her back to the fairy court in
Nymphidia after James’s death.
Drayton’s Nymphidia, or The Court of Faery60 was published in 1627, two years after Charles I came to the throne. The 704 line poem was written to satisfy the needs of those who found fairies a popular subject: “Another sort there bee, that will / Be talking of the Fayries still, / Nor can they have their fill” (9-11).61
Joseph Berthelot notes that “[i]n this poem Drayton investigated an area of the woodland landscape familiar to all Englishmen from their folklore. He wrote of the love and romance of the fairies who were the ‘natural’ inhabitants of the
English countryside” (61). The poem lays the foundation for much of the imagery
60 Later editions of Nymphidia are also known as The History of Queen Mab; or, the court of fairy. An entertainment based on Drayton’s poem about Queen Mab was presented at Drury-Lane by Henry Woodward in 1750 and published in 1751.
61 All references will be from Nimphidia or The Court of Faery. 1627. The Works of Michael Drayton. (Michael Drayton Tercentenary Edition). Vol. III. Ed. J.
William Hebel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931, unless otherwise noted. 151
that is associated with fairies in the seventeenth century--particularly regarding the image of miniature court life and the relationship between the Fairy Queen
Mab and the Fairy King Oberon, who are finally joined together as named spouses in Drayton’s poem. Sara van den Berg notes that “[e]arly in her reign,
Elizabeth often portrayed herself symbolically as England’s wife . . . In later years
Elizabeth sometimes indulged in a remarkable bit of rhetorical cross-dressing: she portrayed herself as the husband of a female Britannia” (35). As a wife, the
Fairy Queen is married to the country, but she is also married to Oberon, who, as I noted above, becomes associated with James after Prince Henry’s death. When
James first addressed Parliament after he entered into London in 1604 he stated, following Elizabeth’s matrimonial rhetoric, “I am the Husband, and all the whole
Island is my lawful Wife” (quoted in van den Berg 45). Both monarchs were married to England and both were figured as either the Fairy Queen or the Fairy
King; it was not until Drayton’s Nymphidia that the two monarchs were transformed into “spouses.”
The story is related to the poem’s narrator by his muse “Nimphidia [a] gentle Fay” (25) and his invocation reveals the nature of the fairy court that has yet to be seen:
Then since no Muse hath bin so bold,
Or of the Later, or the ould, 152
Those Elvish secrets to unfold,
Which lye from others reeding,
My active Muse to light shall bring,
The court of that proud Fayry King,
And tell there, of the Revelling (17-23).
The “bold” topic of the poem is the affair of “Queene Mab” (91) and “Pigwiggen
[a] ... Fayrie knight” (89), “one of [Oberon’s] owne Fayrie crue” (86), and the
“Fayry King[’s]” reaction.
The poem opens up by describing the “Pallace” (33) of the fairy court, which “standeth in the Ayre, / By Nigromancie placed there, / That it no Tempests needs to feare” (33-35). It has “Walls of Spiders legs” (41), “Windowes of the eyes of Cats, / And for the Roofe, instead of Slats, / Is cover’d with the skinns of
Batts” (45-47). The royal palace is set in the air and made of out of animal parts that show the scale of how tiny the setting is. It is from here that “Oberon him sport to make / ... / Desendeth for his pleasure” (49-52).
In the first part of the poem Drayton incorporates familiar aspects of fairy culture that have been associated with Mab, including having the fairies chastise
“sluttery” (65) girls and then “pinching them both blacke and blew” (66).
Specifically, Oberon’s spouse finds her pleasure in her nightly activities:
Mab his merry Queene by night 153
Betrides young Folks that lye upright,
(In elder Times the Mare that hight)
Which plagues them out of measure. (53-56).
This description of Mab ties her back to the plague-filled incubus and succubus hag figure that visits “young Folks” in the form of nightmares, but instead of blaming the “Mare,” Mab is now seen as directly responsible for these sexual visits. Another aspect of Mab’s folk-lore that has altered involves her relationship to changelings, which, as a hag and midwife, she was accused of exchanging healthy babies. Drayton points out how this belief is one in which only the dim- witted “brainless Calfe” (77) still believes:
These when a Childe haps to be gott,
Which after prooves an Ideott,
When Folke perceive it thriveth not,
The fault therein to smother:
Some silly doting brainless Calfe,
That understands things by the halfe,
Say that the Fayrie left this Aulfe,
And tooke away the other. (73-80).
The description of Mab’s “Chariot of a Snayles fine shell” (137) with its “Foure nimble Gnats the Horses were / Their Harnasses of Gossamere (133-134) and its 154
“wheeles compos’d of Cricket bones” (145) evokes images of Mercutio’s little midwife Mab and her “empty hazelnut” (1.4.68). Knowingly or not, Drayton also ties back to the earliest known version of Mab when he names one of “Her speciall Maydes of Honour” (163) “Tib” (164), which is one of the names that
Esau calls Deborra in Jacob and Esau (5.6.1553).
To set up the meeting that will consummate their affair, Pigwiggen employs “Tom Thum a Fayrie Page” (121) to send a letter to the Queene to arrange a secret rendezvous “At mid-night the appointed hower, / And for the
Queene a fitting Bower, / (Quoth he) is that faire Cowslip flower” (113-115).
Tom Thumb’s origins at the hands of Merlin and the Fairy Queen are not addressed in Nymphidia; instead, he is already an established member of the fairy court. Drayton is the first to mention Tom Thumb in relation to Queen Mab rather than to a generic Fairy Queen, and it is after this poem’s publication that the histories of the two merge directly.
When Oberon tries to find his adulterous wife he accosts a wide range of creatures about her location, starting with a “Waspe” (211) whom he asks,
“‘Where is my wife, thou Rogue?” (205). In turn, Oberon approaches “a Glow- worme” (217), “a Hive / Amongst the Bees” (233-234), “an Ant” (242), and some
“Grubs” (261), all of whom represent the wide range of societal members who are all aghast at the actions of “this franticke Fayrie King” (278). Drayton ties back to 155
A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Oberon finally “meeteth Pucke (282), whom he petitions to follow Mab “With vengeance, and persue her; / Bring her to me alive or dead, / Or that vild theife, Pigwiggins head” (300-302). This request for his wife, alive or dead, or her lover’s head is heard by Nimphidia who warns the
“her Soveraigne Mab” (319) who hides under a “Nut” (361), while Nimphidia places protective “Charmes” (384) and calls upon “Prosperpyna” (405), another name for the Fairy Queen, for further protection.
In turn Pigwiggen stands to defend Queene Mab’s honour from Oberon’s slander and challenges the crown:
I defie,
His slanders, and his infamie,
And as a mortall enemie,
Doe publickly proclaime him:
Withall, that if I had mine owne,
He should not weare the Fayrie Crowne,
But with a vengeance should come downe:
Nor we a King should name him. (529-536)
Furthermore, Drayton makes both king and his fairy subordinate equals, noting:
So like in armes, these champions were,
As they had bin, a very paire, 156
So that a man would almost sweare,
That either, had bin either (593-596).
By using the setting of the fairy realm and discussing the actions of the Fairy
King and Queen, Drayton is able to critique the monarchy through allegory and representation without having to directly comment on the state of the nation under the current or past monarch. If Oberon is James then this commentary is pointing out that his skills, though great, are capable of being equaled by his followers.
Even more unsettling is the treasonous cry for “vengeance” on the King.
Richard F. Hardin argues that Drayton’s “aversion to the Crown becomes most pronounced . . during the early 1620s” (103). He points out,
[i]t was also at this time that the term “Country” was first
becoming current in England to denote the faction, as yet vaguely
defined, that opposed the policies of the Crown. Many of
Drayton’s closest associates during these years had Country
allegiances, or if they did not wholly sympathize with the Country,
they shared its disdain for the Court. If we understand the political
crisis of Jacobean and Caroline England as essentially dependent
on this conflict between Court and Country, is it possible to
conclude that Drayton belongs in the vanguard of those who
eventually turned out the Court in the 1640s? (Hardin 103). 157
Hardin’s question seems to be answered by Drayton’s Pigwiggen, who actually calls for the violent end to the King’s reign in favor of the Fairy Queen. This call for regicide is unknowingly preminiscent of Charles’s execution after the civil war when he was put to death on behalf of the national English “wife,” the good of the Commonwealth, that could not abide by his abuse of the monarchy.62
It is only when Queen Mab steps in and brings Proserpyna to the field that the fight between the King and his man is stopped. Furthermore, Proserpyna,
“Drayton’s deus ex machina” (Hardin 73), has them unknowingly drink of the waters of Lethe, which “water you must knowe, / The memory destroyeth so”
(673-674). With the help of divine intervention all of the characters except
“Queene Mab and her light Maydes” (697) are made to forget the adultery that
Mab committed and the battle that ensued. Hardin also argues that Drayton is commenting on the irrationality of war and jealousy:
For men, whose bloodiest quarrels have origins that are usually
just as insubstantial as the fairies’, the implications are clear:
62 Drayton also has a personal reason for disliking James and his successor.
Drayton had written two poems to celebrate James’s succession to the English crown and they were not accepted on favorable terms. Raymond Jenkins notes that “[t]hey were so ungraciously received by the new monarch that he thereafter spurned but the Court and the King’s favorites” (566). 158
almost all the kinds of problems met with in society--the jealousy,
revenge, and human suffering . . .--would vanish were it not for
our memory of them. (74).
The ending of the poem leaves Mab and her maids as the only ones knowing what has happened, which leads to reconciliation of all parties as per Hardin’s point, but that ignorance leaves the path open for the events to repeat since none of the characters have learned from their actions.
If Mab and Oberon are Elizabeth and James, what does it mean that their first public “marriage” is mediated to be adulterous? By mediating the representations through the Fairy Queen’s adultery, Drayton is invoking the memories of Elizabeth’s many suitors and failed marriage prospects, along with her debated affairs with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and Robert
Devereaux, Earl of Essex. In the absence of a real spouse, the country as
“husband” was the one left cuckolded since any dalliance or relationship she had had the potential to affect the whole of the nation by interfering with a marriage that could produce heirs. Also, by maintaining her virginity, her unmarried status,
Elizabeth kept the option open for James VI to be considered as her successor.
The longer that she remained “unfaithful” to the nation by not marrying and fulfilling a lawful relationship, the greater the chance that the crown would be passed to a relative, which is what happened when Elizabeth died a spinster 159
without a child. For James’s sake, it was imperative that she remain “unfaithful” to her national spouse. Elizabeth, as Fairy Queen, is the one left knowing the full story while James/Oberon and Pigwiggen/other suitors are left to blissful ignorance of the true nature of her affairs. Robert Reid argues that “fairy aristocrats, even the great queen of fairies, have the same capacity for robing themselves in carnal passion and self-deceit as ordinary folk” (Reid 24), which is exactly what is shown in Nymphidia’s simulacrum of real life.
Drayton’s mediated representation connects back to Elizabeth as a form of nostalgia for her reign. Nostalgia for Elizabeth started just after James came to throne by those who were reluctant to be led by him and who did not see him as the rightful heir, in spite of attempts by Jonson and others to mediate that transition in favor of James by denigrating the memory of Elizabeth. Curtis Perry argues that “the relationship between perceptions of James and memories of
Elizabeth must be seen as twofold: while dissatisfaction with James no doubt contributed to the production of nostalgia for Elizabeth, idealized images of the late queen also helped to shape England’s apprehension of James” (154-155).
Raymond Jenkins points out another factor that affected the nostalgia: “[t]he younger followers of Spenser [such as Drayton and Browne] looked back upon the reign of Elizabeth, when all wrote in joyful rivalry with one another, as a golden age of noble deeds” (564). Jenkins notes further that “[b]y 1610, the great 160
outburst of typical Elizabethan poetry was almost spent, and all the poets whose ideals still clung to the Spenserian tradition recalled the great age with a certain longing and wistfulness” (564). This “wistfulness” is taken further by Drayton in his The Muses Elizivm, Lately discouerd, By a New Way Over Parnassvs, published in 1630, where the whole land is named after the long lost Elizabeth.
The Muses Elizivm is composed of “ten sundry Nymphalls,” according to the title-page, that deal with describing the interactions of various nymphs and fays in the golden earthly paradise of Elizium. Drayton describes Elizium:
The Poets Paradice this is,
To which but few can come;
The Muses onely bower of blisse
Their Deare Elizium. (100-104).
Berthelot argues that in The Muses Elizium “Drayton reached his ultimate in the pastoral genre. He retained the fairyland of Nimphidia and peopled it with nymphs and swains. Elizium finally moves beyond the land of magic into a land of the ideal. . . By pasing through the fairyland of Queen Mab, Drayton was able to discover the ideal homeland, Elizium” (61-62). This land is one where poets can rejoice in the creativity that was once expressed under Elizabeth.
For this study the most significant part of The Muses Elizivm is “The
Eight[h] Nimphall,” which features the marriage preparations for a nymph and a 161
fairy. Fairy Monarchs were responsible for approving and blessing marriages, especially those of their court, as was the English monarch responsible for approving marriages of some of the court’s elite. This aspect was seen in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream when Titania, Oberon and the other fairies literally swept through the home of the newlyweds to bless their home and marriages. In
“The Eight[h] Nimphall” Cloris, one of the nymphs proclaims,
let us provide
The Ornaments to fit our Bryde,
For they knowing she doth come
From us in Elizium,
Queene Mab will looke she should be drest
In those attyres we thinke our best (15-20)
The nymphs are worried about making the bride look her best so that she can be presented and accepted by the fairy monarch at the wedding the following day.
The rest of the “Nymphall” describes in detail how the bride will be dressed and how the rest of the ceremony will be orchestrated. By including this section in the poetic sequence, Drayton is again confirming the place of the Fairy Queen Mab in the establishment and maintenance of social order via one of the most mediated rituals of transformation: marriage.
162
Randolph’s Amyntas and The Jealous Lovers
Amyntas or The Impossible Dowry by Thomas Randolph, and performed for
Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, at Whitehall in 1632-33 (printed in
1638), is also a pastoral that deals with the ritual of marriage. In this play
Amyntas, “A mad Sheapheard” (“Drammatis Personae”),63 wishes to marry the nymph Vrania, but is prohibited by a request for a seemingly “impossible dowry” that must be provided, and which, since this is a comedy, is eventually fulfilled, allowing the two to marry.64 Throughout the play Jocastus, “A fantastique
63 Unless otherwise noted all quotations from Randolph, Thomas. Amyntas or
The Impossible Dowry. The Poems and Amyntas of Thomas Randolph. 1630. Ed.
John Jay Parry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917. 233-352.
64 The impossible dowry that must be fulfilled for the two to marry is:
Amyntas: That which thou hast not, mayst not, canst not have
Amyntas, is the Dowry that I crave.
Rest hopelesse in thy love, or else divine
To give Vrania this, and she is thine. (1.5.139-142)
The nymph is the one who sets the dowry for herself, which causes the couple so much grief. Amyntas finally figures out the answer to the riddle in the last scene of the play:
Amyntas: I have not, may not, cannot have a Husband. 163
sheapheard & fairy Knight” (“Drammatis Personae”), Thestylis “An old Nymph”
(“Drammatis Personae”), and Mopsus, “A foolish Augur enamoured on
Thestylis” (“Drammatis Personae”) are shown discussing love and the fairy realm, including Mab and Oberon--almost as a sub- or alternate-story to the main narrative of Amyntas and Vrania. A typical exchange:
Mop. Iocastus, I love Thestylis abominably,
The mouth of my affection waters at her.
Io. Be wary Mopsus, learne of mee to skorne
The mortalls; choose a better match: goe love
Some Fairy Lady! Princely Oberon
Tis true, I am a man, nor would I change
My sexe, to be the Empresse of the world.
Vrania, take they Dowry, ‘tis my selft;
A Husband, take it.
Vrania: Tis the richest Dowry
That ere my most ambitious praiers could beg!
But I will bring a portion, my Amyntas,
Shall equall it, if it can equall’d bee:
That which I have not, may not, cannot have
Shall be thy portion, ‘tis a wife, Amyntas. (5.8.70-79). 164
Shall stand thy friend: and beauteous Mab his Queene
Give thee a Maid of Honour.
Mop. How Iocastus?
Marry a puppet? Wed a mote ith’ Sunne?
Goe looke a wife in nutshells? wooe a gnat
That’s nothing but a voice? No no, Iocastus,
I must have flesh and blood, and will have Thestylis.
A fig for Fairies! (1.3.1-12).
This exchange, along with many others in the play, contrasts two views of the fairy realm: the Fairy Monarchs as honorable aids in marriage, and the fairies as parts of the miniature world that is incompatible with the human realm. Mopsus and Thestylis, along with Dorylas, “a knavish boy” (“Drammatis Personae”) ask
Jocastus about the fairy realm and the condition of Mab and Oberon, to which he responds, “Does not King Oberon beare a stately presence? / Mab is a beauteous
Empresse” (2.6.3-4). They also joke about Jocastus having an affair with Mab along the lines of Pigwiggen in Nymphidia: “You Cuckold-maker, I will tell King
Oberon / You lye with Mab his wife!” (2.6.7-8). Though Mab and Oberon are not physical characters in the play, the continual references to them, mediated through these characters, especially the fairy Knight Jocastus, keeps the monarchs ever- present in the narrative. Dorylas even disguises himself as a false Oberon in Act 165
3, Scene 4, and again in Act 5, Scene 6, by coming and dancing the morris dance and talking with the characters. The fairy realm is taken as both a real one since one of the main characters is a fay, and as a comical one where characters are free to take on the likeness of the monarch and speak on his behalf. By extension the monarchy that is mediated through these reference is also both real and mockable.
Randolph’s play The Jealous Lovers. A Comedie, which was also
“presented to their gracious Majesties,” according to the sub-title, includes two references to the Fairy Queen Mab. The play follows the common plot elements of a group of young lovers who fall in love with the wrong person due to unknown and disguised identities. In Act 3, Scene 7, Asotus, the “prodigal son”
(“Dramatis Personae”) of Simo, “an old doating father” (“Dramatis Personae”), compares himself to Oberon as he contemplates a marriage with Phryne “a courtesan, and mistress to Asotus” (“Dramatis Personae”). Asotus proclaims:
Now am I Oberon, prince of fairyland,
And Phryne shall be Mab, my empress fair:
My soldiers two I’ll instantly transform
To Will-with-a-wisp and Robin Goodfellow,
And make my brace of poets transmigrate
Into Pigwiggin and Sir Peppercorn.
It were a pretty whimsy now to counterfeit 166
That I were jealous of my Phryne’s love.
The humour would be excellent, and become me
Better than either Tyndarus or Techmessa.
Thus, will I walk as one in deadly dumps.
. . .
To-morrow, Mab, I thee mine empress crown. (3.7.1-11,74).
The scene begins with Asotus’s proclamation of marriage, but ends with his having sport with “Phryne’s love” by “counterfeit[ing]” a “deadly” jealously that ties back to Pigwiggen’s affair with Queene Mab in Drayton’s Nymphidia.
Asotus’s joke on his beloved is reminiscent of Oberon giving Titania a love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which resulted in Oberon being jealous of
Bottom. By the end of the play, the two lovers do overcome the negative consequences of Asotus’s “counterfeit” and marry.
The ability of mortals to compare their lives directly with those of the fairy monarchs, and their ability to place themselves in their own self-fashioned
“courts,” as Asotus projects the transformation of his “soldiers” and “poets” into fairy knights and companions, shows the levelling of the monarchy in the face of the rising dissatisfaction with Charles’s rule. Charles believed in the divine right of kings even more intensely than his father. Mildred Strubble relates, 167
In 1626, before the judges at Northampton, a divine named
Sibthorpe declared, “Rulers must be obeyed, whether the prince be
a believer or an infidel, whether he rule justly or unjustly,
courteously or cruelly.” The next year Mainwaring preached in
the presence of Charles that “among all the powers ordained of
God the royal is the most high, strong, and large. No power in the
world or in the church can lay restraint upon it” (33).
Even though Randolph’s fairy reference is brief and seemingly inconsequential, it presents a serious critique of the theory of divine right by monarchy, which intensified under James and was now practiced by Charles. If a prodigal son of a commoner and a courtesan can step in for the Fairy King and Queen then anyone can take the place of the “divine” monarchs.65
Queen Mab’s Brief Visits to the Works of Hausted, Milton, Ford, Shirley and
Chapman, Habington, Lluelyn, and Baron...
Following Randolph’s The Jealous Lovers, other writers include allusions to the
Fairy Queen Mab that occur as singular references. Berthelot argues that the
65 For more on the works of Thomas Randolph see The Poems and Amyntas of
Thomas Randolph, edited by John Jay Parry (1917) and Poetical and Dramatic
Works of Thomas Randolph, edited by W. Carew Hazlitt (1875). 168
reason for the inclusion of quick “one-off” references to the pagan realms of the fairy world was due to “the onslaught of the Puritan surge [that] cut short these fanciful tales; for the Puritans considered such fairy work as tools of the devil and an invention of the papists” (Berthelot 63). While fairy discourses were being attacked more frequently as remnants of Catholic beliefs, they were not eradicated as the continuance of these inclusions demonstrate. These allusions are not so much mediations of Mab, as the product of years of mediations by previous authors. Most of the following references are little quips that interpolate the whole combined history of the Fairy Queen Mab, her relationship to Oberon, and her role in the Fairy Court. Full descriptions, such as Mercutio’s in Romeo and Juliet as to who Queen Mab is, are no longer needed. In many respects, the mythography of Mab has become so well known as part of Carolinian fairy lore that Mab is as well known as an icon of the Fairy Queen as she was as a hag figure at the time of Jacob and Esau, a century earlier.
Peter Hausted was a friend and rival to Randolph. They went to school together at Cambridge. Hausted presented his play The Rivall Friends A
Comoedie the day before Randolph presented The Jealous Lovers. John Jay
Parry, the editor of the 1917 Yale University Press edition of Randolph’s works, notes that the two plays had been proposed to be presented to the King and Queen and that the university had taken sides as to which of the two should be presented, 169
with both plays eventually being brought forth. Though covering similar themes,
Hausted’s play, according to Parry,
proved an utter failure, partially, no doubt, because, as Hausted
charged, it was deliberately cried down by the opposing faction,
but chiefly because of its dullness. Randolph’s play . . . was a
great success; not only was it liked by the university, but, what
was of much more importance, the King, and Queen, and the
Court were all well pleased with it (16).
Hausted’s play follows a similar theme of love and mistaken identity as
Randolph’s and, similarly, contains a reference to Queen Mab, along with several references to Oberon. The reference to Mab occurs as part of a warning to the character Stipes by Anteros:
but now be sure
You doe not speake a word what noise so ere
You chance to heare, perhaps the fairy King
Will take some pawse, study a while, consult
With his Queene Mab about you how to polish
And frame you of a purer shape then ordinary.
Doe you marke that? St, not a word good Stipes. (5.5). 170
The passage uses the fairy monarchs as enforcers who can physically transform those they wish to reprimand, and since they belong to the supernatural realms they can hear “what noise” anywhere.66
John Milton, who was at Cambridge along with Randolph and Hausted, also included a brief reference to Queen Mab in his one of his works. The reference to Mab in his poem “L’Allegro,” the companion to “Il Penseroso,” both written around 1631-32, is more familiar to contemporary audiences from the
Henry Fuseli painting that is based upon it than for its significance within the poem. Eleanor Tate notes that “[i]n ‘L’ Allegro’ Milton’s world seems close to a small-scale vision of the ideal, green comic world, the world of As You Like It, for example. This he sets against other unreal dreams: the chivalric past, the classical world of myth, the fairy tale world of Queen Mab and the goblins, and finally
Shakespeare’s world of romantic comedy” (588). The reference to Mab occurs in the midst of the poem about “loathed Melancholy” (1) and “Mirth” (152):
Then to the Spicy Nut-brown Ale,
With stories of many a feat,
How Faery Mab the junkets eat;
66 For more on Hausted and this unpopular play see Laurens Joseph Mill’s 1951 edition of the play and his earlier Peter Hausted: Playwright, Poet, and Preacher
(1944). 171
She was pincht and pull’d, she said
And he by Friar’s Lantern led,
Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat
To earn his Cream-bowl duly set (100-106).
Tate argues that “[t]he Queen Mab allusion takes on some complexity, for this fairy world is an escape world even within the idealized green world--it is the story world of the country folk, in which goblins do their work at night” (Tate
588).
The line “How Faery Mab the junkets eat” (103) was illustrated by Henry
Fuseli in his painting Faery Mab, 1815-1820. The painting now hangs in the New
Reading Room at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.67 It was originally one of three paintings made in relation to the poem that were showcased in Fuseli’s Milton Gallery.68 Though Mab’s midwife aspects are almost universally ignored in illustrations of her, Fuseli in his Faery Mab (1815-
67 See William L. Pressly’s A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare
Library: “As Imagination Bodies Forth” (1993) for more on the Folger’s copy of the painting.
68 The other two paintings being The Frier’s Lanthorn and The Lubbar Fiend.
See Luisa Cale’s Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectator” for an overview of the Milton Gallery. 172
1820, alternatively titled Queen Mab) represents her devilish side. Though directly inspired by Milton’s poem “L’Allegro,” Fuseli’s Mab is a dark, voluptuous, grinning woman who is (over)indulging in food and drink and is surrounded by various sprites and bugs who are also delighting in the fare.
Edmond Jaloux notes that “Fuseli’s fairy world is adorable and cruel; above all it is disturbing. Fuseli knows that fairies are wicked, or at least mischievous . . . His
Queen Mab has something indefinably degenerate about her; her laughter is that of a demimbecile, her gaze is fixed and malicious” (quoted in Mason 81). This
Mab is arguably the grotesque woman who crosses boundaries and who mediates between the natural and the supernatural realms--she hints at the angelic and beautiful with her jewelry and curls, but she is far from being the beautiful and delicate Fairy Queen.69
69 Henry Fuseli, in his famous painting the Nightmare (1782), illustrates the image of the nightmare as a literal ghostly horse who watches as a small incubi--a demon, elf, fairy, or haggish Mab--sits, grinning, on top of the chest of woman sprawling back on a bed in ecstatic terror. In “On Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare,’” Erasmus
Darwin’s poetic response to Fuseli’s painting, Darwin notes the Nightmare “Was marked by Fuseli’s poetic eye; / Whose daring tints, with Shakespeare’s happiest grace, / Gave to the airy phantom form and place” (6-8, quoted in Mason). 173
John Ford’s minute reference to Mab occurs in The Chronicle History of
Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth, registered in 1634. In this play about English kingship and the legitimacy of heirs, Mab and Oberon are mentioned after a list of entertainments and celebrations for a court wedding, where Huntly exclaims to
Dalyell,
The feasts, the manly stomachs,
The healths in usquebaugh and bonny-clabber,
The ale in dishes never fetched from China,
The hundred thousand knacks not to be spoken of,
And all this for king Oberon and queen Mab,
Should put a soul int’ee. (3.2.7-12).
This reference ties back to the need to provide sumptuous decorations and a lavish feast at a wedding so that it will be blessed by the fairy monarchs.70
70 A full discussion of this play on kingship is beyond the scope of this study.
There are numerous editions of Ford’s play. For more on Ford’s life and criticism of the play see: Clifford Leech’s John Ford (1964), H. J. Oliver’s The Problem of
John Ford (1955), Dale B. J. Randall’s “Theatres of Greatness”: A Revisionary
View of Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1986), Joan Sargeaunt’s John Ford (1966), Mark
Stavig’s John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order (1968), and Donald K.
Anderson Jr.’s “Kingship in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck” (1960). 174
In James Shirley and George Chapman’s play The Ball, A Comedy, from
1639, which is sometimes ascribed to only one of the playwrights, Mab appears right at the start of the performance. In the first scene Sir Marmaduke Travers discovers that his mistress Lady Lucina may have “A compliment from one that is
[his] rival” (1.1.19),71 Sir Ambrose, and he goes on a tirade about how he will challenge any for her favor:
I care no more for killing half a dozen
Knights of the lower house, I mean that are not
Descended from nobility, than I do
To kick my footman; and Sir Ambrose were
Knight of the Sun, King Oberon should not save him,
Nor his Queen Mab. (1.1.45-50).
In this passage from the London comedy the playwrights use Mab and Oberon as monarchs who would not be able to protect their own men from Travers’s rage should Sir Ambrose not stand down in his pursuit of Lady Lucina.72
71 All references are from The Ball. The Plays of George Chapman: The
Comedies Vol. 2. Ed T. M. Parrott. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1961.
537-605.
72 A full examination of this city comedy is beyond the scope of this study. For more on Shirley, Chapman, and the play, please see: Hanson Tufts Parlin’s A 175
Later in the midst of the Commonwealth period James Shirley revisited the topic of Mab in his 1655 play The Gentleman of Venice, A Tragi-Comedie.
As with his earlier composition with Chapman, The Ball, the reference to Mab is brief. Unlike the earlier play, though, the allusion to Mab and Oberon appears in connection with other fairy and supernatural references in Act 5, Scene 1, such as
“Cynthia” (5.1.76) and “Endimion” (5.1.87) as part of a delusional speech by
Florelli:
No inquisitions if you will leave Venice.
Let’s drink and spoon away with the next vessell.
A hundred leagues hence, I may tell you wonders.
Here is a chime to make King Oberon
Queen Mab, and all her fayries turn o’th toe boyes. (5.1.95-99)
To which one of the gentlemen listening to Florelli exclaims, “Hee’s mad I think”
(5.1.400). Here the reference to the fairy monarchs is non-sensical and has no real significance except that the fairy monarchs are still in existence and part of the landscape of imagination.
Study in Shirley’s Comedies of London Life (1914), Millar MacLure’s George
Chapman: A Critical Study (1966), David Stevens’s “The Stagecraft of James
Shirley” (1977), and Marvin Morillo’s “Shirley’s ‘Preferment’ and the Court of
Charles I” (Spring 1961). 176
William Habington in his The Queene of Arragon, a Tragi-Comedie, from
1640, has a dwarf named Browfildora invoke Mab during a description of his mistresse in a discussion with his master Sanmartino:
SAN. You a mistress!
BROW. A mistress, to whose beauty I have paid
My vows, fervent vows, e’er since I was
Of stature fit to be an amorist.
SAN. One of the maids-of-honour to Queen Mab?
BROW. Your lordship guesses near; for she is one
O’ th’ chamberers to her Fairy Majesty:
A lady of most subtle wit, who, while
She puts a handkerechief or gorget on,
Her little highness holds intelligence
Abroad, and orders payment for the spies.
She raiseth factions, and unites the angry:
She’s much upon design. (4.1.58-70).
Though the description of Browfildora’s mistress is given in jest, it presents
Queen Mab and her inner chamber of maids as involved in “intelligence” work, hiring “spies,” gathering those who are “angry” and “rais[ing] factions.”
Considering this is the last known reference to the Fairy Queen Mab before the 177
start of the English Civil War in 1642, it is not surprising that the representation of the monarchy would be visualized, even briefly, as readying a “design” for political battle. Habington’s family was known for being politically active anti- royalist Catholics. According to Robert Wilcher, in his entry in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, William’s father “Thomas Habington and his brother Edward were punished, by six years’ incarceration in the Tower and by execution respectively, for involvement in the Babington conspiracy of 1586, and
Thomas was in trouble again in the months following the discovery of the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605 for harbouring Jesuit priests at Hindlip Hall.” During the
1630s Habington was “associated with the Catholic faction that surrounded Queen
Henrietta Maria . . . [and later] bore arms on the royalist side during the civil war” (Wilcher). The transference of the Fairy Queen Mab representing the
Anglican Elizabeth to the Catholic Maria Henrietta follows the connection of the fairies to papist belief. As a fairy, Mab would have been associated with the
Catholics and could easily be used to mediate Maria Henrietta, as she could be used to signify the nostalgia for the lost idealized monarchy of the Tudors.
The above allusions to Mab and her court, from Drayton to Habington, occur during the reign of Charles I. In 1642 the Civil War began in England.
Until the Restoration, the majority of the references to the Fairy Queen Mab occur in poetry such as in Martin Lluelyn (of Llewellyn)’s 1646 song “At the Holly 178
Bush Guard” from his collection Men-Miracles: with other poems on several subjects. The lyric refers to the negative aspects of the “Tyrannous Fairy” (20)
“Queene Mab [who] comes worse then a Witch in” (24) including “pinch[ing]”
(11) “quiet drowzy Heads” (8) and the arrival of the “Night-mare” (29). When he was just seventeen Robert Baron appended a lyric by the fairies to the end of his two-act Gripus and Hegio, or the Passionate Lovers. A Pastorall Acted by the
Lady Iulias Servants, for the entertainment of Flaminius (1647). The “Chorus of
Fairies” ask “Mab thou Majestick Queene / Of Fairies, be thou seene / To keep this holyday” (2.6.7-9), thus blessing the lover’s wedding. It is notable in these last two allusions that Oberon, the Fairy King, is absent and the Fairy Queen seemingly rules alone.
Herrick’s and Cavendish’s Fairy Court Poems
The end of Charles’s troubled reign and the start of the Commonwealth provide two companion views of Mab and Oberon’s courts that are the most familiar post-
Shakespearean mediations besides Drayton’s. Both Robert Herrick in 1648
Hesperides and Margaret Cavendish in her 1653 Poems and Fancies detail the whole of the monarchs’ court life through a series of poems. Cavendish clearly models her fairy poems on Herrick’s, but while Herrick presents a grotesque 179
world that demonstrates a vile repulsion of Catholicism, Cavendish explores the micro- and macro-cosmic worlds of Fairy-land with a proto-scientific eye.
Herrick’s Hesperides
Herrick’s references to the fairy monarchs are scattered throughout his collection of poems; “The Court of Mab, and the Fairie-King” (#1 12)73 are listed as one of the many topics that he addresses in the “The Argument of his Book” (#1). “The
Temple” (#224), preceded by a brief dedicatory poem “The Fairie Temple: Or,
Oberon’s Chappell. Dedicated to Mr John Merrifield, Counsellor at Law” (#223), describes the fairies’ place of worship in detail. He notes, “Theirs is a mixt
Relgion. / And some have heard the Elves call / Part Pagan, part Papisticall”
(#224 23-25), referring to the connection between fairy belief and Catholicism.
Following that connection, the description of this “Temple of Idolatry” (#224 6) is very similar to the description of Catholic churches and their tools of worship, except that the architecture is composed of the corpses of insects and “small bones, instead of walls” (#224 10). The Temple contains an “Altar” (#224 54) “of
73 Unless otherwise noted, all references will be to Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and Noble Numbers. 1648. (Everyman). Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: J. M. Dent &
Co., n. d. The number in the citation that precedes the line number refers to the poem’s order number in this edition. 180
a little Transverce bone” (#224 57), “A little Puppet-Priest” (#224 39), and
“Saints here painted / Saint Tit, Saint Nit, Saint Is, Saint Itis, / Who ‘gainst Mab- state plac’t here right is” (#224 27-29). They also “have their Text for what they doe; / I, and their Book of Canons too” (#224 77-78). The poet also points out
And if their Legend doe not lye
They much affect the Papacie:
And since the last is dead, there’s hope,
Elve Boniface, shall next be Pope. (#224 109-112).74
Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan from 1651, published just a few years after
Herrick’s Hesperides, demonstrates the continued connection between fairies and
Catholicism. In Part IV, Chapter 47 of his work he makes a “Comparison of the
Papacy with the Kingdome Of Fayries” (712), noting,
For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to
be acknowledged for Bishop Universall, by pretence of Succession
to St. Peter, their whole Hierarchy, or Kingdome of Darknesse,
may be compared not unfitly to the Kingdome of Fairies; that is, to
the old wives Fables in England, concerning Ghosts and Spirits,
74 During the time when Herrick wrote Pope Innocent X held the papal seat
(1644-1655). He was succeeded by Alexander VII. Pope Boniface IX held the seat from 1389-1404 during the time of the Papal Schism. 181
and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the
originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily
perceive, that the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the
deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof:
For so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of
that Heathen Power.
. . .
The Fairies in what Nation soever they converse, have but one
Universall King, which some Poets of ours call King Oberon; but
the Scripture calls Beelzebub, Prince of Daemons. The
Ecclesiastiques likewise, in whose Dominions soever they be
found, acknowledge but one Universall King, the Pope. (712-
713)75
75 The rest of this brief section follows:
The Ecclesiastiques are Spirituall men, and Ghostly
Fathers. The Fairies are Spirits, and Ghosts. Fairies and Ghosts
inhabite Darknesse, Solitudes, and Graves. The Ecclesiastiques
walke in Obscurity of Doctrine, in Monasteries, Churches, and
Churchyards. 182
The Ecclesiastiques have their Cathedral Churches; which, in what Towne soever they be erected, by vertue of Holy Water, and certain Charmes called Exorcismes, have the power to make those Townes, cities, that is to say, Seats of Empire. The Fairies also have their enchanted Castles, and certain Gigantique Ghosts, that domineer over the Regions round about them.
The Fairies are not to be seized on; and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the Ecclesiastiques vanish away from the Tribunals of Civill Justice.
The Ecclesiastiques take from young men, the use of
Reason, by certain Charms compounded of Metaphysiques, and
Miracles, and Traditions, and Abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else, but to execute what they command them.
The Fairies likewise are said to take young Children out of their
Cradles, and to change them into Naturall Fools, which Common people do therefore call Elves, and are apt to mischief.
In what Shop, or Operatory the Fairies make their
Enchantment, the old Wives have not determined. But the
Operatories of the Clergy, are well enough known to be the 183
Universities, that received their Discipline from Authority
Pontificall.
When the Fairies are displeased with any body, they are said to send their Elves, to pinch them. The Ecclesiastiques, when they are displeased with any Civill State, make also their Elves, that is, Superstitious, Enchanted Subjects, to pinch their Princes, by preaching Sedition; or one Prince enchanted with promises, to pinch another.
The Fairies marry not; but there be amongst them Incubi, that have copulation with flesh and bloud. The Priests also marry not.
The Ecclesiastiques take the Cream of the Land, by
Donations of ignorant men, that stand in aw of them, and by
Tythes: So also it is in the Fable of Fairies, that they enter into the
Dairies, and Feast upon the Cream, which they skim from the
Milk.
What kind of Money is currant in the Kingdome of Fairies, is not recorded in the Story. But the Ecclesiastiques in their
Receipts accept of the same Money that we doe; though when they 184
Hobbes makes the direct connection between Oberon the Fairy King and the
Pope, which furthers the link between fairy belief and Catholicism beyond that made by Herrick.
Herrick’s critique of the Fairy Temple and its Catholic trappings is also an attack on William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was accused by
Protestants and Puritans of trying to return the Church of England to Catholicism.
Achsah Guibbory notes, “Laud was accused of importing ‘Popish’ things into the
English church (though most indeed had existed previously)--the wearing of surplices and other clerical vestments; the use of incense, candles, and holy water;
are to make any Payment, it is in Canonizations, Indulgences, and
Masses.
To this, and such like resemblances between the Papacy,
and the Kingdome of Fairies, may be added this, that as the
Fairies have no existence, but in the Fancies of ignorant people,
rising from the Traditions of old Wives, or old Poets: so the
Spirituall Power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own Civill
Dominion) consisteth onely in the Fear that Seduced people stand
in, of their Excommunication; upon hearing of false Miracles,
false Traditions, and false Interpretations of the Scripture. (713-
714). 185
making the sign of the cross; kneeling at the Sacrament and bowing before the alter” (91). Though Herrick includes these Laudian elements in “The Temple”
(#224) in a way that seems to be promoting them, the association of the whole temple and its practices with the fairies complicates and/or negates any pro-
Laudian reading.
“Oberons Feast” (#294)76 does not mention Queen Mab, but the description of the miniature feast for the King recalls Browne’s description in his
Britannia’s Pastorals. The feasts of the fairy monarchs are so extravagant that
Herrick includes a poem about a beggar requesting some of their “Store” (#639 1) in “The Beggar To Mab, The Fairie Queen” (#639). Similarly, he addresses the need to be cleanly and chaste “If ye will with Mab find grace” (#557 1) in the poem “The Fairies” (#557).77
The most disturbing poem in Herrick’s collection is “Oberons Palace”
(#444), which is a follow-up companion to “Oberons Feast” (#294). Some critics,
76 An earlier version was published in 1635.
77 It is possible that Herrick is also the author of “King Oberon his Cloathing,” which has been attributed to Sir Simeon Steward. See Norman K. Farmer, Jr.’s
“Robert Herrick and ‘King Oberon’s Clothing’: New Evidence for Attribution” for more on the debate. Mab is not mentioned in the poem so I have not considered it for this study. 186
such as Harold Toliver, claim that Herrick’s “Fairyland has a built-in charm”
(440) and that in “‘Oberon’s Palace,’ he scales down the size and calls attention to minutiae. . . [and that] [t]he narrative is primarily a pretext to itemize such things as the shine of snails” (440). This poem, though, is anything but “charm[ing],” as it is about a drunken Oberon raping his wife while she sleeps. Herrick opens the poem with a pleasant overview of the topic:
AFTER the Feast (my Shapcot) see,
The Fairy Court I give to thee:
Where we’le present our Oberon, led
Halfe tipsie to the Fairie Bed,
Where Mab he finds; who there doth lie
Not without mickle majesty.
Which, done; and thence remov’d the light,
We’l wish both Them and Thee, good night. (#444 1-8)
The reality of Oberon’s actions, however, is far from pleasant as he heads to his wife full of lust. Toliver also trivializes these actions noting, “Oberon hustles off to Mab possessed by a recognizable lust, though we are not obliged to judge him for it” (441-442):
Full as a Bee with Thyme, and Red,
As Cherry harvest, now high fed 187
For Lust and action; on he’l go,
To lye with Mab, though all say no.
Lust ha’s no eares; He’s sharpe as thorn (#444 9-14)
None of his “Elves” (#444 16) or “his Guard” (#444 17) will stop him because
“Kings, though th’are hated, will be fear’d” (#444 18). Oberon’s lust may be recognizable, as Toliver points out, as well, unfortunately, are his actions, but it is only a misogynistic critic, one reared on the idea of woman being the property of her husband, that could say Oberon’s actions should not be judged. Furthermore,
Oberon is not just a man and a husband, he is also a king and every action of his must be read as a mediation of both the personal and the larger monarchic figure, as Herrick makes clear by his comment that though everyone around him “all say no,” “fear” of the King keeps people from stopping his “hated” act.
The poet describes the path to his Palace through a “Grove” (#444 19).
W. F. Moorman sees the description as an example of the “nimbleness of fancy”
(Robert 271) that shows “a nice sense of proportion in miniature” (Robert 271).
Moorman also states that the description of the grove shows Herrick’s “nobler qualities” (Robert 271). Unlike earlier descriptions of the homes, temple, or feasting tables of the monarchs, which are constructed out of insect and animal parts, the “fancy” and “nobler qualities” of Oberon’s Palace, as an extreme satirization of Charles’s lavish lifestyle, also includes parts of humans in its 188
architecture. His royal “Cave” (#444 54) is paved with “Squirrils and childrens teeth late shed” (#444 55) and “The tempting Mole, stoln from the neck / Of the shie Virgin, seems to deck / The holy Entrance” (#444 63-65). Mab is found
Upon six plump Dandillions, high-
Rear’d, lyes her Elvish-majestie:
Whose woollie-bubbles seem’d to drowne
Hir Mab-ship in Obedient Downe.
For either sheet, was spread the Caule
That doth the Infants face enthall,
When it is born. . .
. . .
With Cob-web-curtains . .
. . .
The Fringe about this, are those Threads
Broke at the Losse of Maiden-heads:
And all behung with these pure Pearls,
Dropt from the eyes of ravisht Girles
Or writhing Brides. (#444 86-110)
This grotesque Palace matches Oberon’s actions, which “to excite / A more unconquer’d appetite” (#444 114-115) he has “For Musick now; . . . the cries / Of 189
fainèd-lost-Virginities” (#444 112-113) to enable the sleeping “Mab [be] possest /
Of this great-little-kingly-Guest” (#444 118-119). Peter Schwenger argues that all of this narrative is a “joke, of course, [in] that nobody has any intention of saying no to him. It is purely as a result of his own wine-heightened imagination that
Oberon is cast in the role of hero overcoming all obstacles” (44). He also argues that “Queen Mab, when we finally encounter her, is also playing a role. Tucked into her elaborate ceremonial bed, she awaits the approach of Oberon less as a wife awaits her husband then as a bride awaits her bridegroom” (44). Queen Mab is not playing a role of “await[ing] her husband”; she is if anything described as
“His Moon-tann’d Mab, as somewhat sick” (#444 84). Besides showing a “hated”
(#444 18) king raping his wife, the poem has the beautiful Fairy Queen wrapped in the birth membrane of babies, which though it ties back to Mab’s role as a midwife, is anything but beautiful and glorious. Herrick’s mediation of the fairy monarch presents him as monstrous. Mab is presented as a passive victim of
Oberon’s actions, while presumably being a willing inhabitant of this horrid
Palace. As a satire of Charles’s Court, this pluralization is more sympathetic to 190
Maria Henrietta than it is to Charles, who is seen as reprehensible and unstoppable by those closest to him.78
Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, released her collection of Poems and
Fancies in 1653, four years after Charles’s execution. Her presentation of the fairy court follows structurally along similar lines as Herrick’s in that she has several poems that link together as part of a larger narrative about court life.
Topically her poems are grouped so that she has four poems about the Fairy
Queen (“The Fairy Queen,” “The Pastime, and Recreation of the Queen of
Fairies in Fairy-land, the Center of the Earth,” “The Pastime of the Queen of
Fairies, when she comes upon the Earth out of the Center,” and “Her descending downe”), three about the realm of fairies within the brain (“Of small Creatures, such as we call Fairies,” “The City of the Fairies,” and “The Fairies in the Braine, may be the causes of many thoughts”), “A Battle between King Oberon, and the
Pygmees,” followed by “The Temple of Fortune,” and one of the final poems,
78 There are numerous editions of Herrick’s Hesperides and his work, but very few take anything but a passing interest in the nature of his fairy poems, particularly the misogynistic and grotesque nature of the fairy landscape. 191
“SIR Charles into my chamber coming in,” all but the last couplet of which forms my epigraph for this chapter.79
Cavendish opens one of her addresses “To Poets” by stating her fear of the subject of fairies because of their threat of penetration and violence. She claims, in this rhetorical posturing, that “THERE is no Spirit frights me so much, as Poets
Satyrs, and their Faiery Wits: which are so subtle, aiery, and nimble, as they passe through every small Crevise, and Cranie of Errours, and Mistakes, and dance upon every Line, and round every Fancy; which when they find to be dull, and sleepy, they pinch them black, and blew, with Robbin-hoods Jests” (121). In spite of her worries, Cavendish is more than able to write about this topic, and she does so in a manner that continues and transforms the genre once again.
79 Unfortunately her poems have been excerpted and given other names in some anthologies such as “Courting the Faerie Queen,” from The New Oxford Book of
Seventeenth-Century Verse (2002), which is untitled and known by its first line
“SIR Charles into my chamber coming in” or “Queen Mab’s Dinner-Table,” from the 1849 The Female Poets of Great Britain, which is part of “The Pastime, and
Recreation of the Queen of Fairies in Fairy-land, the Center of the Earth”--all of which can make it confusing when discussing her work. Unless otherwise notes, all references will be from Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s Poems and Fancies. 1653. Menston: Menston Scolar Press, 1972. 192
In “The Fairy Queen,” the first of her four poems written explicitly about
Queen Mab, Cavendish describes “The Fairy Queens large Kingdome got by birth
/ [which] is in the circled center of the Earth” (1-2). Placing the fairy realm at the center of the Earth ties Cavendish’s Mab back to earlier versions where the Fairy
Queen was called Proserpina, “that’s thought the Queen of hell” (“Fairy” 72). In contrast to the earlier poets that describe the realm of the fairy court in minute detail, in this poem Cavendish starts in the center of the earth and works through a description of the whole world on out into the “heavens” (“Fairy” 57). She talks of the geography of “the Poles, / [which] Are pointed Diamonds, the Antartick holds, / And Artick; which about the world is rowl’d” (“Fairy” 33-35) and the chemistry of life:
And as the Sun gives heat to make things spring,
So water moysture gives to every thing.
Thus these two Elements give life to all,
Creating every thing on Earths round ball (“Fairy” 9-12).
Ultimately Queen Mab is seen as the Queen of Nature without necessarily being
“mother nature.” The poem ends with a correction to “men[‘s]” (“Fairy” 87) attempts to understand nature and the universe. She argues,
Yet heretofore men striv’d to prove,
That Cupid was the god of love. 193
But if that men could to the Center go,
They soon would see that it were nothing so.
Here Nature nurses, and sends them season,
All things abroad, as she seeth reason.
When she commands, all things do her obey,
For she stayes life, when drugs are well apply’d,
And healing balmes to deadly wounds beside.
There Mab is Queen of all, by Natures will,
And by her favour she doth govern still.
Happy Mab, that is in Natures grace;
For young she’s alwayes, being in this place. (“Fairy” 87-100)
Within this macro description Proserpine’s “sonne’s a pretty Lad, / And is a Foot- boy to Queen Mab” (“Fairy” 81-82) who rules over all. Margaret Ezell notes, “A large part of th[e] volume [Poems and Fancies] is taken up with the duchess’s verses on scientific matters, particularly ‘atomic’ theory. . . Read in context, her poems on the world of Queen Mab are less an indication of a dreamy, escapist reverie . . than an extension of her passionate curiosity about the ‘new science’ and what it could reveal about the composition of the natural world” (126).
In “The Pastime, and Recreation of the Queen of Fairies in Fairy-land, the Center of the Earth,” with details reminiscent of Browne, Drayton, and 194
Herrick, Mab is portrayed dancing, dining, and then traveling in her “Coach, which is a Nutshel faire” (“Pastime and Recreation” 52). Similarly in “The
Pastime of the Queen of Fairies, when she comes upon the Earth out of the
Center,” Mab is seen avoiding Apollo, “For they fell out about some foolish toy”
(“Pastime of the Queen” 9), chasing “Hobgoblin [who] is the Queen of Fairies fool” (“Pastime of the Queen” 33), and “pinch[ing] the sluts” (“Pastime of the
Queen” 30). Thus like Proserpine, who spends half the year in Hades and half above, Mab spends part of her pastime in Fairy-land in the center of the earth enjoying the courtly delights; the other half she spends above ground playing mischievous tricks that are normally associated with the fairies. The last poem of this group depicts “Her descending downe” to where her “stately Pallace” (“Her”
1) is located. Unlike the other poets her palace is made out of a “Rain-bow”
(“Her” 3), “Amber” (“Her” 5), parts of flowers, and has “large doores . . . cut of transparent Glasse” (“Her” 11). The only body parts that are included in her decorations are “a Butter-flyes wing hung about: / Her sheets are made of a Doves eyes skin” (“Her” 8-9). Cavendish’s Fairy Queen Mab lives in a much more modern and beautiful palace than the earlier ones made out of insect, animal, and human corpses. Although still small she travels the whole world, and plays a very active role in its running. This Fairy Queen is also emancipated from the Fairy
King Oberon, though he appears in the other two series of fairy poems. 195
The second series of poems is part of “The Claspe” section where
Cavendish is writing of the relationship of various spirits to the body, which is seen as a universe unto itself. The most interesting aspect of this series of fairy poems is that they are in part an extension of her theories of atomism. Lisa T.
Sarasohn summarizes Cavendish’s theory of atomism: “the world is composed of four differently shaped kind of atoms: square atoms which constitute earth, round atoms which make up water, long atoms which compose air, and sharp atoms which compose fire. The various concatenations and motions of these different atoms, and the void make up all the variety of forms and change we find in nature” (291). As atom-like creatures the fairies in her poems are a more literal concretization of my argument in Chapter Three regarding Shakespeare’s Queen
Mab: that as a form of disease she is able to penetrate the bodies and minds of
English citizens and affect their thoughts and desires. In the poem “Of small
Creatures, such as we call Fairies,” the opening lines set theme:
WHO knowes, but in the Braine may dwel
Little small Fairies; who can tell?
And by their severall actions they may make
Those formes and figures, we for fancy take.
And when we sleep, those Visions, dreames we call (“Of Small”
1-5). 196
The brain, which she calls “The City of the Fairies” in the second poem, is where the “great Magazine of Oberon King” (“City” 8) is kept. This poem is a blazon of the head and what each part equals within the city’s “Double walls” (“City” 2).
The fairy court is located in the center of it all, in a head belonging to royalty--a king within a king--which she notes:
And Oberon King dwels never any where,
But in a Royal Head, whose Court is there:
Which is the kernell of the Braine, if seen,
We there might view him, and his beauteous Queen;
Sure that’s their Court, and there they sit in state,
And Noble Lords, and Ladies on them wait. (“City” 19-24).
The actions of the fairies in the court and in the brain of a commoner cause emotions, which Cavendish describes in “The Fairies in the Braine, may be the causes of many thoughts.” Here sad thoughts might be from a fairy that has
“dye[d]” (“Fairies in the Braine” 6), or thoughts of love might be due to a fairy wedding that is taking place within one’s cranium. Anne-Julia Zwierlein notes,
“Cavendish’s microscopic fairy world serves to explain phenomena in ‘our’ world as the effects of subliminal causes” (88). As atomic beings the fairies live and reside in our brains, and they are responsible for our thoughts, creations, dreams, and emotions. That the monarchs can choose to live in only “Royal Head[s]” 197
shows that the fairies are not born to particular bodies but are free to move from one corporeal environment to another.
Unlike the earlier authors who focus on more domestic matters, Cavendish shows the fairy monarchy in times of battle. In “A Battle between King Oberon, and the Pygmees” the two factions “Did goe to War, the cause was just no doubt”
(“Battle” 2) as the Pygmees invade Fairy-land. Her poem reflects how Parliament was supposed to work during Charles’s time and did not because he refused to call Parliament for over a decade:
King Oberon then a war prepar’d,
Which maid his Queen, and all his Court afraid;
His Counsell grave and wise, did to him call,
Which came with formall busie faces all:
Where every one did speake their minde full free,
Disputing this, and that, at last agree.
In War, said they, ‘tis better that we dye,
Then to be slaves unto our enemy. (“Battle” 17-24).
The rest of the poem describes the various preparations, a heroic challenge between the two kings, the battle, and the burial rights of the dead. The companion poem describes the “The Temple of Fortune,” which “was built of
Cornelian red, / To signifie that much blood there was shed” (“Temple” 1-2) 198
during the war with the Pygmees. The war and its aftermath described in these two poems has obvious connections to the wars between Charles and the royalists and the parliamentarians, which had taken place the preceding decade in England.
Cavendish’s poem can be read as a testament to how a “just” (“Battle” 2) war should be waged and how the nation should go about memorializing the loss of life and rebuilding the public psyche afterwards in the Commonwealth.80
Following Queen Mab
80 For more on Cavendish’s life and writings see: Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge:
The Extraordinary Life of Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to
Live by Her Pen (2002). Kathleen Jones’s A Glorious Fame: The Life of
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673 (1988), Anna Battigelli’s
Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (1998), Emma L. E. Rees’s
Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (2003), Henry Ten Eyck Perry’s The
Frist Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures of Literary History
(1918), Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz’s collection Authorial Conquests:
Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (2003). Stephen Clucas’s
A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
(2003), and Douglas Grant’s Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 1623-1673 (1957). 199
After almost a decade of the Commonwealth and its abuses to the English people, there were several literary works that tried to sum up the whole of English literature to boost a sense of nationalism. Josua Poole’s 1657 English Parnassus:
Or, A Help to English People. Containing A Collection of all Rhyming
Monosyllable, The choicest Epithets, and Phrases: With some General Forms upon all Occasions, Subjects, and Theams, Alphabetically digested was an exercise in pluralization since it is a giant common-place book composed of excerpts of other works that are woven together without attribution. Similar to the history of how Mab’s mythology was compacted through the cumulative effect of critical mis-readings and abridgements, Josua Poole’s English Parnassus creates something entirely new, yet recognizable, from the earlier Mab texts. As the title indicates Poole’s text contains rhyming guides and alphabetical lists that are like a dictionary or thesaurus in the first half. In the second half, again in alphabetical order, are illustrations of the words in the first half using various excerpts. The
Fairy Queen Mab is included under the section elaborating on “Fairies.” The section includes parts of Jonson’s Entertainment at Althrope, Sir Simeon
Steward’s (or Herrick’s) “King Oberon’s Clothing,” Herrick’s “Oberon’s Feast,” some of the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet, and lists of characters from Drayton’s Nymphidia. Only “Oberons Diet” and “Oberons Clothing” are given titles, along with another work “The Fairy Queen” whose authorship seems 200
to be lost, since Poole’s is the earliest reference that I can find for it--though it has a long and popular history afterwards.
The lyric for “The Fairy Queen” is also known as “Come Follow Me.” It features the lines “Come follow, follow me. You fairy elves that be, / Which circle in the green, Come follow me your Queen” (Poole 291). Edward Phillips republished the poem as a more distinct work in 1658, entitled “The Queen of
Fairies” (74-76), as part of his compendium of English knowledge Mysteries of
Love and Eloquence. David Garrick’s The Fairies: An Opera, from 1755, includes six lines from the poem at the end of the first act (1.6). None of these early versions mentions Mab specifically, but when Bishop Thomas Percy reprinted the poem as “The Fairy Queen,” in his 1765 Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs and Other Pieces of Our Earlier
Poets, he cites Phillips as the source and changes “Come follow me your Queen,” which appeared in the earlier versions to “Come follow Mab your queene” (208).
A hundred years later Joseph Ritson retitled it “Queen Mab’s Invitation” in his
1875 Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances Illustrating Shakespeare and Other
Early English Writers, noting that “[i]t was sung to the tune of the ‘Spanish
Gipsy’” (318). Then in 1938 Gordon Jacob set the words to new music and called it “Queen Mab: Unison Song.” The changes to the song and particularly its title show the multiple effects of simple mediations at work that have literally 201
pluralized this one lyric into multiple texts. This series of mediations also takes a simple song that details standard elements of fairy-lore and moves them, over time, from the realm of the generic Fairy Queen into the specific realm of the
Fairy Queen Mab and all that she represents.
By the time Charles II is restored to the throne in 1660, the realm of the
Fairy Queen Mab, and particularly the figure herself, has become overmediated to encompass the idealized world of Elizabeth and James--nostalgia for them and their lost rule--while simultaneously referencing the corrupt monarchy of Charles
I and the Catholic Maria Henrietta. Other than in brief references in city comedies, the Fairy Queen and her King are relegated to the pagan realms of the forest and idealized court life where all of the complexities of court can occur without impact on the citizens of England and the monarchy can be celebrated and critiqued in spite of and in response to the real world civil war that occurred in England. The references to the Fairy Queen Mab are also vacuous, as Poole’s amalgamated entry and the history of the song “Come follow me” show, because the links to particular stories and histories have collapsed and been merged in ways where individual representations invoke the whole history of the Fairy
Queen Mab without acknowledgement that that history is one of numerous mediations that have worked to transform and pluralize her figure.
202
Conclusion
1 pint milk
yolks 6 eggs
½ pint cream
1 lemon rind
1oz gelatine
a few drops of almond essence
1oz each: pistachio nuts, preserved ginger, cherries and candied peel
--Miss Price
“Queen Mab’s Pudding” (1891)81
81 The rest of the recipe for “Queen Mab’s Pudding” is as follows:
Steep in 1 pint milk the rind of a lemon cut very thin. 5 oz. Loaf
sugar. Strain milk into yolks of 6 eggs; beat a little and stir over
fire until it thickens. Let it cool a little; then mix in 1 oz gelatin
dissolved in ½ cupful water, ½ pint cream and a few drops of
almond essense. When a little stiffend put in 1 oz pistachio nuts, 1
oz candied fruit, 1 oz preserved ginger, 1 oz cherries cut in small
pieces. Then put mixture into moulds previously soaked in water.
When cold turn out. (Price). 203
Often presented as eating and indulging in life, the Fairy Queen Mab has been mediated, transformed, and pluralized throughout the early modern period in
England. Mab has been used to represent Queen Elizabeth during her life time and after her death. This mediation has changed from a negative hag-midwife figure, a mediating agent willing to help usurp and unbalance primogeniture, to one that penetrates all aspects of society like a disease. Mab has been merged with the divine Fairy Queen, also a representative of the deceased Elizabeth, so that she can pass on her monarchy and nation to James’s family. As Elizabeth’s direct power was minimalized in the Jacobean and later Carolinian age, she became diminutive herself in representations that pluralize her form as part of a simulacrum of court life. Furthermore, as the real monarchy became more destabilized under Charles, the ideal monarchy of the fairy realm solidified as
Mab/Elizabeth was married to Oberon/James, in an exemplar of ideal Tudor- descendant court life, one that would be able to lead the English nation to a happier future.
Four centuries later Mab is now the established name for the Fairy Queen, and she has been adapted and used to represent the links to the old and fantastic realms of the Golden Age, the pastoral, and even Arthurian Legend. Along the
There are several versions of this custard pudding named after Queen Mab, which was very popular in the nineteenth century. 204
way Mab has also taken on numerous physical transformations that continue to invoke the fantastic pagan realms of fairies and witches, while simultaneously evoking the gloriousness and divinity of queenship. Variations of the name “The
Fairy Queen Mab” have been used to designate at least twenty-one thoroughbred horses between 1785 and 2005;82 the first train on the railway in Nova Scotia,
Canada in 1853 (called Queen Mab);83 and several vessels, including a 1910 two- masted steel schooner (later called Vagrant) from Rhode Island, and a ship, registered in the Port of Bristol and Southwark. The connection of Queen Mab to modes of transportation is not surprising since her form of locomotion, particularly the tiny chariots from Romeo and Juliet and Nymphidia, are images that have been replicated numerous times. This image of the miniature courtly
Mab riding in her chariot, seen in many visions, is included in Richard Dadd’s
The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), where she is centered in the middle of the painting riding atop the elongated hat of a bearded old man. Patricia
Allderidge, in her exhibition catalogue on Dadd, points out that instead of “little
82 See the Thoroughbred Database
83 See Garth Vaughan’s website for hockey that mentions the train as part of local history
atomi,” Mab’s “car of state [is] drawn by female centaurs, with a gnat as coachman, Cupid and Psyche for pages, and ‘some strapping fairy footman’ behind” (125). Thomas Maybank also illustrates Mab’s procession in The Court of Faerie (1906), though his version is based on Michael Drayton’s poem
Nymphidia or The Court of Faery, and it shows a very dainty, white-lace covered
Mab holding hands with Pigwiggen, as they follow the insect-led coach.
There was a flourishing of artwork featuring Queen Mab, along with
Titania and nameless fairy queens, in the Victorian period. The representations of the glorious fairy queen mediated the image of Queen Victoria and tied her back to the mythology of Queen Elizabeth. Mab’s land of magic and belief, represented by the fairy realm, stood in contrast to the rising harshness of mechanistic industrial cities. This liminality is represented in J. M. W. Turner’s Queen Mab’s
Cave (1856), where the ruddy images of a cave entrance, located under the ruins of a castle, evoke both the delicate world of the sprites frolicking in the foreground and the unknown darkness that is the central archetypal cave. Often the fairies were shown in a grand procession, dancing joyfully in the woods, or feasting at grand banquets.84 Mab’s connection to food, particularly sumptuous
84 See Nicola Bown’s Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature and
Jeremy Maas’s Victorian Fairy Painting and The Stuff That Dreams Are Made 206
fare, has led to her transformation into a dessert. There are numerous variations of the recipe for the popular “Queen Mab’s Pudding,” one of which is in my epigraph. This custard dessert is easy enough for anyone to make, but its rich texture and flavor evoke a sense of royalty with every spoonful. Queen Mab has also been represented as a form of ecstasy drug that Harold Perrineau’s Mercutio offers to Romeo for consumption in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
Queen Mab for Children
Today fairies and their queen are infantilized and belong almost exclusively to childhood and the magical realm of belief, seemingly far away from the real world of monarchs like Queen Elizabeth II. An example of that fictional belief, which ties into the real world, is the case of Cottingley Glen fairies, whose story has been retold in books and movies.
For young children, the main version of the Cottingley fairy story is found in “The Fairies of Cottingley Glen” book set, which consists primarily of Cynthia
Eng’s Queen Mab and Kirsten Hall’s Princess Florella, both written in 1997 and illustrated by Roberta Collier-Morales. There are also various activity books, including puzzle, maze, and sticker books, associated with the set, but the main
Of: Fairy Painting in Britain From 1842 to 1915 for an overview of this growth in fairy artwork. 207
story books are by Eng and Hall. These books were written for pre-school readers as a tie-in to Charles Sturridge’s movie Fairy Tale: A True Story, which was released in 1997. The movie depicts the story of Elsie Wright and Frances
Griffiths, two cousins who supposedly photographed real fairies, including Queen
Mab, in 1917 and again in 1920 in England. The veracity of the fairies’ existence shown in the girls’ photos depended on the fact that the material photographs were considered real and not doctored by experts at Kodak and by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. Since the photographers were young, presumably naive, girls, the experts negated the idea that the visual content of the photos could be staged.
Exactly how the girls conjured the fairies remained unknown until one of them revealed, just before her death in the 1980s, that their act of mediation resulted in four of the five images being created from fairies that the girls had drawn and painted, which they then cut out and attached to sticks and hatpins to poise them for the photographs. The origin of the fairies in the fifth photo is probably the same as the others, but the truth has been left open for speculation and belief.85
While the movie and the novelization by Monica Kulling, aimed at older pre-teen children, address the mysterious origins of the fairies, maintaining the sense of hope that the fairies are indeed real, the picture books ignore the story of the
85 See Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies and Joe Cooper’s The
Case of the Cottingley Fairies for more on the real story of the Cottingley Fairies. 208
photos’ creation and focus on the adventures that Elsie and Frances and the fairies of Cottingley Glen have.
Queen Mab follows the general idea of the real Cottingley Glen girls believing in fairies and setting out to meet them in the woods. In the picture book the two girls make cakes to give to the fairies in an attempt to see them and become their friends. Frances and Elsie are successful in their quest and end up, as they did in the film and in “real” life, meeting numerous fairies and eventually the fairy queen. Their encounter with Queen Mab is described as follows:
Just then, a bugle sounded. The fairies quickly formed two
straight lines. The sprites stood at attention as a miniature coach
made its way toward Frances and Elsie.
The coach was led by a glowing swarm of fireflies. It
stopped right in front of Frances and Elsie, and the fairy queen
delicately stepped out.
“I am Queen Mab,” the royal fairy said, and curtsied.
“You wished for fairies, and your wish has been granted.
But you must promise never to tell anyone about us.”
“We promise!” Frances and Elsie blurted out together.
“Very Well.” Queen Mab said happily. “You are now
official friends of the fairies of Cottingley Glen!” 209
Queen Mab waved her gold scepter, and the sky filled with
glittering fairy dust. The fairies fluttered their wings. In the wink
of an eye, they vanished! (Eng n.p).
Elsie and Frances are not a part of Princess Florella; instead the second book focuses on the water fairy Florella, who looks like a classic mermaid with wings, and the series of good deeds that she performs for the other fairies, many of whom were introduced in the first book and featured briefly in the movie. As a reward for finishing her work Florella is granted an audience with Queen Mab where she gives the Fairy Queen a gift similar to Mab bestowal to Anne at Althrope:
With six good deeds done, Florella twirled and dove into
the brook at Cottingley Glen. She flipped her mermaid fin and
swam through the water until she found several perfect pink
seashells.
Florella strung the seashells on a strand of spider’s silk.
When she was done, she flew off to Queen Mab’s royal palace.
All the royal fairy helpers watched as Florella gave the
beautiful necklace to Queen Mab, the loving, graceful leader of the
fairy kingdom.
Queen Mab raised her jeweled scepter and tapped it gently
on top of Florella’s head. “Florella, you have a noble heart,” the 210
queen said. “You are an example to all the fairies of Cottingley
Glen. From this day forward, you will be known throughout the
land as a royal princess fairy.”
With seven good deeds done. Princess Florella kissed
Queen Mab’s hand and her wings fluttered with joy. (Hall n.p.).
The illustrations of Queen Mab are continuous between the books. Queen Mab, the tiny “delicate” (Eng n.p) and “loving, graceful leader” (Hall n.p), is blond, white skinned, and dressed in a white flowered ball gown; she has blue, yellow, and white butterfly wings, with a spider-web train; and she wears a golden flower crown to match her “gold scepter” (Eng n.p.). Ultimately Mab looks very
Barbiesque.86 Insects lead Mab’s acorn-shaped coach, but her driver is a fairy instead of a gnat. Her palace is made of flowers joined by spider webs, and she has lake/pond-front access via lily pads. These images appear to be a mixture of drawing and painting, and the edges have been left as a rough sketch, invoking the liveliness of the scenes.
86 Barbie now has her own fairy series, with all of its associated merchandise, entitled “Fairytopia,” (2005), which is paired, similarly to “The Fairies of
Cottingley Glen” set with “Mermaidia” (2006). See www.barbie.com for more details. Random House is also publishing the book tie-ins for the series as it did with the “Cottingley Glen” books. 211
Only Elsie and Frances can see Queen Mab, let alone any of the fairies.
Ever since Madame D’Aulnoy’s Contes des fées (1697) was translated and revised for children as Queen Mab: Containing a Select Collection of Only the
Best, Most Instructive, and Entertaining Tales of the Fairies (1799), the dainty fairy queen aspect of the Fairy Queen Mab has been associated with children.
She has been infantilized as her power is only recognized by miniature subjects, both human and supernatural. The release of the Cottingley photographs in the early twentieth century renewed the idea of fairy belief that had been denied to the adult world, yet the visual proof of the fairies’ existence was never fully trusted since it was recorded by the girls. The movie, released at the end of the twentieth century, and its accompanying novelization and picture books, maintains the direct connection between children and the fairy realm as only the children can see the fairies. Yet, the vision that Frances and Elsie have, and reproduce, of the
Fairy Queen Mab and her fairy court is informed by the adult stories, performances, and illustrations going back to Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s Queen Mab was derived from Deborra’s Mab in Jacob and
Esau and their image of the hag-midwife figure was appropriated by Jonson and merged with the glorious Fairy Queen in The Entertainment at Althrope to mediate the image of Queen Elizabeth I. The new Fairy Queen Mab was developed through the early modern mediations of Drayton, who reduced her size 212
and married her to the Fairy King Oberon as an extension of King James. The tiny fairy court of the monarchs was perpetuated and pluralized by later English authors, particularly Herrick and Cavendish, who used their images to discuss marriage and the monarchy within their works. All of these transformations have resulted in a pluralized mythography of the Fairy Queen Mab that is anything “but vain fantasy” (Shakespeare, Romeo 1.4.98).
213
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Merlin Part 3: The End of Magic. 2000. Maybank, Thomas. The Court of Faerie. 1906. Milton, John. “L’Allegro.” c. 1631. Percy, Bishop Thomas. The Fairy Queen. 1765. Poole, Josua. English Parnassus. 1657. Queen Mab. Various Thoroughbred Horses. Queen Mab. 2-Masted Steel Schooner. [later called Vagrant]. Rhode Island, 1910. Queen Mab. Train. Nova Scotia Railway, 1853. 250 Queen Mab (Lori Freedman, Marilyn Lerner). Barbie’s Other Shoe. 1997. Queen Mab Pudding. 1891. Thomas Randolph, Thomas. Amyntas. 1630. ---. The Jealous Lovers. 1632. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. 1593-96. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Queen Mab, with notes. 1813. Shirley, James. The Gentleman of Venice. 1655. Shirley, James, and George Chapman. The Ball. 1639. Sturridge, Charles, dir. Fairy Tale: A True Story. (Elizabeth Earl and Florence Hoath). 1997. Tom Thumb. Turner, Joseph Mallord William. Queen’s Mab’s Cave. 1827. West, Tracey. The Angry Elf. (Pixie Tricks, 5). 2000. ---. Double Trouble Dwarfs. 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