'Enter Cælia, the Fairy Queen, in Her Night Attire': Shakespeare and The

‘Enter Cælia, the Fairy Queen, in her Night Attire’: Shakespeare and the Fairies MICHAEL HATTAWAY HENRY FUSELI: ‘TITANIA CARESSES BOTTOM’ (1793) This essay is based upon my British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, delivered at the Royal Society in London on 22 April 2010. It was published (without illustrations) as Michael Hattaway, ‘"Enter Caelia, the Fairy Queen, in her Night Attire" Shakespeare and the Fairies’, Shakespeare Survey, ed. Peter Holland, (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 65, 26-41. 2 1. ‘Believing in’ Theatrical Performances Where to begin? From history? History of events and institutions? History of ideas? The history of what Max Weber called the ‘external conditions’ of the age? Alternatively, we might start from language, a category that comprises both verbal and visual language systems as well as particular words and images. I choose the latter option. ‘Enter Cælia, the Fairy Queen, in her night attire’ is a stage direction in the manuscript text of Tom a Lincoln, an anonymous theatrical romance that dates from around 1611.1 The play’s hero is the Red Rose Knight. Thomas Heywood may have written it, possibly for staging at Gray’s Inn, but it was never published, and perhaps not even performed. What does the stage direction signify? A search of the corpus of early modern drama reveals that a player in night attire was in fact a stock theatrical image, one that signified that his character was vexed or confused.2 In the ‘closet’ scene of the first quarto of Hamlet, we find ‘Enter the Ghost in his night gown’.3 Heywood’s Fairy Queen, accompanied by a court of night-tripping fairy Amazons, had been abandoned by her lover – like Dido. So, fairies or ghosts in night attire serve as signs requiring to be read, not as visible representations of substantial creatures, real or imagined that might be seen. Shakespeare frequently referred to players as ‘shadows’ – the word could also designate ‘figures’ or ‘types’.4 More particularly, the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (a friend of William Blake), whose pictures of fairy topics are impressively both suggestive and informed, described dreams as ‘personification[s] of sentiment’: the implication is that, to be understood, they need to be translated.5 I propose that this sort of decoding may be more profitable than imputing beliefs to either authors or audiences. Indeed, summoning Shakespeare’s attitudes to the fairy faith is not only unnecessary but also impossible. Why unnecessary? First, because ‘the problem of belief’ never disturbs sane adult spectators watching a performance of, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is partly because all of the comedies bear some resemblance to fairy-tales,6 and also because the play’s title proclaims the informing metaphor of the play as a dream.7 Dreams create a double time in which both the natural and supernatural are perceived.8 In a dream, according to the Watford preacher Philip Goodwin, who was 1 Tom a Lincoln, ed. G.R. Proudfoot et al. (Oxford, 1992), line 1564. 2 Another example occurs at the entrance of Prester John and his queen: Tom a Lincoln, line 2494. 3 William Shakespeare, The Tragical History of Hamlet (London, 1603), sig. G2r. 4 OED, shadow, 6c. 5 Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, ed. John Knowles (London, 1831), p. 145 6 Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (London, 2007), pp. 19-20. 7 For an excellent essay on dreams, see William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1-21. All quotations from the play are taken from this text. 8 Katharine Mary Briggs, The Vanishing People: A Study of Traditional Fairy Beliefs (London, 1978), pp. 19-21. 3 writing about 1657, men deceive themselves if they take ‘the signs of things for the natures of things, mere shadows for substance. In a dream are thoughts of things, not the things thought.’9 Fairies in a dream are obviously fictitious. Second, we do not know what particular signs the Lord Chamberlain’s men came up with when performing, either in a theatre or the hall of a palace or private house. Nor do we know whether or how they differentiated kinds of fairies: pucks, flower-fairies, bringers of fertility … (A ‘puck’ of course, is a hobgoblin: the character in the play perhaps ought be give his ironic name, ‘Robin Goodfellow’ – although, as we shall see, that too is generic.10) There is a hint for fairy costumes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Mistress Page announces that child actors will take these parts: And three or four … we’ll dress Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies, green and white, With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads And rattles in their hands. (4.4.46-9 emphasis added) (An ‘ouphe’ was an elf’s child or changeling.) In Tom a Lincoln too the fairy ladies are green-coated,11 and I guess that those tapers suggest that the text of Merry Wives was prepared for a private indoor performance. What may a puck have looked like? In Wily Beguiled, an anonymous Paul’s play of about 1602, the ‘Robin Goodfellow’ character appears primarily as a clown. The text reveals that he has a ‘flashing [gleaming] red nose’ and that he wears a jester’s calf- skin coat, buttoned down the back – perhaps to display his buttocks: the motif of ‘back to front’ was common in carnival mockery, although it might also have been a means of keeping witches at bay.12 Nine years later, in Jonson’s 1611 court masque Oberon, the fairies are described as ‘antics’, a splendid word that has connotations of the antique, of revelry, and of the monstrous. In Inigo Jones’s design (‘Three Fays’) for their costumes, one of his fairies has a large cod-piece, another may be wearing a coat buttoned at the back: 9 Philip Goodwin, The Mystery of Dreams, Historically Discoursed (London, 1657), p. 12, cit. Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye (Oxford, 2007), p. 302. Goodwin was quoting Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher. 10 Holland ed., MND, pp. 35-49. 11 Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London, 2001), p. 63 12 Iona Archibald Opie and Moira Tatem, ‘Clothes Inside Out’, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford, 2005). 4 In Jonson’s Love Restored, a masque presented at court the next year, Robin Goodfellow, speaking in prose, presents the action. Two ballads of c. 1625, ‘The mad- merry pranks of Robin Goodfellow’, may have been written by Jonson, and are accompanied by wood-cuts showing one puck naked except for a loin-cloth, the other with a tunic that makes him look rough and hairy.13 A late-Caroline night-wanderer with candle and broom, merry, demonised, and ithyphallic appears on the title-page of Thomas Cotes’s Robin Goodfellow, his Mad Pranks and Merry Jests (London, 1639): Although Shakespeare’s Puck seems to have brought a broom on stage as an index of his role (see 5.1.380), we just do not know exactly how fairies and pucks may have been presented in the amphitheatre or public playhouses. 13 The images, from Pepys 1, 80-81, can be found on the ‘English Broadside Ballad Archive’: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20274/image#. 5 Moreover, since 1595 there have been as many representations as there have been productions. They can be, and have been, ballet dancers or, as in Tim Supple’s Indian production of 2006, gymnasts: Sometimes they have appeared brazenly cross-dressed. Children have taken the parts,14 particularly in amateur productions – and also in Peter Hall’s 1969 film, and women have frequently played the puck’s role.15 Third, belief in what? The signs or realities? Supernatural beings such as fairies are both signifiers and signifieds. They seem to have invisible inverted commas around them, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream they distinctively use trochaic rather than iambic metre (trochees are backward iambs). Ron Daniels, for a 1981 RSC production, created what was a memorable convention in which players, clad in black, operated large stick-puppet fairies. This made them obviously not only signs but what medieval theologians called ‘types’ – Elijah who ascended to heaven was a ‘type’ of Christ. In this context, certain of these puppets with appropriately coloured hair were visual quotations of the characters in the main play: signifiers and signified both lay within the text: 14 Holland ed., MND, pp. 25-34. 15 Ethna Roddy played the part in Kenneth Branagh’s 1990 production for the Renaissance Theatre Company; Toyah Willcox in John Doyle’s 1995 production for the same company; Angela Laurier for Robert Lepage at the National Theatre in 1992. 6 In ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ Shakespeare has a merry time mocking the mechanicals whose folly is that they consider that spectators crave or need artless theatrical realism, visual representations of moonlight and substantial garden walls. As Shakespeare obviously realised, theatrical images – and we can revert now to Heywood’s Caelia and the Robin Goodfellow in Wily Beguiled – are elements in the theatrical language system of the early modern period. Many of the remnants of that system survive – and are not difficult to read – but ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ reminds us that signs need not resemble what they signify. It follows, I would claim, that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not ‘thinking about’ fairies – whether they existed or not – but ‘thinking with’ fairies’, recording how people might use or react to what Philip Goodwin called the ‘thoughts of things’. After all, young children think with their toys as they explore the world. These Renaissance writers ‘invented’ fairies: in their time the word ‘invent’ did not mean ‘make up’ or ‘devise for the first time’, but ‘retrieve’ or ‘come upon’.

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