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  • Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture
  • Matthew Woodcock
Regina Buccola . Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006. 294 pp. $55. ISBN: 1–57591–103–5.

Regina Buccola's new book is to be welcomed for providing a reasoned, scholarly demonstration both of the centrality of fairy mythology within the early modern popular imagination and of its validity as a serious object of academic study. Fairy mythology's identification with voices, forms, and groups considered marginal or trivial has led until recently to the dismissal of fairy narratives from critical consideration in literary studies. Buccola seeks to redress this by reconstructing the belief system and representational forms of the "fairy faithful" and revealing how our understanding of several fairy plays by Shakespeare and Jonson must be modified in alignment with early modern audiences' perceptions of fairy beliefs. At the heart of Buccola's study is the web of associations in early modern culture between fairies, unruly women, and Catholicism that allows fairy mythology to act as a flexible expressive form through which to explore and respond to ideological crises relating to gender politics and religious reform.

The opening chapter establishes Buccola's methodology and the key elements of fairy mythology to be discussed. Buccola wisely eschews engaging with questions of Shakespeare's and Jonson's personal belief in fairies, seeking instead to assemble an aggregate picture of the kind of beliefs and connotations that the playwrights consciously manipulate, and with which their audiences would have been familiar. A series of short sections introduce concepts such as fairyland, changelings, the ambivalence and liminality of fairies, and links between fairies, women, the working class, and Catholicism. Subsequent chapters focus on the representation of selected female characters in Shakespeare and Jonson's plays as viewed through the lens of popular belief. Buccola begins with the "fairy feminism" of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the connections between Hermia, Helena, and the fairies that model an alternative to the dominant Athenian patriarchal system. Attention then turns to The Merry Wives of Windsor and a new source that emphasizes the identification of Catholic belief and popular superstition with female discourse. Buccola goes on to show how, through the fairy play staged in the final scene, Shakespeare is able to comment obliquely on religious reform and allow a female character (Anne Page) to broker her own marriage. Chapter 3 examines how Jonson uses the staging of a fairy queen (or quean) to ameliorate religious satire in The Alchemist. The final two chapters read the roles of Imogen in Cymbeline and Helena in All's Well That Ends Well in the light of figures commonly found in fairy mythology: respectively, the fairy bride and the cunning woman who uses fairies to aid her healing arts.

In attempting to trace the "airy nothings" that underlie characters and narrative motifs in Shakespeare and Jonson's plays, Buccola strives to get behind some of the more obvious textual repositories of early modern fairy lore such as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) and access popular beliefs themselves, elucidating in turn the social, political, and religious milieu from which they emerge (30). But this is (and can only be) achieved through consideration and comparison [End Page 658] of elements found in other extant early modern texts. Whilst Buccola offers a far more nuanced delineation of fairy belief than that found in the works of Katharine Briggs, there is still analytic juxtaposition here to materials produced over a relatively broad expanse of time that relate to geographically and politically distinct regions. For example, Robert Kirk's Secret Commonwealth (1691), which discusses Scottish belief, is readily juxtaposed with Scot's Discoverie produced a century earlier and the derivative discussions of fairies found in later English works by Samuel Harsnet and Robert Burton. Although highlighting the importance of historical and social contextualization, at times there is little consideration of the relative value and applicability of sources and the sole point of continuity is the extra-textual fairy belief itself. There is also far less sensitivity to differences between...

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