The Moon and the Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

THE MOON AND THE FAIRIES IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ERNEST SCHANZER THIS article is mainly concerned with the Moon and the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, two subjects which, though apparently unconnected, are yet closely related in a number of ways, and are united at one point: in the identification of the Fairy Queen with the Goddess Diana and hence with the Moon. I shall begin with the fairies. My excuse for breaking Shakespeare's butterfly fairies on the wheel of critical analysis is that they have been already so badly mauled by other commentators that little further harm can come to them. If my fellow-lepidopterists had not already transfixed them on pins and often stuck on them what seem to me misleading labels, I should not have joined in the chase. In this play we are given three wholly distinct kinds of fairies, provided we can speak of Puck as a fairy at all. He was not considered so in popular superstition, but was thought of as a spirit of another sort, whose merry pranks made him the most popular of all the sprites that haunted the English countryside. By making him servant and practical joker to Oberon, Shakespeare began the process of degradation which finally turned him into the devil Pug, the familiar of witches. In our play he considers himself to be a fairy, as his "And we fairies, tbat do run By the triple Hecate's team" (V. i. 381) shows.' (Cf. also III. ii. 110). He is the complete opposite of the tiny fairies with whom Shakespeare fills Oberon's and Titania's train, being gross and earthy, boisterous, rough, and boyish, where the tiny fairies are aerial, timid, and courteous. Nothing could be more misleading than to speak of them as irresponsible children, as so many critics do. Sir Edmund Chambers, for instance, writes: When we tum to the fairies, we find that what enters into human life only as a transitory disturbing element, is in them the normal law of their being. They are irresponsible creatures throughout, eternal children. They belong to the winds and the clouds and the flowers, to all in nature that is beautiful and gracious and fleeting; but of the characteristics by which man differs from these, the sense of law and the instinct of selfcontrol , they show no trace. Puck, the fairy jester, is a buffoon of spirits, whose sport it is to bring perplexity upon hapless mortals. Oberon and Titania will be jealous and be reconciled to each other a dozen times a day, while for culmination of their story you have the absurd spectacle lQuotations are from ,the New Cambridge edition. 234 Vol. XXIV, no. 3, April. 1955 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 235 of a fairy in love with an ass. So that in them is represented, as it were in vacuo, the very quality of which it is the object of the play to discern the partial and occasional workings in the heart of humanity.2 The whole passage is typical of much that has been written about the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It lumps together Oberon and Titania, Puck, and the tiny fairies, as if they all had in common the characteristics of childish irresponsibility and lawlessness. But though there are hints of these qualities in Puck, Shakespeare's description of the attendant fairies points rather to the opposite characteristics . They are conscientious and very much overworked servants of the queen, with little time for idle gossiping. I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits: I'll be goneOur Queen and all her elves come here anon. (II. i. 14 If.) The time employed on these errands is very carefully apportioned by their exacting mistress: Come, now a roundel and a fairy song: Then, for the third part of a minute, henceSome to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds, Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings, To make my small elves coats, and some keep back The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits. Sing...