“Hail, _mortal_, hail!”
which sufficiently shows she was not so herself.
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, in the same play, calls Oberon,
“——King of _shadows_,”
and in the old song just mentioned,
“The King of _ghosts_ and _shadows_,”
and this mighty monarch asserts of himself, and his subjects,
“But we are _spirits_ of another sort.”
The fairies, as we already see, were male and female. Their government
was monarchical, and Oberon, the King of Fairyland, must have been
a sovereign of very extensive territory. The name of his queen was
Titania. Both are mentioned by Shakespeare, being personages of no
little importance in the above play, where they, in an ill–humour, thus
encounter:
Obe. Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.
Tita. What, jealous Oberon? Fairy, skip hence;
I have forsworn his bed and company.
That the name [Oberon] was not the invention of our great dramatist is
sufficiently proved. The allegorical Spenser gives it to King Henry
the Eighth. Robert Greene was the author of a play entitled “The
Scottishe history of James the Fourthe ... intermixed with a pleasant
comedie presented by _Oberon, king of the fairies_.” He is, likewise, a
character in the old French romances of _Huon de Bourdeaux_, and _Ogier
le Danois_; and there even seems to be one upon his own exploits,
_Roman d’ Auberon_. What authority, however, Shakespeare had for the
name Titania, it does not appear, nor is she so called by any other
writer. He himself, at the same time, as well as many others, gives to
the queen of fairies the name of Mab, though no one, except Drayton,
mentions her as the wife of Oberon:
“O then, I see, queen Mab hath been with you,
She is the fairy’s midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate–stone
On the fore–finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon–spokes made of long spinner’s legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider’s web;
The collars, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams:
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film:
Her waggoner, a small grey–coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel–nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love!
... This is that very Mab,
That plats the manes of horses in the night;
And bakes the elf–locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”
(_Romeo and Juliet._)
Ben Jonson, in his “Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope,”
in 1603, describes to come “tripping up the lawn a bevy of fairies
attending on Mab their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring that
was there cut in the path, began to dance around.”—(_Works_, v. 201.)