community, ruled over by the princely Oberon and the fair Titania. There is a court and chivalry; Oberon would have the queen’s sweet changeling to be a “knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.” Like earthly monarchs, he has his jester, “that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow.”

Of the fairy characters treated by Shakespeare may be mentioned Oberon, king of fairyland, and Titania, his queen. They are represented as keeping rival courts in consequence of a quarrel, the cause of which is thus told by Puck (“Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” ii. 1):

Oberon first appears in the old French romance of “Huon de Bourdeaux,” and is identical with Elberich, the dwarf king of the German story of Otuit in the “Heldenbuch.” The name Elberich, or, as it appears in the “Nibelungenlied,” Albrich, was changed, in passing into French, first into Auberich, then into Auberon, and finally became our Oberon. He is introduced by Spenser in the “Fairy Queen” (book ii. cant. i. st. 6), where he describes Sir Guyon:

And in the tenth canto of the same book (stanza 75) he is the allegorical representative of Henry VIII. The wise Elficleos left two sons,

“Oboram, King of Fayeries,” is one of the characters in Greene’s “James the Fourth.”[3]

The name Titania for the queen of the fairies appears to have been the invention of Shakespeare, for, as Mr. Ritson[4] remarks, she is not “so called by any other writer.” Why, however, the poet designated her by this title, presents, according to Mr. Keightley,[5] no difficulty. “It was,” he says, “the belief of those days that the fairies were the same as the classic nymphs, the attendants of Diana. The fairy queen was therefore the same as Diana, whom Ovid (Met. iii. 173) styles Titania.” In Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale” Pluto is the king of faerie, and his queen, Proserpina, “who danced and sang about the well under the laurel in January’s garden.”[6]

In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4) she is known by the more familiar appellation, Queen Mab. “I dream’d a dream to-night,” says Romeo, whereupon Mercutio replies, in that well-known famous passage—

this being the earliest instance in which Mab is used to designate the fairy queen. Mr. Thoms[7] thinks that the origin of this name is to be found in the Celtic, and that it contains 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 hence it is a befitting epithet to one who

Mr. Keightley suggests that Mab may be a contraction of Habundia, who, Heywood says, ruled over the fairies; and another derivation is from Mabel, of which Mab is an abbreviation.

Among the references to Queen Mab we may mention Drayton’s “Nymphidia:”

Ben Jonson, in his “Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope,” in 1603, describes as “tripping up the lawn a bevy of fairies, attending on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring that there was cut in the path, began to dance around.” In the same masque the queen is thus characterized by a satyr.

Like Puck, Shakespeare has invested Queen Mab with mischievous properties, which “identify her with the night hag of popular superstition,” and she is represented as

The merry Puck, who is so prominent an actor in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” is the mischief-loving sprite, the jester of the fairy court, whose characteristics are roguery and sportiveness. In his description of him, Shakespeare, as Mr. Thoms points out, “has embodied almost every attribute with which the imagination of the people has invested the fairy race; and has neither omitted one trait necessary to give brilliancy and distinctness to the likeness, nor sought to heighten its effect by the slightest exaggeration. For, carefully and elaborately as he has finished the picture, he has not in it invested the ‘lob of spirits’ with one gift or quality which the popular voice of the age was not unanimous in bestowing upon him.” Thus (ii. 1) the fairy says: