The fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream are an elusive set of characters. But are we missing the point if we try to tie them down for analysis?
It can be difficult to know how to approach the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, either when writing an essay or staging a production. They’re as slippery and insubstantial a group of characters as one might expect when dealing with the denizens of a magic wood.
For a start, they give radically different impressions of themselves at different points. When we first meet Puck (in Act II, Scene 1), he is addressed by a fairy as “that shrwed and knavish sprite/ Caled Robin Goodfellow.” This very bucolic English name is reinforced by the tricks he is described as playing: hiding in alecups, frightening maidens, hindering butter-churning and leading horses astray. Likewise the fairies that wait on Bottom have homely, rural names: Cobweb, Peaseblossom and Mustardseed.
However, the play takes place not in the English countryside, but in Athens and the wood nearby. Titania and Oberon have distinctly Classical-sounding names, and their conversation reveals their involvement with the noble couple Theseus and Hippolyta, as well as other mythical Greek characters such as Aegles and Ariadne. The basis of their quarrel, a child whom Titania claims as her squire, suggests that her power stretches well beyond the Athenian wood, even to having an order of votaresses, or worshippers, in India. Even the humble Puck, when called away from bumping the bottoms of dairy workers, can boast that he’ll “put a girdle round the earth/ In forty minutes”, a truly supersonic speed for a rural hobgoblin.
For that matter, we’re never entirely sure how big the fairies are supposed to be. Titania and Oberon apparently must be the same size as Bottom and the Indian votaress, but their attendant elves are described as hiding in acorn cups when the royal couple fight. At one moment Bottom is small enough to be mistaken for a roasted crab in a drink, then large enough to do duty as a stool.
Of course trying to calculate the precise dimensions and origins of the fairies is to completely miss the point. Scholars can shed light on Shakespeare’s sources by pointing out parallels with folklore, classical mythology, ballads and plays, but the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream don’t fall precisely into any previous category. Just as they can become invisible by declaring themselves so, their words can make them any size and transport them to any place – they are fairies after all! It’s tempting to see them as an apt metaphor for Shakespeare’s theatre itself – endlessly ambiguous, with bits of exotic myth and folklore sticking out here and there, verbally inventive, and elusive in the best sense.
