The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer night's Dream' by Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

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The story is told as follows.

In all the world there was no better harper than King Orfeo [Sir Orpheo],
and no fairer lady than dame Meroudys. On a morning in the beginning of
May, the queen went forth with her ladies to an orchard, and fell asleep
under an "ympe"[66] tree till it was long past noon. When her ladies woke
her, she cried aloud, tore her clothes, and disfigured herself with her
nails. They sought assistance and put her to bed in her chamber, whither
the king came to visit her, and ask her what might help her. She told him
how in her sleep she had been bidden by a knight to come and speak with his
lord the king; she refused, but the king came to her, with a hundred
knights and a hundred ladies in white on white steeds, and his crown was
all of precious stones. He bore her away to a fair palace, and showed her
his possessions. Then he took her back, but bade her be beneath the tree on
the morrow, when she should go with them and stay with them for ever.

King Orfeo was greatly distressed, and none could advise him. On the morrow
he took his queen and ten hundred knights to guard her beneath the ympe
tree; but in vain, she was away with the fairy, and they knew not whither.
King Orfeo in grief called together his barons and knights and squires, and
bade them obey his high steward as regent; he himself went forth barefoot
and in poor attire into the wilderness, with naught but his harp.

So for ten winters he abode in the forest and on the heath, in a hollow
tree, or under leaves and grass, till his frame shrank and his beard grew
long; and ever and anon, when the day was fair, he would play his harp, and
the beasts of the forest and the birds on bush and briar would come about
him to hearken.

Then on a hot day he saw the king of fairy and his retinue riding with
hounds and blowing horns; and again he saw a great host of knights with
drawn swords; and again he saw sixty ladies, gentle and gay, riding on
palfreys and bearing hawks on their wrists. Their falcons had good sport,
and Orfeo drew nigh to watch; and looking on the face of one of the ladies,
he recognised Meroudys. They gazed at each other speechless, and tears ran
from her eyes; but the other ladies bore her away. The king followed them
to a fair country where there was neither hill nor dale, and into a castle,
gaining entrance as a minstrel. Then he saw many men and women sleeping on
every side, seemingly dead; among them he again beheld his wife. And he
came before the king and queen of that realm, and harped so sweetly that
the king promised him whatever he might ask. He asked for the fair dame
Meroudys; and he took her by the hand, and they fared homewards.

In his own city he lodged awhile in poor quarters, and then went forth to
play his harp; and meeting his steward, who knew the harp but not his
master, told him he had found the harp ten winters ago, by the side of a
man eaten by lions. This evil news caused the steward to swoon, whereupon
King Orfeo revealed himself, and sent for dame Meroudys. She came in a
triumphant procession; there was mirth and melody; and they were
new-crowned king and queen. Harpers of Bretayne heard this tale and made
the lay and called it after the king

"That Orfeo hight, as men well wote; Good is the lay, sweet is the
note!"

The ballad which represents the debris of this romance has only been
recovered in a single text, from the memory of an old man in Unst,
Shetland, and it is incomplete in verse-form, though the reciter remembered
the gist of the story. This version of the ballad is further complicated by
the fact that the old man sang it to a refrain which appears to be Unst
pronunciation of Danish--a startling instance of phonetic tradition.

It is not, however, to be understood from this that it was impossible for
Shakespeare to have heard this ballad; English versions _may_ have been
current in his time. But even so, the ballad would add nothing to the
knowledge he might gain elsewhere; it is simply a short form of the romance
altered by tradition.[67]

There are half-a-dozen other English and Scottish ballads concerning
fairies, none of much importance touching our present theme. They may be
best studied in Child's collection, Nos. 35-41, where under _Tam Lin_ he
has put together the main features of fairy-lore revealed in traditional
ballads.[68] One or two such points may be noted here.

We have seen that Ogier saw the supernatural lady after plucking and eating
an apple from a tree. Thomas of Erceldoune, Launfal, and Meroudys, are
sleeping or lying beneath a tree when they see their various visitors. Tam
Lin in the ballad was taken by the fairies while sleeping under an apple
tree. Malory[69] tells us that Lancelot went to sleep about noon
(traditionally the dangerous hour) beneath an apple tree, and was bewitched
by Morgan le Fay. In modern Greek folk-lore, certain trees are said to be
dangerous to lie under at noon, as the sleeper may be taken by the nereids,
who correspond to our fairies.

At certain intervals--every seven years, the ballads say--the fiend of hell
takes a tithe from the fairies, usually preferring one who is fair and of
good flesh and blood. Hence in _Thomas of Erceldoune_,[70] the elf queen is
anxious that he should leave her realm, because she thinks the foul fiend
would choose him (ll. 219-224).

The notion of the fairies' demand of a tithe of produce, agricultural or
domestic, is parallel to this sacrifice.[71]

A third point on which fairy-lore usually insists is that the steeds of the
fairies shall be white; here _Thomas of Erceldoune_ is at variance with the
other poems, the elf-queen's palfrey being a dapple-grey. It is curious to
learn that this superstition still survives. "At that time there was a
gentleman who had been taken by the fairies, and made an officer among
them, and it was often people would see him and her riding on a white horse
at dawn and in the evening."[72]

It will have been observed that the tale of Orfeo varies considerably from
the classical tale of Orpheus; but this is not surprising; no one can
imagine that it comes direct from the classics. A French original is
presumed; indeed, there are references in early "lais" to a "Lai d'Orphey,"
indicating the existence of a poem which was probably the original of our
_King Orfeo_. This original is presumed to have been a Breton lay, one of
the many that were popular in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the
English version may have been taken from the supposed source through a
French form.

Now, these Breton lays were chiefly on Celtic subjects, and placed their
scenes in the Celtic realms of Great Britain, Little Britain, Ireland, or
Scotland. The bards of Armorica doubtless picked up a good story wherever
they could find it; and the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice would
appeal strongly to Celts, who have always been famous for harping. But why
should these early Celtic singers have made such changes in the story,
_unless they had a similar story of their own_ which was confused with it?
The parallel story has been adduced by Professor Kittredge[73] from an
Irish epic tale, The Wooing (or Courtship) of Etain. The portions of the
story which concern us here follow.

Eochaid Airemm, king of Ireland, found him a wife in Etain daughter of Etar
in the Bay of Cichmany, and with her Mider of Bri Leith (a fairy chief) was
in love. On a summer's day, as the king sat on the heights of Tara
beholding the plain of Breg, a strange young warrior appeared, gave his
name as Mider, and challenged Eochaid to a game of chess for a wager. Many
were the games they played, and at first Eochaid won, and bade Mider carry
out certain tasks. But at last Eochaid was defeated, and Mider for his
reward asked to be allowed to hold Etain in his arms and kiss her. Eochaid
put him off for a month; at the end of which time he called together the
armies of Ireland, and took Etain into the palace, and shut and locked the
doors, and ringed the house with guards. Yet at the appointed hour Mider
stood in their midst, fairer than ever; and he sang to Etain:--

"_O fair-haired woman, will you come with me into a marvellous land wherein
is music, where heads are covered with primrose hair and bodies are white
as snow? There is no "mine" or "thine" there; white are teeth, and black
are eyebrows, and cheeks are the hue of the foxglove, and eyes the hue of
blackbirds' eggs.... We see everything on every side, yet no man seeth us.
Though pleasant the plains of Ireland, yet are they a wilderness for him
who has known the great plain_."

But Etain would not go to him, before Eochaid was willing to resign her.
And the king would not, yet allowed Mider to embrace her before him. Mider
took his weapons into his left hand, and Etain with his right, and bore her
away through the skylight. The guards outside beheld two swans flying, and
they flew towards the elf-mound of Femun, which is called the Mound of the
Fair-haired Women.

For nine years Eochaid waged war against Mider, digging into the
elf-mounds, until he hit upon the fairy-mansion; whereupon Mider sent to
the side of the palace sixty women, all exactly like Etain. And first the
king carried away the wrong woman, but when he returned to sack Bri Leith,
Etain made herself known to him, and he bore her back to the palace at
Tara.

It is reasonable to suppose, then, that some Armorican bard, hearing the
classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, remembered the Celtic legend of
Eochaid and Etain, and grafted the one on the other. Hades became Bri
Leith, or the vaguely-defined beautiful unknown country; but the classical
names displaced the Celtic. The confusion, however, did not at once cease.
In one of the MSS. of _Sir Orfeo_ it is said that Orfeo's father

"Was comen of king Pluto,
And his moder of king Juno"

--confusion worse confounded. Moreover, as we have already seen, even
Chaucer called the fairy-king Pluto and the queen Proserpina.

Again, to hark back to the other romances, we have found the word _fay_
attached to the name of King Arthur's sister Morgan. Nothing is more
remarkably certain than the close and constant association in mediaeval
lore of the fairies and the fairy-world with the Arthurian cycle of
romance;[74] King Arthur's sister was Morgan le Fay, whose son by Ogier was
Merlin; and the romance of _Huon of Bordeaux_, which relates these facts,
though strictly belonging to the Charlemagne cycle, contains the account of
Oberon's bequest of his realm to King Arthur. Chaucer, whatever other
doubts he may have had, was convinced on this point:--[75]

"In th' olde daies of the King Arthoure,
Of which that Bretons speken gret honoure,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elfqueen with hir joly companye
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion as I rede."

Now the Arthurian legends ultimately derive from Celtic tales, which must
be supposed to have travelled from Wales into France by way of
Brittany--Little Britain, or Armorica--in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries; for there are Welsh versions independent of the Breton forms,
though closely akin. Students of early Celtic literature have not as yet
agreed about the historical relations between Welsh and Irish
stories--whether the Welsh imposed their mythology and heroic legends on
the Irish, or _vice versa_; but the general similarity between them is
undeniable, and easily explicable by a common Celtic source.

Everything, then, points to the Celtic legends as the chief origin of the
mediaeval fairy-lore; and the early Celtic literature, although its study,
complicated by an unfamiliar language, has only recently been undertaken
scientifically, has already revealed an extremely rich and complete store
of romance that extends over a thousand years. From manuscripts which are
attributed to the twelfth century (and even so contain matter rightly
belonging to the ninth or tenth), we can trace the development of a creed
concerning supernatural beings through the succeeding centuries, down to a
time at which the written account is displaced by recorded oral tradition.
A race of beings, who must originally have fallen from the Celtic Olympus,
continue to appear, with characteristics that remain the same in essence,
and under a designation that may be heard in Ireland today, through ten
centuries of Irish tradition and literature.[76]

These people are called in Irish mythology the _Tuatha De Danann_,
described from at latest 1100 A.D. as _aes sidhe_, "the folk of the
[fairy-] hillock;" the name for fairies in Ireland now is "the Sidhe."[77]
Originally, it may be, the _aes sidhe_ were not identified with the _Tuatha
De Danann_; and before the twelfth century the Sidhe were not associated
with the Celtic belief in "a beautiful country beyond the sea," a happy
land called by various names--Tir-nan-Og (the land of youth), Tir Tairngire
(the land of promise)--which has now become "fairy-land." In the earliest
heroic legends the _Tuatha De Danann_ assist or protect mortal champions,
and fall in love with mortal men and maids; but with the spread of
Christianity (as might be expected) they lost many of their previous
characteristics.[78]

To look back for a moment, we must note that so far we have touched no
belief later than the fifteenth century, and already we have seen enough
blending of various superstitions and legends to give our fairies a very
mixed ancestry. Classical mythology, Celtic heroic sagas and northern Eddas
in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, Saxo the Danish historian in
the twelfth, and a series of romances, running through
Celtic-Breton-French-English languages from the twelfth to fifteenth
centuries--all combine to alter or add to the popular conception of
fairies. Celtic Mider is of human stature, beautiful, powerful, dwelling
beneath the earth; he attempts to carry off a mortal bride. Teutonic
Alberich is a dwarf, presumably not handsome, but well disposed to mortals.
But when we come to _Huon of Bordeaux_ we find Oberon's characteristics are
derived from varying sources. He himself describes[79] to Huon, in a
fantastic romance-style, which attempts to associate him with as many
classic heroes as possible, his parentage and birth:--

"I shall show thee true, it is Julius Caesar engendered me on a lady of the
Privy Isle ... the which is now named Chifalonny [Cephalonia] ... after a
seven year Caesar passed by the sea as he went into Thessaly whereas he
fought with Pompey; in his way he passed by Chifalonny, where my mother
fetched him, and he fell in love with her because she showed him that he
should discomfit Pompey, as he did." We are almost supplied with the date
of Oberon's birth.

He proceeds to narrate how all the fairies but one were invited to his
birth, and that one, in anger, said that when he was three years old he
should cease to grow; however, she repented immediately and added that he
should be "the fairest creature that nature ever formed." Another fairy
endowed him with the power of seeing into the minds of all men; and a third
enabled him to go whither he would at a wish. "Moreover, if I will have a
castle or a palace at my own device, incontinent it shall be made, and as
soon gone again if I list; and what meat or wine that I will wish for, I
shall have it incontinent."

Elsewhere[80] in the romance his handsome equipment and dress are
described; his gown, his bow, and above all his horn, "made by four ladies
of the fairy," who endowed it with four gifts; it cured all diseases by its
blast, it banished hunger and thirst, it brought joy to the heavy-hearted,
and forced any one who heard to come at the wish of its owner.

Horns, in English folk-lore, appear to belong rather to elves than to
fairies[81]--the elves that haunt hills, and are known all over Europe;
dwarfs, trolls, kobolds, pixies, and so forth. Teutonic witches are called
horn-blowers. Again, the fairy-train or fairy-hunt is supposed to carry
horns; we have seen it already in _Sir Orfeo_,[82] and in _Thomas of
Erceldoune_,[83] the fairy-queen bears a horn about her neck.

But this Oberon of _Huon of Bordeaux_ is mortal, and is not pictured as
being abnormal in stature, any more than Mider. Shakespeare's Oberon and
Mider are invisible (or can make themselves so), both have supernatural
powers, and both are immortal.

The question of the _size_ conventionally attributed to the fairies is of
importance, because it shows that a confusion existed between the fays of
romance with the elves of folk-superstition. Elves and their numerous
counterparts in all European countries and elsewhere--we have just given a
list of names which can easily be extended--are above all things _small_;
they also are earth-dwellers, living in hills or underground chambers, and
originally, perhaps, were supposed to be mischievous by nature. But even in
Shakespeare's day, it would be impossible to say that fairies were
benevolent and elves malevolent; the two kinds and their respective
characteristics were already confused.

Robin Goodfellow, the Puck, or Hobgoblin, is however essentially
mischievous. In a book contemporary with our play we find:--

"Think me to be one of those _Familiares Lares_ that were rather pleasantly
disposed than endued with any hurtful influence, as Hob Thrust, Robin
Goodfellow, and suchlike spirits, as they term them, of the buttery,
famoused in every old wives' chronicle for their mad merry pranks."[84]

But four years later, as we have seen,[85] Nashe confounds elves with
fairies in deriving all alike from fauns and dryads. Robin is "mad-merry,"
"jocund and facetious," "a cozening idle friar or some such rogue" [in
origin], and so forth--simply described by Shakespeare as a "shrewd and
knavish sprite." The forms of mischief in which he delights are described
in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, II. i. 33-57, and all these "gests" may be
found in the contemporary Robin Goodfellow literature;[86] though we have
observed that some of the functions attributed to Queen Mab in Mercutio's
famous speech[87] belong rightly to Robin.[88]

Thus we see--to take into consideration but a few points of the myth--that
the fairy-superstition and the elf-superstition were melted together in the
popular pre-Shakespearean mind, and that Shakespeare himself, making a new
division of the characteristics of the two, yet re-welded the whole into
one realm by putting the Puck in subjection under the fairy king.

The main characteristics of Shakespeare's fairies, then, may be summarised
shortly:--[89]

They are a community under a king and queen, who hold a court; they are
very small, light, swift, elemental; they share in the life of nature; they
are fond of dancing and singing; they are invisible and immortal; they
prefer night, and midnight is their favourite hour; they fall in love with
mortals, steal babies and leave changelings, and usurp the function of
Hymen in blessing the marriage-bed. Oberon, "king of shadows," can
apparently see things hidden from Puck.[90]

Titania, "a spirit of no common rate," is yet subject to passion and
jealousy, and had a mortal friend, "a votaress of my order."[91]

The fairy of folk-lore in Shakespeare's day is nearly everything that the
fairies of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ are; we may possibly except their
exiguity, their relations in love with mortals, and their hymeneal
functions. His conception of their size as infinitesimal at least differs
from that of the popular stories, where (as far as can be ascertained) they
are shown to be about the size of mortal children.

We may conclude these remarks with the modern Irish-Catholic theory of the
origin of the fairies:--

"When Lucifer saw himself in the glass, he thought himself equal with
God. Then the Lord threw him out of Heaven, and all the angels that
belonged to him. While He was 'chucking them out,' an archangel asked
Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in the air
still, and have power to wreck ships, and to work evil in the
world."[92]

* * * *

OBERON'S VISION.

_A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, like too many other plays of Shakespeare, has
been unable to escape the inquisition of "deuteroscopists"--those who are
always on the look-out for historical and other allusions. The dainty
passage (II. i. 148-174), in which Oberon gives Puck directions how and
where to find the magic herb that works the transformations of love in the
rest of the play, appears to contain a reference to Elizabeth as "a fair
vestal throned by the west" and "the imperial votaress." So much may be
reasonably granted; but Warburton in his edition proceeded to identify "the
mermaid on a dolphin's back" with Mary Queen of Scots, the dolphin of
course being the Dauphin, and so forth. This interpretation of the alleged
secret allegory was displaced in 1843 by one rather more plausible--though
still needlessly fantastic.

_Oberon's Vision_, by the Rev. N.J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society, 1843)
attempts to prove that in composing this passage Shakespeare was referring
to the Earl of Leicester's attempt to win Elizabeth's hand, when she
visited him at Kenilworth in 1575; the mermaid, uttering dulcet and
harmonious breath, so that the rude sea grows civil, and the stars that
shot from their spheres, are explained, by parallel passages from
contemporary accounts, as parts of the pageant or "Princely Pleasures"
which formed the Queen's entertainment. The Earl was simultaneously
intriguing with Lettice, Countess of Essex, who ultimately became his wife;
and it is she who, according to the Rev. Halpin, is intended by the "little
western flower"; to him the passage means:--

"Cupid, on behalf of the Earl of Leicester, loosed an arrow at Queen
Elizabeth; but the Virgin Queen's maidenhood was so unassailable that
the bolt missed her, hitting the Countess of Essex, who succumbed."

In other words, Shakespeare mentions the Queen only in order to point out
her rival's success!

It is as unnecessary to discuss the degrees of probability in Halpin's
identifications as it was for him to elaborate them. Certainly it is likely
that Shakespeare intended a compliment to his queen; it is possible that
the "mermaid on a dolphin's back" was a reminiscence of a pageant which he
might have visited Kenilworth at the age of eleven to see; and it may be
true that he meant to hint at Leicester.

On the other hand, I think that another explanation is more obvious and
more rational. Shakespeare had to introduce into his play the magic herb
which was to alter the loves of those into whose eyes it was squeezed. We
may reasonably guess that he had read somewhere one of the many popular
legends that explain why the violet is purple, why the rose is red, _etc._;
there are some in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_[93] which Shakespeare read in
Golding's translation. He saw an opportunity of paying a graceful
compliment to Elizabeth by saying that the magic flower, once white, had
been empurpled by a shaft of Cupid's drawn at the fair vestal and imperial
votaress, who yet passed on untouched;

"And maidens call it love-in-idleness"

--a popular name for the common pansy.

NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTION

[1] For _The Knightes Tale_, see Prof. Skeat's edition (modern spelling) in
the "King's Classics," and his excellent introduction.

[2] was named

[3] realm

[4] called

[5] were not

[6] besieged

[7] See Mr. R.B. McKerrow's note on Nashe's reference to the name in _Have
with You to Saffron-Walden_ (_Works,_ iii. 111).

[8] See Statius, _Thebais_, I, 13-14, etc. (Chaucer refers to "Stace of
Thebes," _Knightes Tale_, 1436.) Athamas, having incurred the wrath of
Hera, was seized with madness, and slew his son Learchus. His wife Ino
threw herself, with his other son Melicertes, into the sea, and both were
changed into sea-deities, Ino becoming Leucothea, and Melicertes Palaemon,
whom the Greeks held to be friendly to the shipwrecked. The Romans
identified him with Portunus, the protector of harbours.

[9] See Skeat's _The Knight's Tale_, xi-xv.

[10] little.

[11] In this passage, Statius describes the meeting between Theseus,
returning in triumph with Hippolyta, and the widows of those slain at the
siege of Thebes, who complain that the tyrant Creon will not permit their
husbands' bodies to be either burned or buried. This episode, as we shall
see, is the opening of the _Knightes Tale,_ and reappears in a modified
form in _The Two Noble Kinsmen._

[12] J. M. Rigg's introduction to his translation of the _Decameron_ (1903)

[13] This opening, derived from Statius (see note, p. 13), serves merely to
introduce the main story, much in the same way as the Theseus story in _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_ is simply the "enveloping action" of the play.

[14] W.W. Greg's edition, i 19-20, ii. 168. Henslowe's dates for the
performances are 17 September, 16 and 27 October, and November, 1594.
Against the first entry are the much-discussed letters "ne," which appear
to mark a new play. It will be seen that according to the theory that _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_ belongs to the winter of 1594-5, this Palamon and
Arcite play was performed immediately before.

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