THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

INTRODUCTION 3
sought for machinery in the superstitions of their native country.
" The fays, which nightly dance upon the wold," were an inter-
esting subject; and the creative imagination of the bard, improv-
ing upon the vulgar belief, assigned to them many of those fanci-
ful attributes and occupations, which posterity have since associ-
ated with the name of fairy. In such employments, as rearing the
drooping flower, and arranging the disordered chamber, the fairies
of South Britain gradually lost the harsher character of the dwarfs,
or elves. Their choral dances were enlivened by the introduction
of the merry goblin Puck, for whose freakish pranks they exchanged
their original mischievous propensities. The fairies of Shakespeare,
Drayton, and Mennis, therefore, at first exquisite fancy portraits,
may be considered as having finally operated a change in the origi-
nal which gave them birth.
While the fays of South Britain received such attractive and
poetical embellishments, those of Scotland, who possessed no such
advantage, retained more of their ancient, and appropriate char-
a~ter.~
The original folk fairies " of Britain, and more espe-
cially those of Scotland," Scott represented as " retaining
the unamiable qualities, and diminutive size, of the Gothic
elves." lo The fairies of England he seems to have re-
garded as harmless.ll
Scott's essay is an important document in the history
of English fairy mythology, since it is one of the first l2
statements, if not the first; of Shakespeare's influence on
the fairies of popular superstition and of Shakespeare's
use of Robin Goodfellow, and one of the first statements
9 Ibid., Vol. 11, pp. 222-224.
lo Ibid., p. 185.
l1 Ibid., p. 178.
12 J. 0. Halliwell, in his Memoranda on the Midsummer Night's
Dream, 1879, p. 13, states: " Charles Lamb, in a manuscript that 1
have seen, speaks of Shakespeare as having ' invented the fairies '; by
which, I presume, he means that his refinement of the popular notion
of them was sufficiently expansive to justify the strong epithet."