THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

'I'HE FAIRIES OF SHAKESPEARE 197
Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie:
There I couch. When owls do cry,
On the bat's back I do fly,
After summer, merrily :
Merrily, merrily, ;hall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.113
Outside of the works of Shakespeare, the influence of
the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream as literary
models is not particularly perceptible until 1600, the date
of the publication of the official quarto of A Midsummer
Night's Dream, and the date found on the Roberts'
quarto of the same play.'l4
In the anonymous play, The Wisdome of Doctor
Dodypoll, dated conjecturally between 1596 and 1599,
and entered on the Stationer's Register in 1600,'~~ a
fairy is described as " a fine little Dapper fellow," and
the description of the commonwealth of fairies is as fol-
lows :
113 Zbid., V, I, 11. 89-95.
l14The one exception to this statement may occur on p. 30 of The
Famous Historie of Chinon of England by Christopher Middleton,
dated 1597, in which " armies of many little Elues " as " special1 at-
tendants " on Oboram's " traine " are described, " whose busie fingers
woulde gladly haue beene pinching" Chinon's and Lancelot's and sev-
eral other knights' legs, " for higher they coulde not reach." In this
case, however, it is probable that the elves so described are copied
from the Oberon of Huon of Burdeux, from which most of the fairy
lore of Chinon is taken (cf. Introd., Mead ed., p. Iviii), or are the
elves of native tradition of whom this is the first description I have
found in English literature which designates them as too small to
reach beyond a man's knee (if " leg" be taken to represent the " part
of the lower limb between knee and ancle ").
116 Dated by Chambers, 1599 and 1600.
14