THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

202 THE FAIRIES OF SHAKESPEARE
the pages of poems in which they were being continually
dressed in diminutive garments and fed infinitesimal
baked insects. Not the most flagrant crime of witchcraft
committed through their power in Scotland, where
mortals were being executed because of them, could
maintain the race as fearful and credible entities in the
face of the ridiculous conceits of Drayton or Browne or
Herrick.
That Drayton should have taken up the conceit of
diminutive and mock heroic fairies and microscopic fairy
costumes is most indicative of the influence of the Shakespearean
fairy. In his earlier works, he had mentioned
the fairies, and had showed himself familiar with the
ordinary fairies of folk tradition. They were referred
to in Idea, The Shepherd's Garland of 1593,'" in Englands
Heroicall Epistles of 1597,'~~ and in the first part
of the Poly-Olhion, published in 1613.~~~ And in every
instance, the references were to some trait of the folkfairies,
or to the fays of romance.'32
It is only in the second part of the Poly-Olhion, published
in 1622, that the ordinary Elizabethan fairies are
replaced by fairies who are unmistakably the descendants
of the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, not only
in the reduction of their stature, but also in the reduction
of their status to that of playful and ineffectual beings.
with a picturesque proclivity for dewdrops, so noticeably
a feature of Titania's court:
129 Poemes, Lyrick and Pastorall, Spenser Soc., The Third Eglog,
p. 45 ; The Fourth Eglog, p. 52.
130 Poems; Spenser Soc., No. 46, 1888: " Elinor Cobharn to Duke
Humfrey," pp. 271 and 272; and " Henry Howard Earle of Surrey to
Geraldine," p. 347.
131 Poly-Olbion, Spenser Soc., 1889-1890, The fourth Song, p. 82.
'32 See Poly-Olbion, The fourth Song, p. 82.