THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

THE FAIRIES OF SHAKESPEARE 215
Not only in plays and poems, however, was the influ-
ence of the Shakespearean fairies, especially the feature
of their smallness, felt. In popular belief, also, the
fairies of tradition tended, it would seem, to become con-
taminated by the fairies of A Midsummer Night's
Drcam. Robin Goodfellow; his mad prankes, and merry
Jests, less than forty years after the appearance of A
Midsummer Night's Dream, contained a characterization
of the fairies for the first time in popular history as
" harmlesse spirits called fayries." 176
In the record of a contemporary encounter with the
fairies in the year 1630-1634, the smallness of the fair-
ies was emphasized :
Comming over the downes, it being neere darke, and approaching
one of the faiery dances, as the common people call them in these
~arts, viz. the greene circles made by those sprites on the grasse, he
all at once sawe an innumerable quantitie of pigmies or very small
people dancing rounde and rounde; and singing, and making all
maner of small odd noyses. He, being very greatly amaz'd, . . .
fell down scarcely knowing what he did; and thereupon these little
creatures pinch'd him all over, and made a sorte of quick humming
noyse all the time.17?
By 1648, the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
might well have sat as the models for the fairies men-
tioned in the Cosmographic of Peter Heylyn, where they
are defined as " a pretty kind of little Fiends or Pigmey-
Devils, but more inclined to sport than mischief." In
1653, in an Antidote against Atheism by Henry More,
the fairies are referred to as ' L those little Puppet-Spirits,
176 Dated 1628. This date is assigned the tract according to the
findings of most scholars. Halliwell rpt., p. 122.
John Aubrey, Natural1 History of Wiltshire, and in Wiltshire
collections of Aubrey, Oxford; Hazlitt rpt., pp. 349-350.
178App., p. 161.