THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

100 APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS
16th century playwrights and pageant writers took pains
to stage their fairies under an oak in Windsor forest; lb4
or against " a dark rock, with trees beyond it, and all
wildness that could be presented "; 15' or enclosed the
company of fairies " in the corner of a field, being de-
fenced with high and thicke bushes."
. . . would I were out of these Woodes, for I shall haue but
wodden lucke, heers nothing but the skreeking of Owles, croking
of Frogs, hissing of Adders, barking of Foxes, walking of
Hagge~,1~~
expressed the usual state of mind of a countryman in a
forest.
. . . goblin, wood-god, fairy, elfe, or fiend,
Satyr, or other power that haunts the grove~,l~~
turned the forest into " Fayry-ground."
They haunted, too, the wells and brooks and streams
and lakes of the countryside. Their love for water
they may have inherited from the nymphs and naiads
with whom they were associated, or from " Pluto, and
his quene, Proserpina, and a1 hir fayerye " who " Dis-
porten hem and maken melodye aboute that welle " of
Januarie,laO or from the fairy ladies of the medieval ro-
mances, or from the elves. Whatever the reason, the
fairies appeared, poetically at least, almost as many
times near water as in a forest.
It is on account of this characteristic that they are in-
voked in The Tempest:
la4 M. W. of W., IV, 6.
Jonson, Oberon, the Fairy Prince, Morley ed., p. 143.
lb5
Nichols, Prog. of Eliz., Vol. 11, p. 2 I I.
157 Lyly, Gallathea, 11, 3, p. 442.
Fletcher, Faith. Shep., I, I .
169 Corbet, Iter Boreale, Chalmers ed., Vol. 5, p. 579.
lso Chaucer, "The Marchantes Tale," Skeat ed., 1894, 11. 794-797.