THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

INTRODUCTION 9
There is Tom Thumb, for example; . . . But Shakespeare has
carried this idea further than any of his predecessors. His fairies,
in A Midsummer-Night's Dream and in Romeo and Juliet, though
perhaps not in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where children are
dressed up to imitate fairies, are at least spoken of as infinitesimally
Sidgwick holds they were " about the size of mortal chil-
dren." Nutt 34 comments upon the diminutive size of
the fairy race in the following words:
I will only say that, possibly, the diminutive size of the fairy
race belongs more especially to Teutonic tradition as developed
within the last 2,000 years, and that in so far the popular element
in Shakespeare's fairy world is, possibly, Teutonic rather than
Celtic.35
Two examples of the present conception of the tradi-
tional fairies of Elizabethan England are to be found in
P. H. Ditchfield's The England of Shakespeare, 1917,
and in Shakespeare's England, chapter XVI, written by
Professor H. Littledale, 19 I 7.36 According to the
33 E. K. Chambers, " Fairy World," pp. 166-167.
34 'I. .
. . SO far as the outward guise and figure of his fairies is
concerned, Shakespeare is borne out by a series of testimonies reach-
ing back to the twelfth century Gervase of Tilbury and Gerald the
Welshman, who give us glimpses of a world of diminutive and tricky
sprites." Fairy Myth. of Eng. Lit., p. 36.
35 Nutt, Fairy Myth. of Eng. Lit., p. 45. Cf. also p. 36.
36 The following account of the fairies of England shows the possi-
bilities of which the subject is capable:
" But the superstition which swayed king and peasant alike could
also take attractive forms. The simple minds which recoiled before
devil-lore and black magic could people their meadows and forests
with fairies and elves, or indulge their fancies in that folklore which
bound, and still binds, the past with the present. Every country-side
would have its poetic myths, fancy-born and harmless, with which to
enliven their many meetings and to invest with significance the common
things of life. . . . But the innate poetry, as well as the majesty and