THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

212 THE FAIRIES OF SHAKESPEARE
Which in a gloomy night, and dark,
Twinckled like a fiery spark.ls6
Amid this profusion of buttons and apparel, diets and
dishes, the power and personality of the fairies disap-
peared as a matter of literary record. In the Amyntas
of Thomas Randolph, of 1638, " the bevy of Fairies
attending on Mab their queen," once invoked by Ben
Jonson to welcome the Queen of England to Apthorpe,
is itself entertained by a " rare device,"
An anti-masque of fleas, . . . taught
To dance corantoes on a spider's thread.ls7
And the status of the fairies under the sovereignty of
Oberon and Mab is fittingly epitomized as follows:
Marry a puppet? wed a mote i' th' sun?
Go look a wife in nutshells? woo a gnat,
That's nothing but a voice? No, no, Jocastus,
I must have flesh and blood, and will have Thestylis.
A fig for fairies! ls8
More conclusive still of the influence of the Shake-
spearean fairies is the stature of the fairies in The Sad
Shepherd, in which the usual consistent and painstakingly
accurate presentations of the folk fairy by Ben Jonson
show the effect of the prevailing literary fashion, and
LL span-long elves," "With each a little changeling in
ls6Ascribed to Sir Simon Steward and found in the Musarurn
Deliciae, London, 1656; rpt. Halliwell, Fairy Myth., p. 313.
la7 Hazlitt ed., 1875, Vol. I, I, 3, 11. 47, 49-50.
lss I, 3, 11. 8-12.
In the Amyntas is to be found also a number of characteristics of
the fairies of the folk, utterly inconsistent with the fairies described
above.