Scary Fairies
Elizabethan audiences, sitting (or standing) in Burbage's Theater in 1595 or so, looked to see how the playwright would change the stories of their history and folklore. This was a culture transitioning from an oral tradition to a literate one. Audiences could hear the story in their homes and then in the theater. If they liked it, for a few coins, they could buy the play in printed form. In the oral tradition, part of the art of transmitting a story was the alteration of the structure and characters. For the Elizabethans, Shakespeare was the best at this. In Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare brought together myriad stories from a variety of sources to tell his story. You can find Ovid, Chaucer, Plutarch and even St. Paul.
When we now think of the fairies from Midsummer, we think of child-like sprites dancing in frolicking circles. Those were not the fairies Elizabethan audiences anticipated. Shakespeare turned their folklore on its head. He took what he wanted from the fairy folklore passed down from the Middle Ages and added what he needed to further his plot and present his characters. What he didn't know was that the fairy that he invented is now the universally recognized creature we know as a fairy today. For the Elizabethans, that was a very different beast. They preferred Shakespeare's, clearly.
In other of Shakespeare's plays, like last summer's Merry Wives of Windsor, characters refer to their fear of fairy pinching. For the rural people of England, leaving food and milk (especially cream) in a clean house was a good way to appease the fairies, the devils. If the humans didn't provide the fairies with what they wanted, the human-sized, wingless creatures would pinch them until they were covered with bruises. Sometimes the beasts would create changelings, babies born in one gender and then changing to the other. They would leave a changeling behind after abducting a human. Fairies would also damage crops, cause illness and, sometimes, even death. When they were pleased with their human hosts, fairies could bring great rewards, including fortune or a clean house (!). Parts of the oral tradition set fairies as fallen angels, creatures trapped between heaven and hell or the souls of the dead.
Shakespeare chose to adopt a "good bits" version of fairies, keeping some aspects of the folklore while leaving out the more nasty aspects. The fairies in the realm of Titania and Oberon are also strongly associated with nature. They love to dance to fairy music during the nighttime hours of their existence. These night creatures, like their folklore counterparts, were most active in the summer months.
The most famous of Midsummer's fairies is, of course, Puck or Robin Goodfellow. The audience would have been directly familiar with his stories, as there were many. However, it seems that Shakespeare is the first to have combined the two creatures of Puck and Robin Goodfellow into one with two names. In the stories, he served no master, nor was he a jester, as in Midsummer. He was a shape-shifter, a hobgoblin, a devil, a sprite. All agree that the Puck is a mischief-maker, especially with travelers. He's also known as puca, as was Harvey in the eponymous film.
Following Midsummer's success, plays, songs and poems were composed featuring fairies and Puck/Robin Goodfellow. Many adopted Shakespeare's view of fairies and, now, centuries later, our image of fairies is that created by Shakespeare and made more ephemeral by the Victorians. An image of pinching fairies doesn't register in our folklore any longer. Fairies, like Oberon and Titania, help humans because they choose to, not because humans leave cream for them in a clean house.
-Joan Weber, BSF Artistic Associate