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OF
SHAKESPEARE
by
Alfred Nutt
(1900)
"Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."
We could not blot out from English poetry its visions of the fairyland without a sense of the Midsummer Night's Dream, the crown and glory of English delineation of the fairy world. Scarce any one of Shakespeare's plays has had a literary influence so immediate, so widespread, and so enduring. As pictured by Shakespeare, the fairy realm became, almost at once, a convention of literature in which numberless poets sought inspiration and material. I need only mention Drayton, Ben Jonson, Herrick, Randolph, and Milton himself. Apart from any question of its relation to popular belief, of any grounding in popular fancy, Shakespeare's vision stood by itself, and was accepted as the ideal presentment of fairydom which, for two centuries at least, has signified to the average Englishman of culture the world depicted in the Midsummer Night's Dream. To this day, works are being produced deriving form and circumstance and inspiration (such as it is) wholly from Shakespeare.
Now if we compare these literary presentations of Faery, based upon Shakespeare, with living folklore, where the latter has retained the fairy belief with any distinctions, we find almost complete disagreement; and if, here and there, a trait seems common, it is either of so general a character as to yield no assured warrant of kinship, or there is reason to suspect contamination of the popular form by the literary ideal derived from and built up out of Shakespeare. Yet if we turn back to the originator of literary fairyland, to the poet of the Midsummer Night's Dream, we can detect in his picture all the essentials of the fairy creed as it appealed, and still appeals, to the faith and fancy of generations more countless than ever acknowledged the sway of any of the great world-religions, we can recover from it the elements of a conception of life and nature older than the most ancient recorded utterance of earth's most ancient races.
Whence, then, did Shakespeare draw his account of the fairy world? As modern commentators have pointed out, from at least two sources: the folk belief of his day and the romance literature of the previous four centuries. This or that trait has been referred to one or the other source; the differences between these two have been dwelt upon, and there, as a rule, the discussion has been allowed to rest. What I shall essay to prove is that in reality sixteenth-century folk-belief and mediæval fairy romance have their ultimate origin in one and the same set of beliefs and rites; that the differences between them are due to the historical and psychological causes, the working of which we can trace; that their reunion, after ages of separation, in the England of the late sixteenth century, is due to the continued working of those same causes; and that, as a result of this reunion, which took place in England because in England alone it could take place, English poetry became free of Fairydom, and has thus been enabled to preserve for the modern world a source of joy and beauty which must otherwise have perished.
I have observed just now that the modern literary presentation of Faery (Which is almost wholly dependent upon Shakespeare) differed essentially from the popular one still living in various districts of Europe, nowhere, perhaps, more tenaciously than in some of the Celtic-speaking portions of these isles. I may note here, according to the latest, and in this respect the best, editor of the Midsummer Night's Dream, Mr. Chambers, what are the characteristics of the Shakespeare fairies. He ranges them as follows:--
This order of characteristics, I make little doubt, would occur to most well-read Englishmen, and denotes what impressed the fancy of Shakespeare's contemporaries and of the after-world. The fairy community, with its quaintly fantastic parody of human circumstance; the minute size and extreme swiftness of the fairies, which insensibly assimilate them in our mind to the winged insect world--these traits would strike us at first blush, and these have been insisted upon and developed by the imitators of Shakespeare; only on second thoughts should we note their share in the life of nature, should we recall their sway over its benign and malign manifestations, and this side of fairy activity is wholly ignored by later fairy literature.
Yet a moment's reflection will convince us that the characteristics upon which Shakespeare seems to lay most stress, which have influenced later poets and story-tellers, and to which his latest editor assigns the first place, are only secondary, and can in no way explain either how the fairy belief arose nor what was its real hold upon popular imagination. The peasant stooping over his spade, toilfully winning his bread from Mother Earth, was scarce so enamoured with the little he knew of kings and queens that he must feign the existence of an invisible realm; nor would the contrast, which touches alike our fantasy and our sense of the ludicrous, between minute size and superhuman power appeal to him. The peasant had far other cause to fear and reverence the fairy world. In his daily struggle with nature he could count upon fairy aid if he performed with due ceremony the ancient ritual handed down to him by his forefathers; but woe betide him if, through carelessness or sluttish neglect of these rites, he aroused fairy wrath--not help, but hindrance and punishment would be his lot. And if neglect was hateful to these mysterious powers of nature, still more so was prying interference--they work as they list, and when man essays to change and, in his own conceit, to better the old order, the fairy vanished. All this the peasant knows; it is part of that antique religion of the soil which means so much more to him than our religions do to us, because upon it, as he conceives, depend his and his children's sustenance. But be he as attentive as he may to the rites by which the fairy world maybe placated and with which it must be worshiped, there come times and seasons of mysterious calamity, convulsions in the invisible world, and then--
"The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard; The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock. . . . . . . . No night is now with hymn or carol blest; Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound: And thorough this distempture we see The seasons alter."
Such calamities are luckily rare, though, as the peasant full well knows, the powers he dreads and believes in can--
". . . . . . overcast the night, The starry welkin cover up anon With drooping fog as black as Acheron."
But as a rule, they are kindlier disposed; not alone do they war with blight, and fog, and flood, and all powers hostile to the growth of vegetation, but increase of flock and herd, of mankind also, seems good in their eyes--it may be because they know their tithes will be duly paid, and that their own interests are inextricably bound up with that of the mortals whom they aid and mock at, whom they counsel and reprove and befool.
Here let me note that not until the peasant belief has come into the hands of the cultured man do we find the conception of an essential incompatibility between the fairy and the human words--of the necessary disappearance of the one before the advance of the other. Chaucer, if I mistake not, first voiced this conception of English literature. In words to be quoted presently, he relegates the fairies to a far backward of time, and assigns their disappearance, satirically it is true, to the progress of Christianity. To the peasant, fairydom is part of the necessary machinery by which the scheme of things, as known to him, is ordered and governed; he may wish for less uncanny deities, but he could not conceive the world without them; their absence is no cause of rejoicing, rather of anxiety as due to his own neglect of the observances which they expect and which are the price of their favour.
I do not, of course, claim that the foregoing brief sketch of the psychological basis of the fairy creed, as exemplified in still living beliefs of the peasantry throughout Europe, represents the view of it taken by Shakespeare, and his literary contemporaries, but yet it is based wholly upon evidence they furnish. And if we turn to the bald and scanty notes of English fairy mythology, to which we can with certainty assign a date earlier than the Midsummer Night's Dream, we shall find what may be called the rustic element of the fairy creed insisted upon, proportionately, to a far greater extent than in Shakespeare. Reginald Scot and the few writers who allude to the subject at all, ignore entirely the delicate fantastic traits that characterise Shakespeare's elves: they are wanting precisely in what we, with an ideal derived from Shakespeare in our mind, should call the "fairylike" touch; they are rude and coarse and earthy. And, not implicitly, but explicitly, a conception of the true nature of these peasant deities found expression in Shakespeare's own days. At the very time of the Midsummer Night's Dream was being composed or played, Nash wrote as follows: "The Robin-good-fellows, elfs, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age, which idolatrous former days and the fantastical world of Greece ycleped Fauns, Satyrs, Dryads, Hamadryads, did most of their pranks in the night"--a passage in which the parallel suggested is far closer and weightier in import than its author imagined.
The popular element in Shakespeare's fairy mythology is, then, the same as that testified to by somewhat earlier writers, but touched with the finest spirit alike of grace and humour, and presented in a form exquisitely poetical. Naturally enough it is accidental and secondary characteristics of the fairy world which are emphasized by the poet, who is solely concerned with what may heighten the beauty or enliven the humour of his picture. But with his unerring instinct for what is vital and permanent in that older world of legend and fancy, to which he so often turned for inspiration, he has yet retained enough to enable us to detect the essence of the fairy conception, in which we must needs recognize a series of peasant beliefs and rites of a singularly archaic character. If we further note that, so far as the outward guise and figure of his fairies is concerned, Shakespeare is borne out by a series of testimonies reaching back to the twelfth-century Gervase of Tilbury and Gerald the Welshman, who gives us glimpses of a world of diminutive and tricky sprites--we need not dwell longer at present upon this aspect of Elfland, but can turn to the fay of romance.
It is evident that Shakespeare derived both the idea of a fairy realm reproducing the external aspect of a mediæval court, and also the name of his fairy king from mediæval romance, that is, from the Arthurian cycle, from those secondary works of the Charlemagne cycle, which, like Huon of Bordeaux, were modelled upon the Arthur romances, and from the still later purely literary imitations alike of the Arthur and the Charlemagne stories. But the Oberon of romance has been regarded as a being totally different in essence and origin from the Robin Goodfellow, the Puck of peasant belief, and their bringing together in the Midsummer Night's Dream as an inspiration to individual genius. I hope to show that the two strands of fiction have a common source, and that their union, or rather reunion, is due to deeper causes than any manifestation, however potent, of genius. I hope to show that the two strands of fiction have a common source, and that their union, or rather reunion, is due to deeper causes than any manifestiation, however potent, of genius.
What has hitherto been overlooked, or all too insufficiently noted, is the standing association of the fairy world of mediæval romantic literature with Arthur. Chaucer, in a passage to which I have already alluded, proclaims this unhesitatingly:--
"In the olde daies of the King Arthoure, Of which that Bretons speken grete honoure, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye; The elf-queen with hyr jolly companye Danced ful oft in many a greene mede."
We first meet the mediæval fairy in the works of the Arthur cycle; as ladies of the lake and fountain, as dwellers in the far-off island paradise of Avalon, as mistresses of or captives in mysterious castles, the enchantments of which may be raised by the dauntless knight whose guerdon is their love and never-ending bliss, these fantastic beings play a most important part in the world of dream and magic haze peopled by Arthur and his knights and their lady-loves. If an instance be needed how vital is the connection between Arthur and Faery, it is furnished by the romance of Huon of Bordeaux. As far as place and circumstance and personages are concerned, this romance belongs wwholly to the Charlemagne cycle; in it Oberon makes his first appearance as king of Faery, and it is his rôle to protect and sustain the hero, Huon, with the ceaseless indefatigable indulgence which the supernatural counsellor so often displays towards his mortal protété alike in heroic legend and in popular tale. He finally leaves him his kingdom; but before Huon can enjoy it Oberon must make peace between him and Arthur. "Sir, you know well that your realme and dignity you gave me after your decease," says the British king. In spite of the Carolingian setting, Huon of Bordeaux is at the art an Arthurian hero; and the teller of his fortunes knew full well that Arthur was the claimant to the throne of Faery, the rightful heir to the lord of fantasy and glamour and illusion.
Dismissing for a while consideration of the Arthurian fay, we may ask what is the Arthurian romance, and whence comes it? For ample discussion of these points I must refer to Nos. 1 and 4 of these studies. To put it briefly, the Arthurian romance is the Norman-French and the Anglo-Norman man re-telling of a mass of Celtic fairy tales, partly mythic, partly heroic in the shape under which they became known to the French-speaking world, tales which reached the latter alike from Brittany and from Wales in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Some of these fairy tales have come down to us in Welsh in a form entirely unaffected by French influence, others more or less affected, whilst some of the Welsh versions are simple translations from the French. The nearest analogues to these Welsh-Breton fairy tales, preserved to us partly in a Welsh, but mostly in a French dress, are to be found in Ireland. That country possesses a romantice literature which, so far as interest and antiquity of record are concerned, surpasses that of Wales, and which, in the majority of cases where comparison is possible, is obviously and undoubtedly more archaic in character. The relation between these two bodies of romantic fiction, Irish and Welsh, has not yet been satisfactorily determined. It seems most likely either that the Welsh tales represent the mythology and heroic legend of a Gaelic race akin to the Irish conquered by the Brytons (Welsh), but, as happens at times, passing their traditions on to their conquerors; or else that the Irish story-tellers, the dominant literary class in the Celtic world throughout the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, imposed their literature upon Wales. It is not necessary to discuss which of these two explanations has the most in its favour; in either case we must quit Britain and the woodland glades of Shakespeare's Arden and turn for a while to Ireland.
Examining the fairy belief of modern Ireland or of Gaelic Scotland, we detect at once a great similarity between it and English folklore, whether recoverable from living trdition or from the testimony of Shakespeare and other literature. Many stories and incidents are common to both, many traits and characteristics of the fairy folk are similar. This is especially the case if we rely upon Irish writers, like Crofton Croker, for instance, who were familiar with the English literary tradition, and may possibly have been influenced by it. But closer examination and reference to more genuinely popular sources reveal important differences. To cite one marked trait, the Irish fairies are by no means necessarily or universally regarded as minute in stature. Two thoroughly competent observers, one, Mr. Leland Duncan, working in North Ireland (Folk-Lore, June 1896), the other, Mr. Jeremiah Curtin (Cf. "Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World, collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster," London, 1895), agree decisively as to this; fairy and mortal are not thought of as differing in size. But what chiefly impresses the student of Irish fairy tradition is the fact that the fairy folk are far more definitely associated with special districts and localities and tribes and families than is the case in England.
There are only two good accounts of the fairy belief, studied as a whole and with a view to determining its origin, nature, and growth:--(1) The essay prefixed to Irische Elfenmärchen, a translation by the Brothers Grimm of Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, published at Berlin in 1826. Croker translated this essay into English and affixed it to the second edition of his Legends (1827-28), where it occupies pages 1-154 of vol. iii. (2) Les Fées du Moyen Age, recherches sur leur origine, leur histoire, et leurs attributs, by Alfred Maury, Paris, 1843; reprinted, Paris, 1896, in the volume entitled Croyances et Legendes du Moyen Age (12 francs). The Grimms' essay is, like all their work, absolutely good as far as it goes, and only needs amplification in the light of the fuller knowledge derived from the researches of the last seventy-five years. Halliwell's Illustrations of Shakespeare's Fairy Mythology (London, 1845; reprinted with additions by Hazlitt, 1875) is a useful collection of materials. The best edition of the Midsummer Night's Dream, as far as the objects of this study are concerned, is that by Mr. E. K. Chambers, 1897. An immense amount of out-of-the-way material is gathered together in Shakespeare's Puck and his Folklore illustrated from the superstitions of all nations, but more especially from the earliest religion and rites of Northern Europe and the Wend, 3 vols., 1852, by Mr. Bell; but the writer's perverse fantasticality and his utter lack of true critical spirit make his work dangerous for any but a trained scholar. Mr. Hartland's The Science of Fairy Tales; an Inquiry into Fairy Mythology, 1891 (3s. 6d.), is a most valuable study of several fundamental themes of fairy romance as exemplified in traditional literature. Dyer's Folklore of Shakespeare, 1884 (14s.), must also be mentioned, but cannot be recommended.
The quotation from Nash is taken from Halliwell's Illustrations.
Shakespeare's three greatest tragedies--Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth--are all founded upon heroic-legendary themes, and in each case the vital element in the legend is disentangled and emphasised with unerring skill. Indeed, wherever he handles legendary romance, he obtains the maximum of artistic effect without, as the artist so frequently does, offering violence to the spirit of the legend.