Browse -
Information -
Catalogue of Titles -
Submission of Manuscripts -
Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture.
REVIEWED BY: Alison Shell, University of Durham
"Farewell rewards and fairies! / Good housewives now may say; / For now foul sluts in dairies, / Do fare as well as So wrote Richard Corbett in the mid-seventeenth century.
Whereas doing one's duty might have earned supernatural rewards under the old religious dispensation, only faith is necessary for salvation in a Protestant world. Corbett's poem, written from a conformist point of view, criticizes what he sees as the puritan removal of incentives to virtue, while using the world of faery to link Catholicism with superstition. As the poem goes on to say, "we note the fairies / Were of the old profession: / Their songs were Ave Marias, I Their dances were procession' Corbett's association of fairy rewards and punishments specifically with women is also a common one at this date, and this triangulation of fairies, women, and Catholicism is one which structures Buccola's book.
Less likely to receive formal education than men at every level of society, women were routinely identified with superstitious beliefs and old wives' tales of all kinds. Protestant commentators often saw hardly any distinction between popery and indigenous paganism: Buccola quotes the puritan John Penry's well-known lament about the idolatrous, unchurched Welsh people who "will not stick openly, to professe that they walke... with the fairies:' referred to as "bendith Ii mamme, such as haue deserved their mothers blessing" (96). As she points out, his complaint unfavorably compares the maternal blessings of the fairy world with the "patriarchal benedictions privileged in Christian doctrine:' while pointing out their similarity to Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary-though to speak of this as "worship" is either mistaken or an unsignaled appropriation of puritan discourse.
Early modern English fairies come in both sexes-the rampantly male Puck is the best known of them all-and fairy lore provided an imaginative space where gender roles could metamorphose. Still, given that ideas of popish and fairy superstition were so strongly gendered as female, it was inevitable that female characters would often have a prominent part to play when fairy stories found their way onto the stage. The body of this book is devoted to chapter-length discussions of four plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Alchemist, with particular attention to Dol Common's role, and Cymbeline. While Cymbeline has no fairy characters as such, Buccola argues convincingly that it includes a number of motifs strongly associated with the fairy world, heightening the play's sense of unlikeliness and wonder. When Imogen first happens upon her brothers, Belarius comments "But that it eats our victuals, I should think / Here were a fairy:' and later, when she offers money for the food she has eaten, Arviragus scoffs "All gold and silver rather turn to dirt / As 'tis no better reckoned but of those / Who worship dirty gods'
Jupiter actually appears in the play, while fairies do not. The overt supernatural presence in Cymbeline betokens classical rather than indigenous paganism, and Buccola's provocative uggestion that fairy lore could act as a female alternative to classical mythology deserves future expansion in this context and others, by her or another scholar. On another front, it is hard not to see its feminization as one reason why it has received relatively little academic interest till recently; but this book's exhaustive and excellent bibliography is particularly strong on primary texts, and ought to provide plenty of inspiration to future researchers. With its focus on canonical works and its exceptionally lively and enjoyable presentation, the book also plays well to teaching needs. Early modern attitudes to the occult are already a standard inclusion on undergraduate syllabi, in both history and literature departments; together with such secondary literature as Diane Purkiss's At the Bottom of the Garden (New York: New York University Press, 2000) and Jack Zipes's studies of fairy lore, this book ought to help fairies give witches a run for their money.
Whereas doing one's duty might have earned supernatural rewards under the old religious dispensation, only faith is necessary for salvation in a Protestant world. Corbett's poem, written from a conformist point of view, criticizes what he sees as the puritan removal of incentives to virtue, while using the world of faery to link Catholicism with superstition. As the poem goes on to say, "we note the fairies / Were of the old profession: / Their songs were Ave Marias, I Their dances were procession' Corbett's association of fairy rewards and punishments specifically with women is also a common one at this date, and this triangulation of fairies, women, and Catholicism is one which structures Buccola's book.
Less likely to receive formal education than men at every level of society, women were routinely identified with superstitious beliefs and old wives' tales of all kinds. Protestant commentators often saw hardly any distinction between popery and indigenous paganism: Buccola quotes the puritan John Penry's well-known lament about the idolatrous, unchurched Welsh people who "will not stick openly, to professe that they walke... with the fairies:' referred to as "bendith Ii mamme, such as haue deserved their mothers blessing" (96). As she points out, his complaint unfavorably compares the maternal blessings of the fairy world with the "patriarchal benedictions privileged in Christian doctrine:' while pointing out their similarity to Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary-though to speak of this as "worship" is either mistaken or an unsignaled appropriation of puritan discourse.
Early modern English fairies come in both sexes-the rampantly male Puck is the best known of them all-and fairy lore provided an imaginative space where gender roles could metamorphose. Still, given that ideas of popish and fairy superstition were so strongly gendered as female, it was inevitable that female characters would often have a prominent part to play when fairy stories found their way onto the stage. The body of this book is devoted to chapter-length discussions of four plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Alchemist, with particular attention to Dol Common's role, and Cymbeline. While Cymbeline has no fairy characters as such, Buccola argues convincingly that it includes a number of motifs strongly associated with the fairy world, heightening the play's sense of unlikeliness and wonder. When Imogen first happens upon her brothers, Belarius comments "But that it eats our victuals, I should think / Here were a fairy:' and later, when she offers money for the food she has eaten, Arviragus scoffs "All gold and silver rather turn to dirt / As 'tis no better reckoned but of those / Who worship dirty gods'
Jupiter actually appears in the play, while fairies do not. The overt supernatural presence in Cymbeline betokens classical rather than indigenous paganism, and Buccola's provocative uggestion that fairy lore could act as a female alternative to classical mythology deserves future expansion in this context and others, by her or another scholar. On another front, it is hard not to see its feminization as one reason why it has received relatively little academic interest till recently; but this book's exhaustive and excellent bibliography is particularly strong on primary texts, and ought to provide plenty of inspiration to future researchers. With its focus on canonical works and its exceptionally lively and enjoyable presentation, the book also plays well to teaching needs. Early modern attitudes to the occult are already a standard inclusion on undergraduate syllabi, in both history and literature departments; together with such secondary literature as Diane Purkiss's At the Bottom of the Garden (New York: New York University Press, 2000) and Jack Zipes's studies of fairy lore, this book ought to help fairies give witches a run for their money.
<Top>
Last Reviewed on 11/24/2008 by Nabin Mulepati | SU Press (570)372-4175/fax (570)372-4021 | Email: baileys@susqu.edu | Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA 17870