Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith
Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture

by Regina Buccola

Fairies, unruly women, and vestigial Catholicism constituted a frequently invoked triad in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama which has seldom been critically examined and therefore constitutes a significant lacuna in scholarly treatments of early modern theater, including the work of Shakespeare. Fairy tradition has lost out in scholarly critical convention to the more masculine mythologies of Christianity and classical Greece and Rome, in which female deities either serve masculine gods or are themselves masculinized (i.e., Diana as a buckskinned warrior). However, the fairy tradition is every bit as significant in our critical attempts to situate early modern texts in their historical contexts as the references to classical texts and struggles associated with state-mandated religious beliefs are widely agreed to be. Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith examines the ways in which the fairy, rebellious woman , quasi-Catholic trio repeatedly stages resistance to early modern conceptions of appropriate class and gender conduct and state-mandated religion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.

The introduction provides an overview of widespread popular beliefs with respect to fairies-beliefs with particular relevance to the lived experience of women-and illustrates their connection to the doctrinal battles waged over religious reform in this period. The succeeding chapters argue that our impression so the central female characters in four plays by Shakespeare and a significant contribution by Ben Jonson would be quite different if we viewed them in the context of the fairy beliefs with which they would assuredly have been associated in the minds of early modern English audiences. The book begins with probably the best known and most explicit of the “fairy” plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then proceeds to two plays in which women impersonate fairies, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Jonson’s The Alchemist. The fourth and fifth chapters return to Shakespeare and two plays in which fairies are not explicitly invoked but in which an early modern audience more immersed in fairy beliefs than our own would have recognized constellations of fairy beliefs with important implications not only for their heroines, but also for the religious import of the plays. The heroines in question are Imogen, from Cymbeline, and Helena of All’s Well That Ends Well. They have long frustrated critics, especially feminist ones. When examined in conjunction with early modern fairy beliefs, these heroines become not only more comprehensible, they also emerge as more powerful than they are often found to be.