Fairies by Greg Clinton

Author:Greg Clinton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC

This watercolor by William Blake was inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In the fairyland of the play, Oberon is the king of the fairies and Titania is his queen. They are at odds from the start: Oberon wants to make a young Indian boy into a knight, but Titania refuses. She obtained the boy from his mother, who was one of her worshippers in India. The boy is a changeling, a child who has been stolen from its crib and replaced with an impostor. The husband-and-wife quarrel leads to the central complication of the plot. Oberon orders his jester, a mischievous sprite named Puck, to find a special flower in the forest. The flower produces a potion that, when spread on the eyelids of a sleeping person, will cause them to fall in love with the first person they see when they wake up.

As you can imagine, Puck’s use of the potion causes pandemonium. First he puts it on Titania, but then Oberon sends him to use it on one of the humans. Puck puts it on the wrong guy, who falls in love with the wrong girl. Trying to fix his error, Puck makes several more mistakes. Soon there are heated love triangles and tangled romantic arrangements. Titania even spends part of the play in love with a donkey-headed actor named Bottom. At the end, the “right” people fall back in love with the correct partners, and weddings ensue. (Weddings are common endings for romantic comedies, in Shakespeare and also in modern movies.)

Without going into too much detail of this complicated and zany plot, one can learn a few things about how Shakespeare represented fairies and what they meant in Renaissance Europe when he lived and worked. First, the play reiterates that fairies live in the boundary zones; in this case, they live in the forest, and they travel to England from the East. Second, the fairies cause as much trouble as good, so they don’t have clear-cut moral values (that is, they are neither good guys nor bad guys). Third, fairies traffic in magic and potions. Fourth, fairies come in many forms: male, female, beautiful, and strange. But most importantly, fairies never take things too seriously. This is expressed when Puck declares, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” The humans are only focused on their own lives and loves, while the fairies have fun at their expense and seem to see life as a kind of frivolous game.

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