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2. WHERE SHAKESPEARE FOUND SUGGESTIONS FOR HIS FAIRIES

The models in literature from which Shakespeare drew may have been 'Huon of Bordeaux,' where he got little, however, but the name Oberon. The name Titania may have been derived from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' The Fairy Queen in Shakespeare's day usually went by the name of Queen Mab. Puck's characteristics seem to have been derived from the little tract of 'Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests.' Rolfe, in the notes to his edition of the play, says that White argues that this was probably written after "A Midsommer Nights Dreame." Ward thinks that the entire machinery of Oberon and his court may have been derived from Greene's 'Scottish History of James IV,' and that Titania may have been suggested by Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath's Tale.' He probably owed his fairies in great measure to tradition or folk-lore. The folk-lore of England was originally made up of Teutonic elements, which have been modified by Danish and Norman invasions, by remnants of old Keltic belief, and by the introduction of Christianity, which last degraded the good fairies into mischievous elves. (See Hazlitt, 'Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare,' Halliwell's 'Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of Midsummer Night's Dream,' also Poet-Lore, April, 1891, 'Fairy-lore in Midsummer Night's Dream.')

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