Like most American schoolchildren, I was introduced to William Shakespeare’s works when my ninth grade English teacher assigned Romeo and Juliet. I half-heartedly took notes as she spoke of family feuds and star-crossed love. I learned about Elizabethan culture, counted the beats of iambic pentameter, and was angered by Lord Capulet’s desire to marry his daughter off to a man she hardly knew, but it was not until Romeo’s dashing friend Mercutio delivered his famous Queen Mab speech about the fairy who aids in the birth of human dreams that I became transfixed by Shakespeare’s beautiful poetry and prose. 

“She is the fairies’ midwife,” Mercutio explains, “and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate-stone / On the fore-finger of an alderman.” As Queen Mab’s tiny hazelnut carriage wrote itself upon my imagination, I realized William Shakespeare was more than a playwright; he was a magician casting incantations with his words. He was a poet who understood the enchanted world of the good neighbors.

The relationship between poets and the fair folk is long standing in folkloric circles. Often associated with the natural world, fairies provide endless inspiration to the artistically minded, but “good” though they may be, our “neighbors” are not always benevolent. The Fae have traditionally  pilfered all they can from humankind, stealing sheaves of corn, pails of milk, and the “foyson” from healthy cattle. Like Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Gothel, they have a desire for human babies, and they are also known to spirit away young women who can serve as brides and midwives. But women and children are not the only victims of fairy kidnapping; skilled artisans and storytellers are also in danger of being taken, and many a merry fiddler and poignant poet has been forced to entertain the fairy courts of folklore. 

The artists’ interaction with the fair folk often exacts a steep cost (as explored in John Keats’ fairy poem La Belle Dame sans Merci), but a visit to the good neighbors can also be beneficial. When Thomas the Rhymer follows the queen of Elfland into the fairy world to entertain her with his music and poems, he returns seven years later, wielding the “gift” of prophecy. While we will never know if William Shakespeare’s rise from an obscure young man in Stratford-upon-Avon to the darling of the London stage was a “gift” bestowed by the fair folk themselves, we do know that his depiction of the fairy world did much to shape our contemporary perceptions of the good neighbors. In his book The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien, author Kevin Pask situates William Shakespeare as a key figure in synthesizing fairy folklore with literary culture. 

Shakespeare’s most famous fairy, Queen Mab, may be small, wielding a “whip of cricket’s bone” to drive her carriage over “men’s noses as they lie asleep,” but she has the power to intensify human dreams. When she drives through lovers’ brains, “then they dream of love,” and when she travels over ladies’ lips, they “straight on kisses dream.” In Queen Mab’s presence, courtiers dream of curtsies, lawyers dream of fees, and soldiers dream “of cutting foreign throats.” Queen Mab’s fairy powers work in conjunction with human desires. As a midwife, she guides the thoughts of humans through the birth canal of dreams, producing both pleasures and nightmares. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech is only a small part of the tragedy Romeo and Juliet, but it establishes Shakespeare’s meaningful connection between the human and the fairy worlds. 

Shakespeare also draws connections between the human and fairy worlds in other tragedies like Hamlet and MacBeth, in comedies such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and in romances, most notably, The Tempest, but no play is more steeped in fairy lore and legend than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy featuring fairy characters who interact with and have agency over the human world. A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with both the anticipation of the Duke of Athens’ upcoming nuptials and a family conflict between a father and daughter who are at odds over her right to choose her future husband. The daughter, Hermia, and her love interest, Lysander, run away into the woods. The paternally approved suitor, Demetrius, and the young woman who loves him, Helena, follow in hot pursuit, and the frantic mixing of the two young couples in the forest proves hilarious. The woods in the play are also the destination for a troop of amateur actors rehearsing a play to be performed at the Duke’s wedding ceremony, and, most delightfully, the woods house the beautiful, liminal world of the fairies who fill the play with magic and mischief. 

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare introduces his audience to a fairy monarchy complete with a king and queen with marital conflicts of their own. Drawn from the pages of literature, Oberon, the Fairy King, and Titania, the Fairy Queen, are fighting over the fate of a changeling boy, and their quarrel upsets the natural world. To teach his wife a lesson, Oberon enlists the help of a lowly fairy named Robin Goodfellow (or Puck) to secure the magical “love juice” he intends to pour into his sleeping wife’s eyes so she will fall in love with the first thing she sees upon awakening. “Wake when some vile thing is near,” Oberon whispers as he sprinkles the potion over Titania’s eyelids, hoping to embarrass her into submission so he can recruit the changeling boy for his fairy army. When Titania wakes up, she falls in love with Bottom, one of the amateur actors rehearsing in the forest. Their odd romance is made funnier by the fact that Puck has transformed Bottom into a beast, so the beautiful fairy queen spends her time lusting over a man with the head of an ass. In typical comedic fashion, all is set right by the conclusion of the play. Oberon and Titania end their quarrel and reunite, offering the three sets of human newlyweds a fairy blessing of health and happiness. 

While Shakespeare’s world of fairy is inspired by a long-standing literary tradition, he also draws from the annals of folklore and fairy legend. Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in Athens, the tiny fairies who attend the Queen (Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed) are drawn directly from the English countryside, and Robin Goodfellow, or Puck as he is alternately called in the text, is introduced as a British hobgoblin, a domestic fairy who typically performs household tasks in exchange for bread and cream. The name “Puck” derives from an old middle English word for “devil” or “demon,” but Shakespeare’s Puck is more mischievous than evil, and although he seems to enjoy the havoc he wreaks upon his Queen and the young lovers, his apologetic and endearing address to the audience in the epilogue of the play warms the heart, leaving even the most skeptical audience members transformed by fairy magic:

If we shadows have offended,  
Think but this, and all is mended —  
That you have but slumbered here  
While these visions did appear.  
And this weak and idle theme,  
No more yielding but a dream,  
Gentles, do not reprehend.  
If you pardon, we will mend.  
And, as I am an honest Puck,  
If we have unearnèd luck  
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,  
We will make amends ere long.  
Else the Puck a liar call.  
So good night unto you all.  
Give me your hands if we be friends,  
And Robin shall restore amends. 

By breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to viewers, asking for the applause typically offered at the end of a performance, Puck makes the human audience complicit in the fairy antics that have taken place. Clapping for the actors becomes an acknowledgment of the fairy world itself. The audience admits to believing in fairies, at least within the fictional space created and sustained by the theater, for what are the good neighbors, after all, but the ethereal magic of divine imagination rendered in tangible, earthly form?

Although Shakespeare’s fairies were played by human actors on stage, his language describes them as small enough to “creep into acorn cups and hide.” The fairies also “crop the waxen thighs” of “humble bees” for “night tapers.” This diminution in size helps to mitigate the fairies’ elemental power, making them seem less threatening than the full-sized fairy enchantresses of yore. The beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry and the popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream helped to cement the idea of tiny, benevolent fairies in modern culture. The artists and poets who followed Shakespeare continued this trend through the 19th century when fairy stories were relegated to the nursery and the small size and kind dispositions of fairies became staples of children’s literature. Although this movement to the nursery may seem a form of diminishment, it actually illustrates the culture’s deep and abiding need to continue contemplating the good neighbors. Fairy legend and lore is too important to be wholly discarded; it must be preserved, in some form, to inspire the artists of the future. The fairies of western contemporary folklore may have retained their small size and child-like features, but like Shakespeare’s diminutive Queen Mab, they continue to exert a powerful influence over our dreams.

Since that moment in ninth grade when Romeo and Juliet’s Mercutio held me transfixed with his speech about the fairy Queen Mab, I have never stopped studying Shakespeare. I pour over his words about the fairy world the way I pour over the shadowy woods at twilight, searching for hidden beauty that blinks in the corner of my eyes. The mysteries of the good neighbors rest just beyond our reach, but with the magic spells found in the pages of Shakespeare’s plays, we can conjure intoxicating images and evocative rhymes to weave mushroom circles of fairy enchantment through the forests of our minds.

Works Cited

Briggs, Katharine Mary. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959. 

Keats, John. La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Pask, Kevin. The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. 

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet.

[Kelly Jarvis works as the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine and teaches writing and literature at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her debut novella, Selkie Moon, was released in 2025. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/]