Shakespeare's Other World

In Shakespeare’s magical plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, fairies and sprites work magic and dabble for a time in human affairs. Shakespeare drew inspiration for these otherworldly characters from oral tales filled with fairies, imps, hobgoblins, boggarts, elves, and many other spirits often believed not good enough to be angels or bad enough to be devils.

Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, two of Shakespeare’s main fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are traditional Renaissance characters. Oberon is a legendary fairy lord. Robin, also called Puck, is a traditional, mischievous hobgoblin who changes shape, enjoys misleading travelers, and plays pranks on unsuspecting mortals.

Shakespeare’s Ariel, the sprite from The Tempest, does not play games as Oberon and Puck do or feel human emotions. He serves a mortal master, Prospero, obediently but reluctantly. Unlike Puck, who serves a fairy lord, Ariel is a sprite imprisoned in a human world. His great desire is to be free.

In English Renaissance culture, good fairies helped mortals in need, often doing the cleaning and other chores. They also punished mortals with pinches and cramps, as the fairies in The Tempest do to Caliban. In many non-Shakespearean tales, however, fairies had more sinister links with witchcraft and the dead. The fact that Oberon is also called the “King of Shadows” hints at his connection to the shadowy underworld, although Shakespeare never makes his fairies obviously evil or ghostly.

Renaissance fairies tended to be small (Shakespeare’s sprites play among the flowers), and were gifted with song and dance. However, they were not merely pretty but also mysterious and even melancholy. 

Ariel, for example, sings merrily about lying down in cowslips and playing with flowers, but he also sings about death (“Full fathom five thy father lies”) to one of the island’s visitors. Although usually beautiful, Ariel also appears before humans as a harpy, a frightening classical monster, half-human, half-bird, that tormented starving mortals by fouling their food. Shakespeare blends English and classical lore to show that fairies can be fearsome.

These two plays have inspired numerous works of art, music, and literature, among them Susan Cooper’s modern fantasy novel, King of Shadows, about a boy who acts Puck’s role. For centuries after the Renaissance, producers of the plays sugarcoated Shakespeare’s fairies with butterfly wings and ballerina costumes. Less interested in empty prettiness, modern audiences appreciate otherworldly mischief and mystery.