Elves and Fairies
Shakespeare’s fairies
by Ælf
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily;
Merrily,
merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
THESE hauntingly familiar words have been taught as a song to generations of children in the English-speaking world.
My primary school singing class in 1950s Rondebosch was by no means unique in learning it, and while becoming acquainted with a lyric dating back close on four centuries, we also imbibed some very weird ideas about fairies, since this is the song of Ariel, a major character in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Okay, so fairies were so tiny that they could fit into the
bell or cup of a flower smaller than a man’s thumb?
Well, when you take into consideration that the real
fairies were human beings, Homo sapiens, rarely shorter as adults than
4ft (121 cm), that’s pretty ludicrous.
Add to that the fact that Ariel and other fairies were
played on stage by human beings (perhaps boys, but nonetheless real people),
this entails quite a stretch of the imagination.
But then, perhaps Shakespeare was trying to account for the
fact that – aside from being the “wee folk” – fairies were reputed to be able
to hide themselves. That skill amounted to little more than an ability to make
good use of natural cover, enhanced by the fact that their clothing was in
natural colours that blended well with the countryside.
Margaret A Murray notes that Shakespeare was born roughly a
generation after the English enclosures. This was a major move to change the
landscape, entailing the erection of fences or hedges over vast swathes of
meadow that had, until then, been common land.
Acts of Parliament were passed authorising the erection of
such enclosures, although these laws were erected on such shaky ground that it
is doubtful that a modern-day court would have tolerated the way they rode
roughshod over the rights of all manner of people who had rights to graze their
livestock on the commonage.
The effect of the enclosures was to open up enormous
stretches of the English countryside to sheep owned by powerful magnates, who
in turn were able to reap vast profits from the production of wool, needed for
the textile industry.
The enclosures were, in large measure, a forerunner of the
Industrial Revolution of some two centuries later, and greatly improved the
state of the English economy – although the wealth they created was
concentrated in the hands of an elite few.
The effect they had on the little man, as it is popularly
put today, is not so well documented.
Ordinary small farmers would have suffered devastating
losses, but they were likely people who also gained some form of an income from
doing various jobs and chores for other people, such as the lord of the local
manor.
However, the people who suffered most went almost
unnoticed, probably because they had largely lived unnoticed by the authorities
for centuries.
These were precisely the wee folk, the aboriginal
inhabitants of the land, the very human fairies who had lived in the wilder
parts of the countryside, making their homes in isolated huts or small hamlets
unknown to the authorities, growing a small quantity of their own food,
probably gathering wild food such as berries and nuts, and keeping their own
small cattle.
The cattle were where they were hit hardest, since it was
from these beasts that they had been able to maintain themselves with milk,
cream, cheese and meat that was not “stolen” from the neighbouring lord’s
hunting lands.
Fairies were forced out of their humble homes and obliged
to live in established villages and towns, often without their cows. Living in
settlements that had churches, they then also came under pressure to be
churchgoers and to abandon their pagan
practices. Having become Christians, they married Christians, and their
exclusive bloodlines became blended with those of the rest of the population.
By the time Will Shakespeare was born, knowledge of the
fairies – always a thing not spoken much of, since they were quite literally
heathen
– had largely been forgotten, and become interwoven with fantastical ideas.
Shakespeare’s use of these fantastical ideas in his writing
served further to entrench them, and to encourage others to tell even more
unbelievable fairy tales.
