Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:20:23.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Marjorie Swann
Marjorie Swann*
Affiliation:
The University of Kansas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay argues that Stuart fairy poetry, rooted in Shakespeare's innovative representation of tiny, consumeristic fairies, attempts to indigenize new forms of elite material display. Rather than the fairies of popular tradition or courtly mythography, Stuart poets depict miniaturized Mabs and Oberons who are notable for their wardrobes, banquets, coaches, and the decor of their palaces. The fairy poetry of William Browne, Michael Drayton, and Robert Herrick must be interpreted not as playful escapism, but as a self-consciously politicized literary mode which reveals these writers’ deep ambivalence toward elite culture — and toward their own artistic role within that culture.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 449 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Airs, Malcolm. 1995. The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History. Stroud, Gloucestershire.Google Scholar
Akrigg, G.P.V. 1962. Jacobean Pageant. London.Google Scholar
Beier, A.L. and Roger, Finlay. 1986. “Introduction: The Significance of the Metropolis.” In London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. Beier and Finlay, 1-33. London and New York.Google Scholar
Blount, Dale M. 1984. “Modifications in Occult Folklore as a Comic Device in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream .” Fifteenth Century Studies 9:1–17.Google Scholar
Briggs, K. M. 1959. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London.Google Scholar
Brink, Jean R. 1990. Michael Drayton Revisited. Boston.Google Scholar
Brown, Cedric C. and Margherita, Piva. 1978. “William Browne, Marino, France, and the Third Book of Britannia's Pastorals .” Review of English Studies 29.116: 385–404.Google Scholar
Browne, William. 1868-1869. The Whole Works of William Browne. Ed. W Carew Hazlitt. 2 vols. London.Google Scholar
Bruster, Douglas. 1992. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge and New York.Google Scholar
Burton, Robert. 1977. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Holbrook Jackson. 1932. Reprint, New York.Google Scholar
Cain, T.G.S. 1985. “Robert Herrick, Mildmay Fane, and Sir Simeon Steward.” English Literary Renaissance 15:312-17.Google Scholar
Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John, Marston. 1979. Eastward Ho. Ed. R.W. Van Fossen. Manchester and Baltimore.Google Scholar
Cogswell, Thomas. 1991. “The Path to Elizium ‘Lately Discovered': Drayton and the Early Stuart Court.” Huntington Library Quarterly 54: 207–33.Google Scholar
Coiro, Ann Baynes. 1988. Robert Herrick's “Hesperides “ and the Epigram Book Tradition. Baltimore and London.Google Scholar
Cressy, David. 1976. “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England.” Literature and History 3: 29–44.Google Scholar
Cunliffe, J. W. 1911. “The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke.” PMLA 26:92–141.Google Scholar
Delattre, Floris. 1912. English Fairy Poetry from the Origins to the Seventeenth Century. London.Google Scholar
Drayton, Michael. 1961. The Works of Michael Drayton. Ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, B.H. New-digate, and B.E. Juel-Jensen. Corrected ed. 5 vols. Oxford.Google Scholar
Dubrow, Heather. 1990. A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium. Ithaca and London.Google Scholar
Eberly, Susan Schoon. 1991. “Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids, and the Solitary Fairy.” In The Good People: New Fairy lore Essays, ed. Peter Narvaez, 227-50. New York and London.Google Scholar
Farmer, Norman K. 1971. “Robert Herrick and ‘King Oberon's Clothing': New Evidence for Attribution.” Yearbook of English Studies 1: 68–77.Google Scholar
Fisher, F.J. 1962. “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Essays in Economic History, ed. E.M. Carus-Wilson, vol. 2, 197–207. London.Google Scholar
Foster, Andrew. 1989. “Church Policies of the 1630s.” In Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, 193-223. London and New York.Google Scholar
Fumerton, Patricia. 1991. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago and London.Google Scholar
Goldthwaite, Richard A. 1993. Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600. Baltimore and London.Google Scholar
Greenlaw, Edwin. 1918. “Spenser's Fairy Mythology.” Studies in Philology 15:105–122.Google Scholar
Guibbory, Achsah. 1994. “Enlarging the Limits of the ‘Religious Lyric': The Case of Herrick's Hesperides .” In New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts, 28-45. Columbia, MO and London.Google Scholar
Hamilton, A.C., et al., eds. 1990. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto, Buffalo, and London.Google Scholar
Hardin, Richard F. 1973. Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England. Lawrence, Manhattan, and Wichita.Google Scholar
Heal, Felicity and Holmes, Clive. 1994. The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700. Stanford.Google Scholar
Hendricks, Margo. 1996. “'Obscured by d r e a m s ‘ : Race, Empire, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream .” Shakespeare Quarterly 47: 37–60.Google Scholar
Herrick, Robert. 1956. The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick. Ed. L.C. Martin. Oxford.Google Scholar
Holmer, Joan Ozark. 1976. “Internal Evidence for Dating William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, Book III.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 70: 347–64.Google Scholar
Holmer, Joan Ozark. 1981. “Religious Satire in Herrick's ‘ The Fairie Temple: or, Oberons Chappell.' ” Renaissance and Reformation 17: 40–57.Google Scholar
Holmer, Joan Ozark. 1995. “No ‘Vain Fantasy': Shakespeare's Refashioning of Nashe for Dreams and Queen Mab.” In Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet“: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation, ed. Jay L. Halio, 49-82. Newark, DE and London.Google Scholar
Houghton, Walter E. 1942. “The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of the History of Ideas 3:51–73, 190-219.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. 1991. The Alchemist. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. New York.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. 1925-1952. Ben Jonson. Ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson. 10 vols. Oxford.Google Scholar
Knapp, Jeffrey. 1992. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia “ to “The Tempest.” Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London.Google Scholar
Latham, Minor White. 1930. The Elizabethan Fairies. New York.Google Scholar
Loxley, James. 1997. Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars. London and New York.Google Scholar
Lyly, John. 1902. Complete Works of John Lyly. Ed. R. Warwick Bond. 3 vols. Oxford.Google Scholar
Marcus, Leah S. 1979. “Herrick's Hesperides and the ‘Proclamation made for May.'” Studies in Philology 76: 49–74.Google Scholar
Marcus, Leah S. 1986. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago and London.Google Scholar
McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis.Google Scholar
Moorman, F.W. 1915. Introduction. In Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. Moorman, v-xxiii. Oxford.Google Scholar
Mowl, Timothy. 1993. Elizabethan and Jacobean Style. London.Google Scholar
Mullaney, Steven. 1983. “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance.” Representations 3: 40–67.Google Scholar
Nichols, John, ed. 1823. The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. 3 vols. London.Google Scholar
Norbrook, David. 1984. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London.Google Scholar
Nutt, Alfred. 1972. The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare. 1900. Reprint, New York.Google Scholar
Oram, William A. 1978. “ The Muses Elizium: A Late Golden World.” Studies in Philology 75: 10–31.Google Scholar
Parry, Graham. 1981. The Golden Age Restor‘d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42. Manchester.Google Scholar
Puttenham, George. 1936. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Sagar, Keith. 1995. “ A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Critical Survey 7:34–43.Google Scholar
Schoenfeldt, Michael C. 1990-1991. “The Art of Disgust: Civility and the Social Body in Hesperides .” George Herbert Journal 14:127-54.Google Scholar
Schwenger, Peter. 1979. “Herrick's Fairy State.” ELH46:35-55. Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. 2nd ed. Boston.Google Scholar
Sisson, C.J. 1948. “A Topical Reference in The Alchemist .” In Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby, 739-41. Washington.Google Scholar
Smuts, R. Malcolm. 1996. “Art and the Material Culture of Majesty in Early Stuart England.” In The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. Smuts, 86–112. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. 1977. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London and New York.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. 1994. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. 1984. Reprint, Durham, NC and London.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. 1965. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford.Google Scholar
Summers, Claude J. 1978. “Herrick's Political Poetry: The Strategies of His Art.” In “Trust to Good Verses “: Hexjick Tercentenary Essays, ed. Roger B. Rollin and J. Max Patrick, 171-83. Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. 1994. “Herrick, Vaughan, and the Poetry of Anglican Survivalism.” In New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts, 46–74. Columbia, MO and London.Google Scholar
Summerson, John. 1993. Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830. 9th ed. New Haven and London.Google Scholar
Thirsk, Joan. 1978. Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England. Oxford.Google Scholar
Thomas, Keith. 1985. Religion and the Decline of Magic. 1971. Reprint, Harmondsworth.Google Scholar
Underdown, David. 1985. Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660. Oxford.Google Scholar
Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Ed. Robert Schwartz. Baltimore and London.Google Scholar
Williamson, J.W. 1978. The Myth of the Conqueror. New York.Google Scholar
Woodward, Daniel. 1965. “Herrick's Oberon Poems.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64: 270-84.Google Scholar
Wright, Louis B. 1942-1943. “Propaganda against James I's Appeasement’ of Spain.” Huntington Library Quarterly 6: 149–72.Google Scholar