If worries about ghosts weren't enough to guarantee sleepless nights, there were the fairies to think about, too. Those to be feared weren't the tiny sweet playful fairies that Shakespeare invented for A Midsummer Night's Dream—that mischief-making but good-hearted fairy tribe led by Oberon and Titania; nor were they the cute little animated figures who flit around Walt Disney Studios on their shimmering wings. No, these Elizabethan fairies were life-sized creatures, fiendish and malicious, who made the milk go sour and the livestock sick. This is the kind of fairy that Dromio of Syracuse means when he calls his churlish master in The Comedy of Errors "A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough.
Fairies came in several models: there were hostile river spirits and wily mermaids who lured unsuspecting sailors to their deaths; giants and hags; fairy aristocrats who, like their human counterparts, spent their time dancing, hunting, and feasting; and the ordinary everyday goblins. But not all fairies were malevolent. Best-known of all was the native English fairy Robin Good-fellow, or Puck, a "shrewd and knavish sprite," as Shakespeare calls him, who was the special guardian of home and hearth.
The fairies considered the workings of the household to be their special concern and inspected domestic operations during their nocturnal visits. They rewarded a well-kept house and a well-swept hearth by helping with the chores and bringing luck. Puck could make himself particularly useful to a family that treated him well; as a fellow-fairy points out in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Those that 'Hobgoblin' call you, and 'Sweet Puck,' You do their work, and they shall have good luck."
The best strategy for an Elizabethan family to adopt with the fairies was one of preemptive obedience and flattery, which might work where charms and conjurations failed. They could also be won over by food and drink left out for them at night. As a contemporary wrote, women "were wont to set a bowl of milk before [the fairies] and Robin Good-fellow for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight."
But woe to the housewife who neglected her chores! The fairies were enemies of untidiness, or "sluttery," and punished it wherever they found it, almost always by third degree pinching during the night: "Where fires thou find'st unraked, and hearths unswept, There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry. Our radiant Queen hates sluts and sluttery," the make-believe fairies are reminded in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Pinching wasn't reserved only for the slovenly housekeeper, however; the lustful and lecherous—or any other mortals judged offensive by the fairies—often found themselves similarly bruised when they woke up. This is why Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, the merry wives of Windsor, can punish the lustful (and superstitious) Falstaff by dressing children up "fairylike, to pinch the unclean knight." And Dromio of Syracuse, bewildered by the topsy-turvy events of The Comedy of Errors, wonders if he and his master have blundered into the wrong place: "This is the fairy land. O spite of spites, We talk with goblins, elves and sprites! If we obey them not, this will ensue: They'll suck our breath or pinch us black and blue."
One thing fairies enjoyed more than anything was causing domestic confusion with their practical jokes—which sometimes weren't so funny. They loved dairy tricks—spilling the milk from the pail as the milkmaid carried it back to the house, or keeping the cream from turning to butter. Fairies put spells on animals, sometimes even causing death. And they considered it great fun to lead travelers astray: Caliban, in The Tempest, mutters that his master Prospero will send fairies who will "lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark Out of my way."
Fairies were most notorious and most feared for their practice of abducting a human baby from its cradle and replacing it with a fairy changeling, which was usually hideous, deformed, or retarded. This was one of an Elizabethan mother's greatest fears. But King Henry IV, fed up with his Plantagenet son's wild and riotous behavior (in contrast to the honor and valor of the young Percy) resorts to some wishful thinking about changelings: "O that it could be proved That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged In cradle clothes our children where they lay And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!"
Of course, no Elizabethan actually saw the fairies abducting a human baby, for that matter no Elizabethan ever saw a fairy at all. In the first place, they came out only during the night—Puck calls himself "that merry wanderer of the night." In the second place, everyone knew that mortals were expressly forbidden to see or speak to fairies. They guarded their privacy fiercely and didn't take at all kindly to being spied on even accidentally. This is the fear that grips Falstaff as the child-fairies dance around him. Throwing his huge body down on the ground outside Windsor Forest, he