ii. 173) styles Titania."
In Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale" Pluto is the king of faerie, and his
queen, Proserpina, "who danced and sang about the well under the laurel
in January's garden."[6]

[4] Essay on Fairies in "Fairy Mythology of Shakspeare," p. 23.

[5] "Fairy Mythology," 1878, p. 325.

[6] Notes to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," by Aldis Wright,
1877, Preface, p. xvi.

In "Romeo and Juliet" (i. 4) she is known by the more familiar
appellation, Queen Mab. "I dream'd a dream to-night," says Romeo,
whereupon Mercutio replies, in that well-known famous passage--

"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you,"

this being the earliest instance in which Mab is used to designate the
fairy queen. Mr. Thoms[7] thinks that the origin of this name is to be
found in the Celtic, and that it contains a distinct allusion to the
diminutive form of the elfin sovereign. _Mab_, both in Welsh and in the
kindred dialects of Brittany, signifies a child or infant, and hence it
is a befitting epithet to one who

"comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman."

Mr. Keightley suggests that Mab may be a contraction of Habundia, who,
Heywood says, ruled over the fairies; and another derivation is from
Mabel, of which Mab is an abbreviation.

[7] "Three Notelets on Shakespeare," pp. 100-107.

Among the references to Queen Mab we may mention Drayton's "Nymphidia:"

"Hence Oberon, him sport to make
(Their rest when weary mortals take,
And none but only fairies wake),
Descendeth for his pleasure:
And Mab, his merry queen, by night
Bestrides young folks that lie upright," etc.

Ben Jonson, in his "Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope,"
in 1603, describes as "tripping up the lawn a bevy of fairies, attending
on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring that there was
cut in the path, began to dance around." In the same masque the queen is
thus characterized by a satyr.

"This is Mab, the mistress fairy,
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can help or hurt the cherning
As she please, without discerning," etc.

Like Puck, Shakespeare has invested Queen Mab with mischievous
properties, which "identify her with the night hag of popular
superstition," and she is represented as

"Platting the manes of horses in the night."

The merry Puck, who is so prominent