mischievous. In a book contemporary with our play we find:--

"Think me to be one of those _Familiares Lares_ that were rather pleasantly
disposed than endued with any hurtful influence, as Hob Thrust, Robin
Goodfellow, and suchlike spirits, as they term them, of the buttery,
famoused in every old wives' chronicle for their mad merry pranks."[84]

But four years later, as we have seen,[85] Nashe confounds elves with
fairies in deriving all alike from fauns and dryads. Robin is "mad-merry,"
"jocund and facetious," "a cozening idle friar or some such rogue" [in
origin], and so forth--simply described by Shakespeare as a "shrewd and
knavish sprite." The forms of mischief in which he delights are described
in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, II. i. 33-57, and all these "gests" may be
found in the contemporary Robin Goodfellow literature;[86] though we have
observed that some of the functions attributed to Queen Mab in Mercutio's
famous speech[87] belong rightly to Robin.[88]

Thus we see--to take into consideration but a few points of the myth--that
the fairy-superstition and the elf-superstition were melted together in the
popular pre-Shakespearean mind, and that Shakespeare himself, making a new
division of the characteristics of the two, yet re-welded the whole into
one realm by putting the Puck in subjection under the fairy king.

The main characteristics of Shakespeare's fairies, then, may be summarised
shortly:--[89]

They are a community under a king and queen, who hold a court; they are
very small, light, swift, elemental; they share in the life of nature; they
are fond of dancing and singing; they are invisible and immortal; they
prefer night, and midnight is their favourite hour; they fall in love with