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Excerpt from English Fairy Poetry: From the Origins to the Seventeenth Century Lastly, I wish to express my sincere thanks to those who have helped me to the officials of the British Museum and of the Bodleian Library, who have always shown me the utmost courtesy; to Professor R. Huchon, who has examined my manuscript; and to my friends Ch. Fleurant and J. K. Rooker who have, with the greatest kindness, gone over the proof sheets, and offered many valuable suggestions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Fairies, unruly women, and vestigial Catholicism constituted a frequently invoked triad in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama which has seldom been critically examined and therefore constitutes a significant lacuna in scholarly treatments of early modern theater, including the work of Shakespeare. Fairy tradition has lost out in scholarly critical convention to the more masculine mythologies of Christianity and classical Greece and Rome, in which female deities either serve masculine gods or are themselves masculinized (i.e., Diana as a buckskinned warrior). However, the fairy tradition is every bit as significant in our critical attempts to situate early modern texts in their historical contexts as the references to classical texts and struggles associated with state-mandated religious beliefs are widely agreed to be. fairy, rebellious woman, quasi-Catholic trio repeatedly stages resistance to early modern conceptions of appropriate class and gender conduct and state-mandated religion in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, All's Well That Ends Well, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.