Queen Mab

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In English folklore, Queen Mab is a fairy. She is memorably described in a famous speech by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, in which she is a miniature creature who drives her chariot across the faces of sleeping people and compels them to dream dreams of wish-fulfillment.

Mab's origins are uncertain. Shakespeare may have borrowed her name from a Celtic goddess, the Irish Medb or her Welsh counterpart Mabb both being possible candidates. After her literary debut in Romeo and Juliet, she appears in works of seventeenth-century poetry, notably Ben Jonson's "Queen Mab" and Michael Drayton's "Nymphidia". In Poole's work Parnassus, Mab is described as the Queen of the Fairies and consort to Oberon, Emperor of the Fairies^[1].

Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem is also the title of the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), the famous English Romantic poet.

The character was adapted as a ruthless sorceress, Mab, 'Queen of the Fairies and the Old Ways' in the 1998 miniseries Merlin, featuring Miranda Richardson in the role. Queen Mab is a celtic fairy.

She is also found in the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher as the Winter Queen of the Fae or Sidhe.

Orson Scott Card's Magic Street depicts Queen Mab as a modern African American "motorcycle riding hoochie mama."

Queen Mab was also a San Franscisco/East Bay based punk band from the early to mid 1990s featuring among others, Cassandra Millspaugh on guitar and backup vocals (more info needed).

In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio speaks of her thus:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep; Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, The traces of the smallest spider’s web, The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film, Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat, Not so big as a round little worm Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid; Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love; O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight, O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees, O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream, Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are: Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose, And then dreams he of smelling out a suit; And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep, Then dreams, he of another benefice: Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two And sleeps again. This is that very Mab That plats the manes of horses in the night, And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs, Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes: This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, That presses them and learns them first to bear, Making them women of good carriage: This is she—

[edit] References

1. ^ Rose, Carol (1996). “M”, Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns and Goblins (Paperback), Norton, 207. ISBN 0-393-31792-7.