Rien n'est si jolie que la fable,
Si triste que la verite!

* * * *

III

In _The Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Shakespeare presents a conception of
fairy-land as original as that which owes its propagation to Perrault and
the other French collectors of fairy-tales; its merits as a popular
delineation of the fairy-world are proved by the fact that it has obtained
the sanction and approval of tradition, passing almost at once into an
accepted literary convention; so that even to-day it is not easy to shake
off the inherited impression that the fairies are only what Shakespeare
shows them to be. He did not, of course, invent them; he had doubtless both
read of them and heard tales of them; but he invested them with a delicate
and graceful fancy that has held the popular imagination ever since. Thanks
to him, the modern English conception of the fairies is different from the
conceptions prevalent in other countries, and infinitely more picturesque
and pleasant.

As before, it will be convenient to deal first with the names of his
characters.

_Oberon_ is the English transliteration of the French Auberon in the
romance of _Huon of Bordeaux_, and Auberon is probably merely the French
counterpart of Alberich or Albrich, a dwarf occurring in the German
_Nibelungenlied_ and other works. Etymologically Alberich is composed of
_alb_ = elf and _rich_ = king. The name Oberon appears first in English
literature in Lord Berners' translation of _Huon of Bordeaux_ (c. 1534),
and afterwards in Spenser[27] and in Robert Greene's play _James IV_, which
was acted in 1589.[28] But the king of the fairies in Chaucer[29] is Pluto,
and the queen Proserpine.

_Titania._ Proserpine is the wife of Pluto (in Greek, form, Persephone,
wife of Dis). In Elizabethan times, Campion's charming poem "Hark, all you
ladies that do sleep"[30] keeps the name of "the fairy-queen Proserpina."
Shakespeare appears to have taken the name Titania from Ovid,[31] who uses
it as an epithet of Diana, as being the sister of Sol or Helios, the
Sun-god, a Titan. Scot, in his _Discovery of Witchcraft_,[32] gives Diana
as one of the names of the "lady of the fairies"; and James I, in his
_Demonology_ (1597) refers to a "fourth kind of sprites, which by the
Gentiles was called Diana and her wandering court, and amongst us called
the Phairie."

Curiously enough in Shakespeare's most famous description of the Fairy
Queen, she is called Que