A Sieve, a Fairy, a Midwife and a Mystery June 3, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
So here is a fairy mystery… In Romeo and Juliet Mercutio tells us that Queen Mab is ‘the fairies’ midwife’: a mysterious phrase that has never been explained. Most guides link it unconvincingly to a previous comment of Romeo’s. A much more interesting point of reference is a fairy poem of Ben Jonson. Beach has run the relative lines together, they are sung by a Satyr who is constantly interrupted by a series of fairies. The poem is very simple at the beginning. Everything in the next ten lines is explicable in terms of English fairy-lore.
This is Mab, the mistress Fairy
That doth nightly rob the dairy,
And can help or hurt the churning
As she please without discerning.
She that pinches country wenches,
If they rub not clean their benches,
And with sharper nails remembers
When they rake not up their embers :
But if so they chance to feast her.
In a shoe she drops a tester.
Easy peasy. The problems begin after.
This is she that empties cradles,
Takes out children, puts in ladles:
Here we have a reference to changeling lore: in Ireland, stocks (brooms, sticks etc) are left that take on the appearance of bodies. Why not ladles for a small baby in England? But what comes after is really confusing. Remember that there is a well-established legend, the Midwife to the Fairies, whereby a fairy brings a midwife to the fairy world to help in a birth.
Trains forth midwives in their slumber. [Mab wakes up midwives and brings them out at night, this makes perfect sense]
With a sieve the holes to number; [???]
And then leads them from her burrows. [after the midwives have delivered the fairy babies, they are brought out of the fairy ‘burrows’]
Home through ponds and water-furrows. [they are taken home and dunked in ponds, this would be like pixy-led humans]
The first line is fine. The third and fourth line could be made to work. But what the hell is the sieve about? The midwives are given a sieve, but why? There are two obvious folk solutions: first, they are supposed to sail in the sieve (thanks Chris); second they are supposed to carry water in the sieve to show their purity (hence Elizabeth holding a sieve above). Both of these motifs appear regularly in European folktales. It has been suggested that perhaps the midwives are supposed to count the holes in the sieve. This would be an impossible task given by Mab. But Beach can find no parallel. Impossible tasks are things like counting grains of sand, or making a rope with water… Not sure: an Elizabethan sieve would not have taken much counting. The real proof that this is a teaser is that no one has tried to connect Jonson and Shakespeare here. Beach suspects goodly Shakespeare scholars have read Jonson (who clearly knows his fairylore) and blanched.
Can anyone help: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Note for general interest another verse follows.
She can start our Franklin’s daughters. / In their sleep, with shrieks and laughters; / And on sweet St. Anna’s night, / Feed them with a promised sight. / Some of husbands, some of lovers, / Which an empty dream discovers.
This seems to be love magic: you’ll see your future husband in your dreams. This, for the record, is the key to the Romeo passage.
