Figuring the Otherworldly. Late Victorian Visions of Shakespeare’s Fairy Lore

While presenting an outstanding collection of mythological and popular sources of fairy lore having relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, editor Halliwell’s expresses a deep concern about the destiny of the fairies, whose existence had been feared and revered by the Elizabethans and whose relationships with the humans had intrigued Shakespeare. Their existence was rationally explained by Victorian scientism as the hybrid expression of mythology and ancient, deeply rooted popular beliefs which became the object of folklorists’ investigation. The Victorian search for the sources of fairy mythology from which Shakespeare had drawn inspiration must thus be connected to a wider cultural enterprise which counteracted scientism and technological progress by retrieving, systematising and re-evaluating folklore sources as outstanding expressions of Great Britain’s cultural heritage. Figuring the otherworldly, recognised as a mode of representation extraordinarily suited to Shakespeare’s imagination but also pertaining to Britishness, bears relevance to the construction of British cultural identity. In the nineteenth century the fairy cult, sustained by research on fairy lore, produced fairylands in literature and the other arts; the prominent status attributed to Shakespeare’s fairies in the Victorian fairy-world involves the revaluation of an autochthonous cultural manifestation through its most outstanding exponent. Verbal and visual figurations of Shakespeare’s fairy lore in the Victorian age and up to the early twentieth century consolidate specific traits of Great Britain’s cultural identity. Paintings and illustrations that visualise the fantastic and the supernatural in Shakespeare’s plays also raise issues concerning the aesthetic status of visual transmutations of verbal works of art which are ontologically derivative. The autonomy of illustration as a work of art is jeopardised by its dependence on words; nonetheless, illustration aims at asserting its own identity by superimposing a visual interpretation of the text. Illustrators and painters devised expressive modes which bore relevance to radical changes in the concept of vision and visual representation during the Victorian age . The complex cultural and aesthetic negotiations engendered by Victorian visualisations of otherworldly beings featuring in Shakespeare’s fairy plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest – would remain unintelligible without taking into account philological studies on the fairies’ mythological and folkloric origins as well as late 19th-century experiments with non figurative painting.