Queen Mab

One of the most remarkable speeches in one of Shakespeare's most remarkable plays, Romeo and Juliet, comes from a secondary character, Romeo's friend Mercutio. This is the famous speech about Queen Mab, the "fairies' midwife" who rides in a chariot made from an empty hazel-nut and "gallops night by night/Through lovers' brains and then they dream of love..." This is one of Shakespeare's finest flights of fancy and a largely gratuitous one as it has little to do directly with the story but merely creates an atmosphere as it fleshes out the persona of Mercutio, who will later die in a swordfight. Here is the whole, remarkable, speech:

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 spinners’ 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.

Why am I bringing this up? For two reasons, really. As part of my project to "de-digitize" my life to some extent I decided a while back to read a physical book every morning. Apart from some musical texts such as Erno Lendvai's book on Bartók and some others, I also made of a point of reading classics like The Odyssey and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. I might at some point re-read Dante's Inferno. But the biggest classic of all, at least for English readers, is Shakespeare who sits in English literary history like a great boulder athwart the stream--impossible to ignore. I have read many plays, starting with Macbeth in high school and Othello in university and many other plays on my own. I have also watched quite a few films of Shakespeare. A very enlightened movie theatre owner in Canada where I used to live, would put on a mini-Shakespeare film festival every winter. He only had a few films, but they were some of the best: Laurence Olivier as Othello, the Zeffirelli production of Romeo and Juliet, Peter Brook's King Lear and so on. He would put on one film as a matinee each Sunday.

So I have started re-reading some Shakespeare plays and decided to start with some comedies as they are least familiar to me. Much Ado About Nothing (there is a wonderful recent film by Kenneth Branagh with a dream cast of him, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard, Keanu Reeves, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, and Kate Beckinsale. Michael Keaton as Dogberry has to be seen to be believed!), The Tempest and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Shakespeare's comedies are difficult for modern readers because we tend to miss all the puns and Elizabethan bawdy slang. So after that I decided to turn to some tragedies and I am re-reading Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio's Queen Mab speech sticks out as something really remarkable. As Mercutio says a moment later:

I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain,

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy...

I rather like it when a great talent like Shakespeare goes off the rails for a bit and takes us into a pure, creative fantasy. Someone else who was impressed with this speech was Hector Berlioz who wrote a lovely scherzo based on it which provides my second reason. Here is the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.