SOURCE: Reynolds, Lou Agnes, and Paul Sawyer. “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies of A Midsummer-Night's Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10, no. 4 (autumn 1959): 513-21.

In the following essay, Reynolds and Sawyer examine Titania's four fairy servants in A Midsummer Night's Dream—Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and Moth—and contend that their presence represents the healing properties of folk medicine as well as its role in establishing a connection between the natural and supernatural world.

To the Elizabethans no subject, apart from love, was more appropriate to Midsummer's Night than folk medicine; or conversely, at no time could a reference to folk medicine be more opportunely introduced than on Midsummer's Night. It was believed that on this night of the summer solstice, plants were granted a magic power that they possessed at no other time of the year¹ That Shakespeare was well acquainted with this mass of superstition is shown by his...