"A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye": An Unnamed Fairy in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

Thank you for your responses to last week’s spot-the-difference Folger Mystery! Let’s take another look at the two images:

Though sharp-eyed readers also spotted differences in punctuation between the two versions, if you guessed that a spoken line becomes a stage direction, you were right about the focus of this month’s mystery! While the 1600 Quarto of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends Titania’s welcome to Nick Bottom with a call to four named fairies, “Pease-blossome, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seede”, the printing of the First Folio shows that the once-spoken line has been made a stage direction. Importantly, this new stage direction does not replace the original, “Enter foure Fairyes” but instead combines the new with the old, resulting in the following: “Enter Pease-blossome, Cobweb, Moth, Mustard-/seed, and foure Fairies.” Where there were four, there are now eight. 

I noticed this variance during a graduate school seminar in which Professor Claire M.L. Bourne asked us to trace the editorial history of a scene. In that seminar, I was more interested in the printing of the dialogue following Titania’s summons:

For the duration of Midsummer’s printing in the 1600s, all four (or eight) fairies answered Titania’s summon in a single line. While the line is not split by individual speakers, the punctuation and the first-person singular subject personal pronouns always read to me as if the first part of the line was split between four speakers, “Ready; and I, and I, and I,” and had them all come together to ask the question, “Where shall we go?”

The printing of this line changed in 1709, with the publication of Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare’s works. Rowe was the first editor of Shakespeare’s work to consistently add Act and Scene divisions and Dramatis Personae lists to the plays. Additionally, as a playwright, Rowe paid particular attention to character entrances, exits, and line assignments, fixing mistakes that he found in the Fourth Folio, including the fairies’ line in Midsummer:

As you can see, Rowe assigns responses to individual speakers, with “4 Fair.” asking where the fairies are needed after responding to Titiania’s summons. Rowe’s editorial intervention is one that editors seem to like, as the overall majority of editions printed since 1709 divide the lines by speaker. This does not mean that they assign a specific fairy to speak a specific line, however. You’ll see that Rowe does add a number before each “Fair”, but readers of the text do not know if the fairy speaking is one of the named fairies or one of the unnamed fairies.

It is not until 1857 that Alexander Dyce decides to assign the named fairies the lines at which we’ve been looking:

Dyce is the first editor of Shakespeare to use the names that Shakespeare gave the fairies through Titania’s summons: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. Dyce’s fellow nineteenth-century editors, including Richard Grant White and William J. Rolfe followed the new convention set by Dyce. In fact, we see his influence as recently as 2016 in The Norton Shakespeare, which assigns the lines to Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed.  

I credit this line or, these lines, (depending on what edition you are reading) with introducing me to the fascinating world that is editing Shakespeare. I began to understand that I have always read an “edited” Shakespeare and that what may seem like a miniscule editorial intervention–whether intentional or not–could completely remove entire characters from a play. We have actually been looking at a scene that does just that: one of the named fairies is dependent on whether a single line is spoken or assigned as a stage direction. 

Let’s go back to the last line of Titania’s speech in the 1600 Quarto:

Here, Titania calls the four fairies by name and then they enter the stage. Lewis Theobald, in 1733, adds a footnote to the scene, “Here the common Editions have been so extravagant as to split four Fairies into eight: but the old Quarto Impressions both came into my Assistance to reduce ‘em to their right Number.” Theobald is the first editor to revert back to the Quarto’s printing of the names as part of Titania’s speech rather than as a stage direction. 

It is this very line on which Moth’s naming on the stage depends. In the lines following the fairies’ entrance, Titania commands the fairies to serve Bottom, to which all four fairies respond with a single-word affirmation: “Hail!” Bottom then addresses the fairies directly and asks for “your worship’s name,” to which Cobweb responds, “Cobweb.” Bottom then asks another fairy, “Your name, honest gentleman?” to which Peaseblossom responds, “Peaseblossom.” And once again, “Your name, I beseech you, sir?” to which Mustardseed responds, “Mustardseed.” 

Bottom calls these fairies by name in Act 4 Scene 1. He asks for “Peaseblossom”, “Monsieur Cobweb”, and “Monsieur Mustardseed”. Unlike these three fairies, Moth is only mentioned by name once in the play, in Titania’s summons. If this line is not spoken and treated as a stage direction, Moth appears, speaks two lines (“And I” and “Hail”), but is never named on stage. 

Whether Moth is named or not does not have any consequence for the plot of the play, and yet this textual crux is one that continues to intrigue me. This intrigue is in part caused by Moth’s continuous presence in the Folger collection. We can find them in cast lists for different performances, illustrations for potential costume designs, in a part book, and a prompt book:

Moth is present in Midsummer, even if only briefly. David Kerr’s 2016 adaptation of the play for TV shows the fairies screaming in fright when they see Bottom for the first time, and one of them disappearing by turning into a speck of light. Kerr’s decision certainly helps explain Moth’s absence later in the scene, but also allows me to add in one last point: the interchangeability between the words moth and mote in early modern English. Lukas Erne, the textual editor for Midsummer in the 2016 Norton Shakespeare notes, “‘Mote’: speck. [Moth and Mote] were spelled and pronounced alike” (1068).  

Does Bottom simply not address Moth because, as their name seems to imply, he does not see them?