In the i6th and 17th centuries most ofthe poets made Queen Mab the queen of the Fairies, and particularly ofthe diminutive fairies of Drayton's Nimphidia. Shakespeare's Queen Mab as mentioned in Romeo and Juliet the fairies' midwife, who gives birth to dreams, is of the same sort, with a coach drawn by insects — a very much less dignified person than his Titania in a Midsummer Night's Dream. This minute Queen Mab, however, probably comes from a Celtic strain and was once much more formidable, the Mabb of Wales, with possibly some connection with the warlike Queen Maeve of Ireland.

In Ben Jonson's Entertainment at Althorpe she is a pixy type of fairy, described as an 'Elfe' with no royalty about her:

This is Mab, the mistris-Faerie,

That doth nightly rob the dayrie;

And can hurt, or helpe the cherning,

(As shee please) without discerning...

Shall we strip the skipping jester?

This is shee, that empties cradles,

Takes out children, puts in ladles:

Traynes forth mid-wives in their slumber,

With a sive the holes to number.

And then leads them, from her borroughs,

Home through ponds, and water furrowes.

In one of the British Museum magical manuscripts (Sloane MS. 1727), she is mentioned as 'Lady to the Queen'.

Jabez Allies in his chapter on the Ignis Fatuus in The Antiquities of Worcestershire says that 'Mabled' was used for pixy-led. Evidently Jonson followed the same tradition.

[Motif: F369.7]