Abstract
In recent research, attention has been paid to the prominence of fairies in nineteenth-century folklore, literature and fine arts. Two other areas of fairies’ proliferation have been neglected: ethnography and the theatre. Variously regarded as the products of invention or documentation, fairies figured consistently in the nineteenth-century imaginary as well as the more empirical realms of scholarship and stage embodiment, suggesting that they may have served more, or deeper, purposes than mere lighthearted distraction and aestheticized diversion. In particular, examination of a relationship between ethnography and theatre challenges the historiography on fairies and suggests this chapter’s abiding question: ‘what are fairies for?’1
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Notes
Robert A. Gilbert, ed., Victorian Sources of Fairy Tales: (1) A Collection of Researches, 5 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002)
Robert A. Gilbert, ed., Victorian Sources of Fairy Tales: (2) A Collection of Stories, 5 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003)
Tracy C. Davis, ‘Do You Believe in Fairies?: the Hissing of Dramatic License’, Theatre Journal, 57 (March 2005): 57–81.
R. L. Green, Fifty Years of Peter Pan (London: Peter Davies, 1954), 79.
Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance’, Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief, ed. Yvonna S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003), 408.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), 94.
W. Graham Robertson, Time Was (London: Quartet Books, 1931), 315.
W. Y. Evans Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), 468.
Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales (London: Walter Scott, 1890)
Lewis Spence, The Fairy Tradition in Britain (London: Rider and Company, 1948), 298–9
W. Graham Robertson, Pinkie and the Fairies (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 98.
J. R. Planché, The Golden Branch (London: S. G. Fairbrother and W. Strange, 1848), 7.
Anna E. Bray, A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy; its Natural History, Manners, Customs, Superstitions, Scenery, Antiquities, Biography of Eminent Persons, &c. &c. in a Series of Letters to Robert Southey, Esq. (London: John Murray, 1836), 173
Compare Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 25.
See Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116–17.
Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other (New York: Columbia University Press: 1998), 77.
Malcolm Morley, ‘“The Cricket” on the Stage’, The Dickensian, 48.1 (1951/2): 17–24
Elaine Ostry, Social Dreaming: Dickens and the Fairy Tale (New York: Routledge, 2002), 79–104.
Albert R. Smith, Cricket on the Hearth (London: John Dicks, 1845), 11–12.
Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846)
Dion Boucicault, Forbidden Fruit and Other Plays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 109–49.
Percy Fitzgerald, The World Behind the Scenes (1881; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), 89.
J. R. Planché, The Island of Jewels (London: S. G. Fairbrother, 1849), 28.
John Ruskin, The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford (Sunnyside, Kent: George Allen, 1884), 122–3.
Compare Nicola Bown’s perspective in Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–2.
Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890—1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 65.
Compare Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Affell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
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© 2007 Tracy C. Davis
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Davis, T.C. (2007). What are Fairies For?. In: Davis, T.C., Holland, P. (eds) The Performing Century. Redefining British Theatre History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589483_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589483_3
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