Fairies in Shakespeare´s plays.

   Through Romeo and Juliet whe have learnt that fairies play a very important role just as Mercutio tells Romeo before entering Capulet´s territory:

"... 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´re courtiers´fingers, that dream on court´siers straight,
O´re ladies´lips, who straight on kisses dream,
which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, 
because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
sometimes she gallops o´er a courtier´s nose, 
and then sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig´s tail
tickling a parson´s nose as a´lies asleep..."

   Here, Mercutio tries to tell Romeo that his love for Rosaline is pure imagination and he should not trust those feelings because they will make him do things he won´t usually do. In this sense, Shakespeare uses fairies as a way to tell us that love is something to fear because it makes us do things we are not used to and we become blinded by this love, so in that way we are not able to differentiate between good and evil.

                                

       Just as William Rolfe says in one of his essays: " fairies are just like little human children, not able to differentiate between right and wrong, with no moral sense, living in the present and are quite incapable of reflection." (Rolfe, 2009) Considering these words, we have to take the misconception that Disney gave to fairies, they are not always good and kind, they don´t have common sense, they are unable to discriminate between right and wrong, they make us feel dizzy and change our perception of things making everything look so perfect and wonderful when there´s only danger and evil.

                                   

   Taking in consideration all that, we have to fous now on Midsummer Night´s Dream. What happens with fairies in this play? They have a more significant role in the play but they got fooled, they took part on the foolish game of love and there´s no way out. With the magic potion King Oberon fools Queen Titania who falls in love with an ass, maybe Shakespeare was trying to tell us that everytime a woman falls in love is with an ass, or maybe that people in love prefer to consider the good things of the loved one and avoid the less good aspects. That´s called being blinded by love; maybe you love that person, but that doesn´t mean you have to give up things to be with him/her, or that you have to change your personality to fit with the other one´s.

                                

   At the moment of being in love we tend to put that person´s needs before ours and that´s something good up to one extend because , on the one hand, that shows we are humans and that we are able to share, give and are about others, but on the other hand, that also represents that we are loosing ourselves to become someone else, that´s a creation of a new being that wants to fit in and become part of something, in this case of a relationship. T.S Eliot shows  the exact same thing on The lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock; he tells us that we loose our true self to fit in society and we create a mask with its proper custome to fit and become part of something bigger, and there´s a time in which we are so into this "character" that we are not able to stablish a difference between them and become absorbed by this creation and leave our true identity back to transform into this new person. I think the same thing happens when we are in love. We become absorbed by the feeling of being with someone that we change and we adapt to the other person, but what happens when the other person is not with us anymore? can we go back and return to the real self or are we so immersed into this character that we are not able to go back? Just think about it for a moment.

                                    

   We know that the importance of fairies in this story is to tell us how vulnerable we are in the subject of love. Have you ever heard the phrase "Not all that glitters is gold"?, Well, you should be careful and pay atention to the signs, if it´s neccesary, look twice and think before doing, but considering that we are human and there are no rules regarding love, we know we are going to fall sometime, or maybe more than once and then you will remember Shakespeare and his fairies or maybe you will remember Luna Lovegood and the "torposoplos", those little creatures that are around your head and makes you get confused ( it sounds familiar right? if not, I will tell you: fairies!!!!)

                                    

                                    

References:
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Comedy of A Midsummer-night's Dream. Ed. William J. Rolfe. New York: American Book Company, 1903. Shakespeare Online. 20 Dec. 2009. (4 October, 2014) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/midsummer/mdsrolfe.html >.
The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock. T.S Eliot 1915
Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare 1597
Midsummer Night´s Dream. William Shakespeare 1605