Queen Mab

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In English folklore, Queen Mab is a fairy. She is memorably described in a famous and memorable comedic speech by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, in which she is a miniature creature who drives her chariot across the faces of sleeping people and compels them to dream dreams of wish-fulfillment.

1 Origin
2 In modern literature
3 Other modern uses of the name
4 References

[edit] Origin

Mab's origins are uncertain. Shakespeare may have borrowed her name from a Celtic goddess, the Irish Medb or her Welsh counterpart Mabb. It’s also possible to draw comparisons between her and Mara from Scandinavian folklore. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio gives a lengthy description of her.

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
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’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she—

— Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene iv

After her literary debut in Romeo and Juliet, she appears in works of seventeenth-century poetry, notably Ben Jonson's "Queen Mab" and Michael Drayton's "Nymphidia". In Poole's work Parnassus, Mab is described as the Queen of the Fairies and consort to Oberon, Emperor of the Fairies^[1].

Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem is also the title of the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), the famous English Romantic poet.

[edit] In modern literature

Mab was adapted into a ruthless pagan goddess and 'Queen of the Fairies and the Old Ways' in the 1998 miniseries Merlin. She was portrayed by actress Miranda Richardson.
Orson Scott Card's Magic Street depicts Queen Mab as a modern African American "motorcycle riding hoochie mama."
"Queen Mab" is the title of the thirty-first chapter in Melville's Moby Dick.
Mab also appears in the "Dresden Files" series of novels by Jim Butcher. She is the reigning queen of the Faerie court of Winter.

...In the ruins of my office stood a woman with the kind of beauty that makes men murder friends and start wars. She stood by my desk with her arms folded, facing the door, hips cocked to one side, her expression skeptical. She had white hair. Not white-blond, not platinum. White as snow, white as the finest marble, bound up like a captured cloud to bare the lines of her slender throat. I don't know how her skin managed to look pale beside that hair, but it did. Her lips were the color of frozen mulberries, almost shocking in a smooth and lovely face, and her oblique eyes were a deep green that tinted to deep blue when she tilted her head and looked me over. She wasn't old. Wasn't young. Wasn't anything but stunning...

— Harry Dresden in Summer Knight, part of the The Dresden Files

[edit] Other modern uses of the name

Queen Mab was also a San Francisco/East Bay based punk band from the early to mid 1990s featuring among others, Cassandra Millspaugh on guitar and backup vocals (more info needed).
MAB are an all girl heavy metal band. Although all the members are Italian they are based in the UK. The lead singer, Psycho Jeremy, is an opera singer, which gives them a unique sound.
British band Queen included Queen Mab in their song, "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke". In the song, the feller cracks a nut in order to build her carriage.