‘A Local Habitation and a Name’: The Origins of Shakespeare's Oberon

Abstract

‘ . . . but the way is so full of ye fayrey & straunge thynges, that such as passe that way are lost, for in that wood abydyth a kynge of ye fayrey namyd Oberon’.1 So the French knight, Huon de Bordeaux, is warned as he continues his journey in quest of four teeth and a tuft of the beard of Babylon’s ruler, Admiral Gaudys. Literary scholars looking at mortals lost in another wood full of fairy and strange things in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream have long identified Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners’s 1534 English translation of the French romance Huon de Bordeaux as the source for two aspects of the fairy king in Shakespeare’s play. Huon is generally recognized as the source for Oberon’s ‘local habitation’. That is, it provides the most likely precedent for his location, not only in terms of the wood he abides in when first introduced in both the play and the romance but also his original habitation in an eastern or ‘Indian’ region.2 The other widely accepted contribution of Huon to A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the name Oberon itself, which first began to become a popular name for the fairy king in the English tradition with the publication of Berners’s translation. However, while these origins of Oberon’s name and geographic origins have been cited and mentioned briefly,3 there has been little space devoted to a serious exploration of the way previous representations of the fairy king Oberon have influenced or been altered by Shakespeare in Dream. This article takes a closer look at the Oberon character in Berners’s translation of Huon de Bordeaux and at the Oberon of Robert Greene’s 1594 play The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth as a way of inquiring into the origins of Shakespeare’s Oberon. The fairy king of the sources is an often contradictory character, at once a beneficent guide and a darkly powerful threat; a meddlesome trickster and a haughtily detached observer of human affairs. Understanding these mixed origins not only provides new insights into the ways in which Shakespeare’s Oberon was shaped by his predecessors but also suggests that certain aspects of Puck’s character and the relationship between Puck and Oberon are indebted to the single figure of the fairy king in previous texts. Though ample scholarship has demonstrated that a number of English sources contributed to the character of Puck, I suggest that continental sources are also important for understanding Oberon’s assistant, in that Shakespeare shares between Puck and