Although popular culture, particularly in the wake of Disney, has convinced us that fairies are, by and large, harmless and benign creatures working for human wishfulfilment, the fairies of history were quite different from their modern forebears. Historically, fairies have been viewed in a variety of ways ranging from the downright sinister and demonic to the liminal, the inscrutable, and the unknowable. As a subset of the ambiguous supernatural, fairies have elicited significant theological and sociocultural discomfort, sometimes denigrated and condemned as handmaidens of their more explicitly diabolical counterpart, the witch and occasionally dismissed as the annoying vestiges of an ignorant and superstitious past of folkloric fantasy¹. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, fairies were also persistently employed in works of literary fiction, appearing both in the works of printed texts as well as in dramatic performance. In tandem with their ontological ambivalence and hermeneutic heterogeneity, fairies were subject to modes of conceptualisation that were as diverse, shape-shifting, and oscillatory as their varieties of literary treatment. In such a case, reconstructing a monolithic and undifferentiated tradition of fairy in Tudor England is not only a fallacious undertaking but also, according to Matthew Woodcock, ultimately both unnecessary and futile. Instead, Woodcock encourages ‘reading’ fairies as definitive textual constructs, moving away from focusing on the essentialist attributes of fairies themselves to an analysis of “the rhetorical or formal role of fairy within [the] process of representation” by taking into account “the ways in which fairies are represented, described, depicted, or staged within texts