Queen Mab - Definition and Overview

In English folklore, Queen Mab is a fairy. She is memorably described in a famous 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.

Mab's origins are uncertain. Shakespeare may have borrowed her name from a Celtic goddess, the Irish Medb or her Welsh counterpart Mabb both possible candidates. 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".

"Queen Mab" is also the title of the first larger poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous English Romantic poet. It was written early in his career and serves as a foundation to his theory of revolution. In this work, he depicts a two-pronged revolt involving the necessary changes brought on by both nature and the virtuousness of humans. Shelley takes William Godwin's idea of Necessity and combines it with his own idea of ever-changing nature to establish the theory that the current evils in society will dissolve naturally in time. This is to be coupled with the creation of a virtuous mentality in people who can envision the ideal goal of a perfect society. The ideal is to be reached through evolutionary revolution, because Shelley, as a result of the French Revolution, believed that the perfect society can not be obtained immediately through violent revolution. It is to be achieved through both the evolving change that nature will cause and the expanding numbers of people that will become virtuous and imagine a better society.