The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among Shakespeare's Contemporaries 7 Successors

by Katharine M. Briggs

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Research, Criticism

284 pages, Hardcover

About the author

Early Life Katharine Briggs was born in Hampstead, London in 1898, and was the eldest of three sisters. The Briggs family, originally from Yorkshire, had built up a fortune in the 18th and 19th centuries through coal mining and owned a large colliery in Normanton, West Yorkshire. With such enormous wealth, Katharine and her family were able to live in luxury with little need to work. Briggs's father Ernest was often unwell and divided his time between leafy Hampstead and the clear air of Scotland. He was a watercolourist and would often take his children with him when he went to paint the landscape. An imaginative storyteller, he loved to tell his children tales and legends; these would have a great impact on the young Katharine, becoming her passion in later life. When Briggs was 12 her father had Dalbeathie House built in Perthshire and the family moved permanently to Scotland; however, tragedy struck when he died two years later. Briggs and her two sisters, Winifred and Elspeth, developed a close bond with their mother, Mary, after this - all living together for almost fifty years. As Briggs and her sisters grew older their main passion was for amateur dramatics. They wrote and performed their own plays at their home and Briggs would pursue her interest in theatre throughout her education. After leaving school she attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, graduating with a BA in 1918 and an MA in 1926. She specialised in the study of traditional folk tales and 17th-century English history.

The Folklorist Briggs continued her studies largely as a hobby, while living with her sisters and mother in Burford, Oxfordshire. She collected together traditional stories from across the country and the wider world, but did not publish them yet. Together she and her sisters performed in plays with local amateur dramatics groups and Briggs wrote historical novels set during the Civil War (also unpublished). When the Second World War started Briggs joined the WAAF and later taught at a school for the children of Polish refugees. After the war Briggs threw herself into her folklore studies, completing her PhD on the use of folklore in 17th-century literature. In 1954, the first Katharine Briggs book was published, titled The Personnel of Fairyland, a guide to the folklore of Great Britain. This was followed by Hobberdy Dick (1955), a children's story about a hobgoblin in Puritan England. Though these books brought a small amount of interest, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s, following the deaths of her sisters and mother, that Briggs became a renowned folklorist. In 1963 she published another children's book, Kate Crackernuts, and became involved with the Folklore Society of the UK, later being elected as its president in 1967. Now a preeminent expert on fairy stories and folklore, she began to lecture across the country and by the 1970s she had been invited to give lectures in the United States and was regularly interviewed on television. In 1971 she published her masterpiece, the four-volume A Dictionary of Folk-Tales in the English Language. This work remains the definitive collection of British folk stories, becoming a vital resource for writers, academics and storytellers. Katharine Briggs died suddenly at the age of 82 on 15th October 1980. At the time of her death she had been working on a memoir of her childhood days in Scotland and Hampstead, where her love of folklore began.

Information taken from http://www.foliosociety.com/author/ka...

Reviews

[AndrewYoung · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific book for what it is - an anthropological/cultural/historical exploration of fairies in 16th and 17th Century art and society. I especially like the last few chapters which are filled with great original sources and folk lore extracts. What this book doesn’t have is any sort of magic or rituals associated with fairies except when referenced in a quotation. I guess that’s fair though as there are enough books filled with that kind of fluff already.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars for content and fair limitited bias. Invaluable collection of references of magical beings, particularly faeries in literature of the elizabethan and jacobean era in England. A window into the past of people's beliefs, preoccupation, or fads that leaked into literature. To be honest I couldn't finish the last two appendices due to fatigue of trying to understand the old English of the original pieces referenced in the analysis. 5 stars for authenticity.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though written in the early 1950s, this book is still fascinating for its detailed understanding of fairies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While there may be points where it feels old-fashioned, and it brings in some much later evidence, which confuses things, this has compendious and rigorous analyses of the stories that may well have influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

[Kori Klinzing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative and interesting book of folklore and folklore based literature from the 16th and 17th centuries. It's especially helpful if you're doing a paper on Shakespeare's usage of faeries like I was. The little glossary in the back explains the generalized types of faeries for someone who hasn't obsessively read this stuff, and the little collection of stories are those faerie tales we don't get told as children. It includes quotes and passages from plays and stories and a comprehensive bibliography if you want to read further.

A must-have for a lover of all things Faerie.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent work as far as it goes, but it's very specialized--a look at fairy lore as seen through writers of the 16th and 17th centuries. That made it a little too niche for me, though the writing on the overlap between fairies, witches and demons was interesting (a lot of literary works showed Hades or Proserpine as the ruler of the fae, for instance). Katherine Briggs' Encyclopedia of Fairies works far better for my purpose.