A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Queen in the Sussex Woods

A royal hunt, a woodland nymph, a Wild Man, an enchanted oak, a mermaid riding upon a dolphin and a Queen entertained beneath the trees. The spectacular outdoor entertainments of Elizabeth I’s reign belonged to the world of Sir Lewes Lewkenor and illuminate the theatrical imagination of Shakespeare’s most magical comedy.

Elizabeth I comes to Cowdray

In August 1591 Elizabeth I visited Cowdray House in Sussex, the magnificent residence of Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montagu.

The visit was an important political occasion. Montagu was one of England’s most prominent Catholic noblemen, and the Queen’s reception demonstrated the delicate relationship between religious difference and loyalty to the Crown.

But the festivities were also a remarkable achievement of theatrical invention.

Instead of confining the entertainment to a hall or a temporary stage, the organisers transformed the surrounding countryside into a succession of dramatic encounters.

As Elizabeth moved through the grounds, allegorical figures appeared before her, delivering speeches, offering gifts and presenting carefully arranged spectacles.

The landscape itself became a theatre.

The nymph and the royal hunt

During the Queen’s visit, a nymph appeared to present Elizabeth with a bow for hunting.

The figure belonged to the classical world of Diana, goddess of the hunt, whose imagery was frequently associated with Elizabeth.

The Virgin Queen’s reputation made the identification especially appropriate.

The nymph’s appearance transformed an ordinary royal pastime into a mythological ceremony.

Elizabeth was no longer merely a monarch hunting in the Sussex countryside.

She became the central figure in a theatrical landscape populated by beings drawn from classical mythology.

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the woodland is similarly inhabited by figures who interrupt and redirect the movements of those entering it.

Oberon and Titania preside over the fairy world, while Puck moves between its inhabitants, manipulating appearances and transforming ordinary encounters into extraordinary events.

The woodland setting allows the dramatist to introduce supernatural presences without the formal boundaries of the court.

The Wild Man beneath the oak

Another entertainment at Cowdray involved a pilgrim and a Wild Man who appeared beside an oak tree.

The tree had been decorated with the arms of Sussex gentlemen, turning it into a visible representation of the county’s aristocratic society.

The Wild Man was a familiar figure in medieval and Renaissance pageantry.

He represented a being who existed beyond the ordinary restraints of civilisation, inhabiting forests and wild places.

His appearance before the Queen allowed the organisers to contrast the natural world with the authority of the monarchy.

The oak itself became a ceremonial object, bearing the heraldic identities of the local gentry.

In Shakespeare’s comedy, the forest similarly contains beings who belong to different orders of existence.

Fairies, artisans, courtiers and lovers move through the same landscape, each interpreting its mysteries according to their own understanding.

The woodland becomes a place where social distinctions are temporarily suspended.

The angler and the country dancers

The Cowdray entertainments continued with an angler and netter who presented fish to the Queen.

Country people performed dances accompanied by pipe and tabor.

These episodes brought the ordinary occupations and pleasures of rural Sussex into the ceremonial programme.

The effect was to present the countryside as a harmonious community united in honouring its sovereign.

Shakespeare’s comedy likewise brings together aristocratic and popular forms of entertainment.

The noble court of Theseus is eventually entertained by the mechanicals, whose performance of Pyramus and Thisbe transforms the skills and enthusiasms of ordinary working men into courtly spectacle.

Both occasions depend upon the collision of social worlds.

The difference is that Shakespeare turns the collision into comedy, allowing the artisans’ theatrical incompetence to become the source of affectionate ridicule.

The Queen at Richard Lewkenor’s house

The Cowdray festivities have a direct connection with the Lewkenor family.

On 20 August 1591 Elizabeth travelled to West Dean, where she dined at the house of Mr Richard Lewkenor, Lewes’s uncle.

The surviving accounts record the expenditure incurred in preparing the house:

for making ready Mr Richard Lewkenour’s house for her ma’tie to dine at betwixt Cowdrey and Chichester by the space of two days mense Augustii 1591 as appereth by bill signed by the lord Chambleyne [mark] 39s 4d.

This document establishes the family’s direct involvement in the royal progress.

The same royal party that had witnessed the extraordinary woodland entertainments at Cowdray was received at Richard’s house.

The significance is considerable.

These spectacles were not remote performances taking place in an unfamiliar aristocratic household.

They belonged to the immediate social and ceremonial world of the Lewkenors.

Richard was closely connected with the Brownes of Cowdray, while Lewes had grown up among the Sussex families involved in the Queen’s reception.

Kenilworth and the mermaid on a dolphin

A second remarkable connection leads back to the entertainments prepared for Elizabeth I at Kenilworth Castle in 1575.

The Earl of Leicester organised one of the most spectacular royal visits of the reign.

George Gascoigne contributed to the entertainments, which combined elaborate speeches, music, classical mythology and extraordinary effects upon the castle’s lake.

Among the aquatic spectacles was a singer mounted upon a dolphin.

The image invites comparison with Oberon’s recollection in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song.

The resemblance is particularly striking because the Kenilworth entertainment was one of the most celebrated examples of Elizabethan royal spectacle.

Gascoigne’s account helped preserve its memory in print.

Shakespeare transforms the image into a supernatural recollection spoken by Oberon.

The mermaid’s music becomes so powerful that it pacifies the sea and arrests the movement of the stars.

Leicester and the Lewkenor family

The Earl of Leicester was an important patron of the Lewkenor family.

His influence extended through the military and political networks in which Lewes later served.

Leicester commanded English forces in the Low Countries during the 1580s, a campaign that brought together many of the soldiers whose careers appear in Lewkenor’s writings.

The Kenilworth entertainment therefore belongs to a world connected with Lewkenor through aristocratic patronage and military service.

George Gascoigne, who contributed to the Kenilworth festivities, also devised the Montagu wedding masque of 1572.

That entertainment introduced Italian Montagues into the theatrical world of the Brownes of Cowdray.

Gascoigne thus provides a particularly interesting literary connection between two of the great aristocratic environments associated with the Lewkenors: Leicester’s Kenilworth and Montagu’s Cowdray.

The Earl and Countess of Warwick

The Dudley connection extended to Leicester’s brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, and to Ambrose’s wife Anne Russell.

In the dedication of The Resolved Gentleman (1594), Lewkenor acknowledged the assistance that his family had received from the Dudley brothers. Anne, Countess of Warwick, became the dedicatee of that translation and later of The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599).

The Countess belonged to Elizabeth’s household and to the literary patronage through which Lewkenor’s books entered print. His acknowledgement of her “continual readiness to do me good at court” places that relationship in his own words.

The family connections behind Kenilworth therefore continue into Lewkenor’s literary career. Leicester’s great entertainment, Ambrose’s patronage and Anne’s support belong to the same network of court service, writing and aristocratic hospitality.

Lewkenor’s dedications to Anne, Countess of Warwick, discussed in the 18 October 2026 master manuscript; The Resolved Gentleman (1594) and The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599).

Elvetham and the Queen of Fairyland

In September 1591, shortly after the Sussex progress, Elizabeth was entertained by the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in Hampshire.

Here the royal entertainment brought a fairy queen and her dancing company directly into the Queen’s presence.

The surviving account names her Aureola, Queen of Fairyland. Her speech associates her with Auberon, the fairy king whose name Shakespeare gives to Oberon.

After addressing Elizabeth, Aureola and her attendants danced about the garden and sang to an instrumental consort.

Fairy royalty, music, dancing and a compliment to the English sovereign were combined within a garden transformed for performance.

Elvetham adds another part of the theatrical world explored in the 18 October manuscript. Cowdray supplies the sequence of woodland encounters; Kenilworth supplies the celebrated dolphin spectacle; Elvetham brings the fairy queen and Auberon into the entertainment itself.

Read together, these occasions show how the fairy landscape of A Midsummer Night’s Dream grew within a culture of royal visits, noble hospitality and elaborate outdoor performance.

The contemporary account of The Entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Elvetham (1591), transcribed in REED Online; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, discussion of Elvetham and Oberon.

The fairy queen and the Virgin Queen

Shakespeare’s fairy world contains another celebrated allusion to Elizabeth I.

Oberon describes Cupid attempting to wound a beautiful maiden who remains untouched by love.

A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

The arrow fails:

The imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

The reference to the virgin sovereign is unmistakable.

Elizabeth is presented as a figure whose chastity places her beyond the ordinary power of Cupid.

The imagery belongs to the same courtly tradition that represented the Queen through the figures of Diana, Cynthia and other mythological embodiments of virginity.

At Cowdray the nymph offering Elizabeth a hunting bow drew upon that tradition.

In Shakespeare’s play the Queen becomes the untouched vestal whose resistance to love gives rise to the enchanted flower used by Oberon.

The compliment is transformed into a mechanism of the comedy itself.

From the Sussex childhood to the fairy wood

The sequence of entertainments spans Lewkenor’s youth and early adult life.

The Montagu wedding masque of 1572 belonged to the Sussex society in which he grew up. Kenilworth followed in 1575, under the patronage of Leicester, whose assistance to his family Lewkenor later acknowledged.

By the time of the Cowdray progress in 1591, Lewes had entered the Middle Temple and experienced the continental wars. The Queen’s visit brought the ceremonial splendour associated with his family’s patrons back into the Sussex landscape, with his uncle receiving her at West Dean.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, generally placed in the middle of the 1590s, follows this succession of entertainments.

The biographical connection develops across the years: the Montagus, the Dudleys, Gascoigne and the Lewkenors recur within the same world of patronage, literature and performance.

The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is framed by the approaching marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta.

The preparations require entertainments appropriate to a noble celebration.

Theseus commands Philostrate to:

Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments;
Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.

The instruction belongs to a recognisable aristocratic world in which the organisation of entertainment was a formal responsibility.

Wedding celebrations required music, dancing, speeches and theatrical performances.

Theseus’s court becomes a dramatic representation of the ceremonial culture familiar from Elizabethan noble households.

The same practical questions that governed the entertainments at Cowdray and Kenilworth appear within Shakespeare’s fictional Athens.

Who will perform?

What entertainment will be appropriate?

How should the host respond to the performers?

And how can a celebration be made worthy of its distinguished guests?

Philostrate and the management of performance

Philostrate, Theseus’s Master of the Revels, is responsible for presenting the available entertainments.

He advises the Duke against choosing the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe.

The play is badly rehearsed, its actors inexperienced and its tragic subject unsuitable for a wedding.

Theseus nevertheless insists upon seeing it.

His decision transforms a potentially embarrassing performance into an act of gracious hospitality.

He declares:

The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing.

The scene reveals Shakespeare’s understanding of the social obligations surrounding theatrical entertainment.

A noble host must consider not merely the quality of a performance but the honour of those who offer it.

Lewkenor would later encounter precisely such questions in his role as Master of the Ceremonies to James I.

Foreign ambassadors, visiting princes and distinguished courtiers were regularly entertained with plays, masques and music.

The successful management of those occasions depended upon tact, precedence and the ability to avoid public embarrassment.

Theseus as host, patron and judge

The manuscript develops this comparison through Theseus himself. The Duke receives petitioners, presides over his wedding celebrations, considers the available entertainments and determines how the performers will be treated.

In the final act he combines several responsibilities: he is the host of the occasion, patron of the players, member of the audience and judge of what is fitting.

His authority allows the mechanicals’ uncertain performance to become part of an ordered celebration. The honour of the occasion depends upon the conduct of the audience as well as the skill of the actors.

This is the ideal of hospitality explored in the manuscript’s account of Lewkenor’s later office. The Master of the Ceremonies received foreign visitors, arranged their access to the monarch and managed encounters in which the reputation of the court was publicly displayed.

Theseus gives dramatic form to that ceremonial intelligence: the ability to make an occasion succeed through judgement, generosity and control of its proceedings.

The mechanicals and the court audience

The performance of Pyramus and Thisbe is one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant representations of amateur theatre.

Bottom and his companions approach their task with immense seriousness but little practical understanding.

Their efforts produce a succession of comic disasters.

The wall must speak.

The lion must reassure the ladies that he is not a real lion.

The moon must be represented by a man carrying a lantern.

Yet the comedy depends as much upon the reactions of the noble audience as upon the incompetence of the actors.

Theseus and his companions continually interrupt the performance, interpreting its mistakes and supplying jokes of their own.

The spectators become participants in the theatrical event.

This is an important feature of Elizabethan courtly entertainment.

Performances were social occasions in which the audience’s knowledge, rank and responses could shape the meaning of what was presented.

Shakespeare turns that relationship into the subject of the final act.

The enchanted woodland

The central action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place beyond the formal authority of Theseus’s court.

The lovers enter the forest and encounter a world governed by Oberon, Titania and Puck.

Ordinary relationships become unstable.

Desire is redirected by enchantment.

Identities are confused.

And the boundary between waking experience and dream becomes uncertain.

The woodland entertainments at Cowdray operated through a related theatrical principle.

The Queen entered a landscape transformed by allegorical figures and carefully arranged surprises.

At one moment she encountered a nymph.

At another she met a Wild Man.

Elsewhere she received gifts from figures representing the occupations and pleasures of the countryside.

The royal progress became a journey through a succession of staged encounters.

Shakespeare’s forest transforms the same dramatic possibilities into an imaginative world in which supernatural beings possess genuine power.

Robin Goodfellow and The Spanish Mandeville

The manuscript brings a second body of evidence into the fairy wood: Lewkenor’s translation of Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas, published in English as The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles.

In Act II, scene 1, one of Titania’s fairies recognises Puck by the names and activities associated with a familiar household spirit:

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i.

Lewkenor’s translation discusses these same spirits by name. Luduvico asks Antonio about the stories told of them:

I pray you let me somewhat understand your opinion as concerning Robingoodfellowes and Hobgoblins, which are said to be so common, that there is scarcely any man but will tell you one tale or other of them, of which for my own part, I believe none, but do make reckoning that every man forgeth herein, what pleaseth him.

Antonio de Torquemada, translated by Lewes Lewkenor, The Spanish Mandeville; passage transcribed in the 18 October 2026 master manuscript, “The Garden of Curious Flowers”.

Antonio answers with an account of familiar spirits attached to particular houses. They make noises, play tricks, laugh, gesture and become so well known to the inhabitants that the household ceases to fear them.

Many of them without doubt are forged, and many also true, for these kinds of Spirits are more familiar and domestical then the others, and for some causes to us unknown, abide in one place, more than in another, so that some never almost depart from some particular houses, as though they were their proper mansions, making in them sundry noises, rumours, mockeries, gawdes and jests, without doing any harm at all.

The Spanish Mandeville; spelling follows the transcription in the master manuscript.

Here the connection reaches beyond the ceremonial setting. Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin appear in Lewkenor’s prose as spirits whose identity is expressed through their behaviour: household disturbance, mockery, laughter and mischievous familiarity.

Shakespeare gives those activities a theatrical agent. Puck frightens, misleads, assists and deceives; his pleasure in the confusion of others turns the familiar spirit into a driving force of the comedy.

The translation among Lewkenor’s papers

The history of The Spanish Mandeville gives this comparison a further biographical dimension.

Ferdinando Walker’s prefatory letter, dated 23 April 1600, describes the translation as an early work that had remained among Lewkenor’s papers for many years. Walker presents himself as the friend who rescued it from destruction and brought it before readers.

In his dedication he calls it:

the first labor of a worthy Gentleman of your Lordships Country of Sussex

He explains that the translator undertook it:

for his exercise in the Spanish tongue

The manuscript uses this publication history to raise the question of earlier access to Lewkenor’s writing. The translation had a life among his papers before its appearance in print; the proposed connection with the play concerns that earlier work as well as the published volume.

The argument joins the two strands explored on this page. Lewkenor’s family belonged to the world of royal woodland entertainment, while his own literary work included the familiar spirits who populate Shakespeare’s fairy comedy.

The screech-owl in the night

The manuscript also draws attention to Lewkenor’s marginal phrase:

We call them Skritch-Owles

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck evokes the bird as part of the nocturnal world through which he moves:

Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i; Lewkenor’s marginal wording is reproduced in the master manuscript’s discussion of The Spanish Mandeville.

The owl belongs with the spirits, night travellers and household disturbances discussed in the translation. The manuscript reads these details together as part of Lewkenor’s sustained engagement with the supernatural material that Shakespeare brings to the stage.

The Queen in the Sussex woods

The importance of the Cowdray material lies in the combination of historical specificity and theatrical invention.

We know that Elizabeth I visited Cowdray in August 1591.

We know that her hosts arranged woodland entertainments involving mythological figures, music and allegorical speeches.

We know that she subsequently dined at Richard Lewkenor’s house at West Dean.

And we know that the Lewkenors were closely associated with the aristocratic families responsible for those entertainments.

These are the circumstances that make the comparison with Shakespeare’s comedy particularly illuminating.

The woodland of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not simply a natural landscape populated by imaginary fairies.

It belongs to a theatrical culture in which noble households transformed gardens, forests, lakes and hunting grounds into elaborate performances for distinguished visitors.

Lewkenor’s family stood within that culture.

The cumulative case

The connection between Lewkenor and A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings together the theatrical environment of his family and the supernatural subjects of his own writing.

The Cowdray entertainments supply a remarkable historical example of the woodland pageantry Shakespeare transforms into comedy.

The Queen’s dinner at Richard Lewkenor’s house establishes the family’s direct participation in the royal progress.

The Kenilworth entertainment provides the famous image of a singer upon a dolphin, recalling Oberon’s mermaid.

Gascoigne connects the ceremonial worlds of Leicester and the Montagus.

Elvetham adds the fairy queen, Auberon, music and dancing before Elizabeth to this succession of royal entertainments.

Lewkenor’s translation of The Spanish Mandeville brings Robin Goodfellow, Hobgoblins and their domestic mischief into the literary comparison.

And the final act of Shakespeare’s play reveals an intimate understanding of the practical and social problems involved in arranging entertainments for noble audiences.

These connections illuminate the historical culture from which Shakespeare’s magical comedy emerged.

The fairy wood of Athens becomes recognisable as a theatrical transformation of the gardens, forests and aristocratic entertainments of Elizabethan England.

And Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s family provides a direct route into that world.

Continue:
Richard III — Buckingham and the Silent Citizens →

Sources and Further Reading

The accounts of Elizabeth I’s Sussex progress, August 1591, including the Cowdray entertainments and the expenditure for preparing Richard Lewkenor’s house at West Dean.

George Gascoigne, contributions to the Kenilworth entertainments of 1575 and A Devise of a Maske (1572).

E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, account of the Cowdray entertainment, 14–20 August 1591; The Elizabethan Court Day by Day, 1591, entry for 20 August and the Queen’s visit to Richard Lewknor’s house at West Dean.

The Entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Elvetham (1591), REED Online. Contemporary account of Aureola, Queen of Fairyland, her speech and the fairy dancing company.

C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom, discussion of Elvetham and Oberon.

Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas (1570), translated by Lewes Lewkenor as The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600), including the discussion of Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblins; Ferdinando Walker’s dedication and prefatory letter of 23 April 1600. Quotations follow the transcriptions in the master manuscript.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, especially I.i, II.i and V.i.

The Master of the Ceremonies, expanded master manuscript, 18 October 2026: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Queen in the Sussex Woods”; “The Garden of Curious Flowers”; the account of Anne, Countess of Warwick; and the discussion of Theseus and ceremonial hospitality.

Illustrations and Acknowledgements

The play. John Simmons, Titania sleeping in the moonlight protected by her fairies, nineteenth century; Joshua Reynolds, Puck, 1789. Public-domain reproductions via Wikimedia Commons. These later paintings illustrate the play’s artistic reception.

Royal visits and their settings. Anonymous, Cowdray House, catalogued circa 1790; frontispiece from John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, volume II, 1823, Boston Public Library copy digitised by the Internet Archive; Wenceslaus Hollar, Kenilworth Castle: Three Views, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Image records are linked in their captions.

Elvetham. The entertainment of 1591, lithograph printed by John Nichols in 1823. Folger Shakespeare Library. Image and accompanying historical account: “How Queen Elizabeth I spent her summer vacation”.

Portraits. Elizabeth I, Darnley portrait, circa 1575, unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery, NPG 2082; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, circa 1560–1565, attributed to Steven van der Meulen, Wallace Collection, P534; Anne Russell, Countess of Warwick, circa 1565–1569, Master of the Countess of Warwick, Woburn Abbey. Public-domain reproductions via Wikimedia Commons. Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, engraving published in 1620, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1910-424; CC0 reproduction via Wikimedia Commons.