Pluto And Proserpina The Merchant's Tale Quotes

the morally ambiguous fairies may have provided an outlet for the classicising impulse under a different and genre-appropriate guise. Thus Sir Orfeo of Winchester takes the place of Orpheus, and the Fairy King stands in for Pluto/Hades in Sir Orfeo. It is clear that some of the fairies of romance are little more than thinly veiled Classical gods, such as Chaucer’s fairy king and queen in The Merchant’s Tale, named Pluto and Proserpina, while Morgan le Fay bears many characteristics of Circe and Medea.113 It is possible, therefore, that one of the many versatile literary purposes of fairies in medieval romance was to introduce figures with the capacity to act like Classical deities while keeping them at arm’s length from the contested realm of theology.