Queen Mab

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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 being 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: A Philosophical Poem is also the title of the first large poetic work written by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), the famous English Romantic poet.

The character was adapted as a ruthless sorceress, Mab, 'Queen of the Fairies and the Old Ways' in the 1998 miniseries Merlin, featuring Miranda Richardson in the role.

She is also found in the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher as the Winter Queen of the Fae or Sidhe.

Orson Scott Card's Magic Street depicts Queen Mab as a modern African American "motorcycle riding hoochie mama."

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