A Midsummer Night's Dream is a fairy play. But what, exactly, are fairies? According to one line of speculation, the fairies are pagan gods that have dwindled, after the triumph of Christianity, into furtive, mischievous nature-sprites; and vestiges of their ancient power cling to them. Shakespeare borrowed the name Oberon from the French romance Huon de Bordeaux, in which Oberon is a sort of glorified lubber fiend, a helpful elf king who makes impossible tasks possible for his human friends; but the German form of the name Oberon is Alberich, the dwarf king whose black greed troubles the human race in the Nibelungenlied and, much later, in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Behind cute Mustardseed and adorable Peaseblossom there lurk demons.

Indeed, there are moments in Shakespeare's play when Christian orthodoxy enters slantwise into ancient Athens, and the fairies almost reveal themselves as devilish spirits hostile to a Christian regime. At one point Puck alludes to ghosts of the dead, especially the wretched wraiths of suicides, whom Christian Europe buried at crossroads since hallowed ground was forbidden them:

Of course, in classical Greece such concepts as damnation and salvation had little meaning, and no one considered that the souls of suicides suffered any unusual torment. As if alarmed, Oberon forestalls this dangerous swerve into Christian values by a sleight of speech, instantly paganizing, eroticizing, the fairy world: “But we are spirits of another sort. / I with the Morning's love have oft made sport” (3.2.388–89). In other words: all this talk of ghosts and damned spirits has nothing to do with us; we’re attractive, vivacious, fun-loving creatures. It is as if Puck, on the verge of leading the audience to identify Oberon as a sort of Antichrist, had been diverted into safe channels of discourse.