Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau

Queen Mab is a fairy described by Mercutio in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The ‘fairies' midwife’, Queen Mab is said to be a prankster who rides her chariot over men’s noses and makes them dream

‘O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lies asleep;

Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,

The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,

The traces of the smallest spider's web,

The collars of the moonshine's wat'ry beams,

Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film;

Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,

Not half so big as a round little worm

Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid:

Her chariot is an empty hazelnut

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers’

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene IV