Fairy Attendants
The four named fairy attendants collectively establish the texture and scale of Titania's bower world. Their brief individual exchanges with Bottom are the play's most charming instances of the mortal and fairy worlds making direct, ordinary contact — Bottom receiving magical creatures and responding to each with the same practical curiosity he brings to everything.
Appears In
Biography
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed are the four named fairy attendants summoned by Titania to wait upon Bottom during his enchanted sojourn in her bower. Their names are the play's most concentrated expression of the fairy world's scale and texture — each a tiny natural thing (a blossom, a web, a dust-speck, a seed) given identity and voice by the play's insistence that the smallest things in the fairy world are also persons.
Bottom greets each of them with the same easy sociability he would extend to any neighbour in Athens. He asks after Peaseblossom's family by name ('Mistress Squash, your mother, and Master Peascod, your father'). He notes that Cobweb would be useful if he cut his finger. He commiserates with Mustardseed about the suffering of her kind — oxen eat mustard, and many oxen have died in the process, and he is sorry for it. Each exchange is a small masterpiece of the mortal world making ordinary contact with the extraordinary.
Their assigned duties — fetching apricots and dewberries, killing cankers in musk-rose buds, fanning Bottom's head while he sleeps — are those of creatures for whom the impossible is simply domestic labour. Collectively they are the play's most complete embodiment of the fairy world's combination of grandeur and delicacy: sovereign beings of a miniature realm, directed to scratch the ears of a weaver with an ass's head, and doing so without a trace of incongruity.
Motivation
The fairy attendants have no motivation beyond service — to Titania absolutely, and to Bottom by extension of her enchanted command. They perform both with the same gracious readiness.
Personality
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed are defined by their names and their belonging to the fairy world's diminutive scale. Each is a living detail of Titania's bower — creatures entirely at home in a world where the proper business of fairies is to tend enchanted weavers, chase bats from sleeping faces, and receive the condolences of mortals about the hardships of being mustard.