When the Baroness comes ashore in Salem, she is wearing purple. Queen Elizabeth's Sumptuary Laws put strict limits on what colors, fabrics, and clothes could be worn by each class. The law forbade anyone outside the immediate royal family from wearing the color purple. To create the dye, thousands of a specific shells were crushed. As the dyes were so expensive to create, they further reflected the wearer's wealth and status.
The countess (Lucy Lawless) remarked that the magistrate and Cotton Mather were reminiscent of the finest gladiators in Rome. In another show, Starz' "Spartacus," she plays the wife of a man who owns and fights gladiators in Rome.
This episode's title comes from a line in Act Two, scene one in "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream" when Oberon says, " Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania What, jealous Oberon? -- Fairies, skip hence I have forsworn his bed and company." This episode's title is also the title of a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story by Fritz Leiber.