Oberon
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: King of the fairies and husband of Titania. His quarrel with her over a stolen Indian boy has thrown the seasons into disorder, and his magic flower drives every love plot in the wood.
- Key Traits: Proud, jealous and used to being obeyed. Capable of spite, but also of pity. The only character who sees the whole story and steers it.
- The Core Conflict: Oberon wants the changeling boy and Titania will not give him up. To win, he humiliates his queen; then he has to decide when the humiliation has gone far enough.
- Key Actions: Confronts Titania and is refused (A2S1). Sends Puck for the love-in-idleness flower and anoints Titania’s eyes (A2S2). Overhears Helena and orders Puck to help her. Discovers Puck’s mistake and corrects it (A3S2). Takes the boy, pities Titania and releases her from the spell (A4S1). Blesses the three marriages (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania."
(Act 2, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Reconciled with Titania, with the boy in his keeping. He leads the fairies through the palace at midnight to bless the bride-beds.
Ill Met by Moonlight
Oberon’s first line is a challenge and his first scene is a marital row. He and Titania have not spoken since early summer; each accuses the other of old affairs with mortals; and behind the insults is a single practical dispute. Titania has adopted a human boy, and Oberon wants him.
Original
Do you amend it then; it lies in you:
Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
I do but beg a little changeling boy,
To be my henchman.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So fix it then; you have the power to do so.
Why argue with me? I’m your Oberon.
I only want the little boy you swapped,
To be my right-hand man.
"I do but beg" is the king’s idea of humility, and it lasts one line. When Titania refuses, explaining that the boy’s mother was her friend and died bearing him, Oberon does not argue. He asks how long she means to stay in the wood, is told to keep away, and promises to torment her before she leaves it. The play never says what he wants the boy for. A page, a knight, a henchman: the words shift, and the need underneath them does not.
What is at stake is authority. "Am not I thy lord?" Oberon asks, and Titania answers that if he is, she must be his lady, which is not the same as obedient. The theme of gender and patriarchy enters the play here, in the fairy court rather than the human one, and the fairy king turns out to want exactly what Egeus wants: a female will bent to his own.
The King of Shadows
Oberon’s weapon is a flower. He tells Puck how Cupid’s arrow, aimed at a virgin queen and missing, fell on a white blossom and turned it purple, and how its juice makes any sleeper love the first creature they see. The plan is to use it on Titania. But before Puck returns, Oberon overhears Demetrius rejecting Helena, and his purpose widens.
Original
Fare thee well, nymph: ere he do leave this grove,
Thou shalt fly him and he shall seek thy love.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Goodbye, young girl: before he leaves this grove,
You’ll run from him as he pursues your love.
This is the moment that separates Oberon from a mere jealous husband. He has no stake in Helena; she is a stranger who walked past him in the dark. Yet her humiliation moves him, and he spends part of his precious juice putting it right. The same magic that will degrade his own wife is turned, in the next breath, to mending a mortal’s heart.
He is invisible while he watches, and he stays that way for most of the play. Oberon sees everything and is seen by almost no one, which makes him the nearest thing the wood has to a playwright. The theme of magic and illusion is his, and so is the theme of order and chaos: the disorder in the wood is his doing, and so is its repair.
Her Dotage Now I Do Begin to Pity
The plan works. Titania wakes, sees Bottom with an ass’s head, and falls in love. Oberon watches her garland the weaver with flowers and reports, with some satisfaction, what happened next.
Original
When I had at my pleasure taunted her
And she in mild terms begged my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child;
Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent
To bear him to my bower in fairy land.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
When I had teased her to my heart’s content
And she had begged that I desist with it,
I asked she cede her Indian boy to me,
Which she gave straightaway, and sent her fairy
To take him to my room in fairy land.
"At my pleasure" is honest. Oberon enjoyed this. He taunted his queen while she was helpless, and only when she had begged and handed over the boy did he decide that the joke had run its course. The pity he mentions a few lines earlier is real, but it arrives after the victory, not before it.
And yet the release, when it comes, is gentle. He lifts the spell with a blessing rather than a curse, asks for music, and takes her hand to dance. Titania asks how it all happened, and he tells her to wait: he will explain in the morning. Whether he ever does is one of the play’s quiet questions. The theme of control and rebellion is not only the lovers’ story; the fairy king wins his quarrel by making his wife ridiculous, and the play lets us decide what that costs.
Blessing the House
By Act 5 Oberon has no plot left. The lovers are married, Titania is reconciled, and the mortals have gone to bed. What remains is a ceremony. At midnight the fairies enter the palace, and Oberon leads them in a blessing.
Original
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Then unto the lovers’ bed,
We’ll place blessings on their head;
And the children they create
Shall be ever fortunate.
The speech is a fertility charm. It promises faithful couples, healthy children, and protection from the marks and deformities that Elizabethan parents feared. The king who began the play as a spoiler of Titania’s revels ends it as the guardian of three marriages, and the wood’s chaos is answered by a house at peace.
This is the reason many critics believe the play was written for a wedding, and even if it was not, the ending behaves as though it were. Oberon’s last words are practical: work till daybreak, then meet me. The theme of order and chaos closes with the fairy king restoring what his own jealousy had broken, and taking the credit.
"Wild and fantastical as it is, all the parts in their various modes are well written, and give the kind of pleasure which the authour designed. Fairies in his time were much in fashion; common tradition had made them familiar, and Spenser’s poem had made them great."
— Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765
Key Quotes
Quote 1
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I know a grassy bank where wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
And luscious honeysuckle offers shade,
Whilst roses share the sweet bouquet they’ve made.
And there, sometimes, Titania sleeps at night,
Lulled by the flowers dancing with delight...
Quote Analysis: Oberon describing the place where Titania sleeps. The lines are among the most quoted in Shakespeare, and it is worth remembering what they are for: he is telling Puck where to find his wife so that he can drug her. The beauty of the description and the meanness of the purpose sit side by side without apology. Notice how the bank is built up flower by flower, thyme, oxlips, violet, woodbine, musk-rose, eglantine, until the whole verse is over-canopied. The wood is Oberon’s, and he knows every inch of it.
Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid's archery,
Sink in apple of his eye.
When his love he doth espy,
Let her shine as gloriously
As the Venus of the sky.
When thou wakest, if she be by,
Beg of her for remedy.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Flower from this purple dye,
Hit by Cupid’s archery,
Hit the apple of his eye.
When his lover he does spy,
Let her shine as gloriously
As planet Venus in the sky.
When you wake, if she’s nearby,
You’ll beg her for another try.
Quote Analysis: The spell Oberon lays on Demetrius. The short lines and heavy rhymes mark it as fairy speech, quite different from the pentameter he uses to argue with Titania. Where Puck’s version of the same charm calls Lysander a "churl", Oberon’s is courtly: the woman is to shine like Venus, and the man is to beg. The tone of a spell tells you the intentions of the caster, and this one is meant kindly.
But we are spirits of another sort:
I with the morning's love have oft made sport,
And, like a forester, the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But we are spirits made a different way:
For often I’ve enjoyed the break of day,
And, like a woodman, through the trees I wander
Until the red horizon, glowing yonder,
Forms sunbeams on the ocean to behold,
And turns the salt-green water into gold.
Quote Analysis: Puck has warned that dawn is coming and that ghosts must hide from it. Oberon’s reply draws a line between his fairies and the damned spirits of the churchyard: he can walk the wood at sunrise and has often done it. The lines settle a question the audience might reasonably ask about a fairy king who drugs people in the dark. His magic is not black. He belongs to the morning as well as the night, and the description of the sun on the sea proves it.
Be as thou wast wont to be;
See as thou wast wont to see:
Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower
Hath such force and blessed power.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Go back to how you used to be
And see things like you used to see:
Diana’s sap beats Cupid’s flower
With more force and holy power.
Quote Analysis: The counter-charm that frees Titania. Dian’s bud, the herb of chastity, cancels Cupid’s flower, and the balance of the two is the play’s whole moral economy in four lines: desire and restraint, each with its own plant. Oberon speaks the spell as a blessing, and it is the first tender thing he has said to his wife. The quarrel has been won, and the winner can afford to be kind.
Key Takeaways
- The Jealous King: Oberon's fight with Titania over the Indian boy is a battle for authority, and it has unbalanced the seasons.
- The Invisible Author: Unseen for most of the play, he sees everything and uses the love-juice to arrange the ending he wants.
- Cruelty and Pity: He humiliates his queen to win the boy, then pities her and releases her with a blessing.
- The Guardian of Marriage: He ends the play leading the fairies through the palace to bless the three bride-beds.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why do Oberon and Titania quarrel over the changeling boy?
The play gives two accounts, and they do not match. Puck’s version, told to a passing fairy before either monarch appears, makes it a matter of possession and jealousy:
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
But she perforce withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy...
(Puck, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And Oberon, mad jealous, sought the child
To join his staff within the forests wild;
But, using force, she kept hold of the boy,
And crowned his head with flowers, out of joy.
Titania’s version, when Oberon asks her directly, is a story about a friendship. The boy’s mother was a votaress of her order, a mortal woman who sat with her on the Indian shore and imitated the sailing ships with her pregnant body, and who died in childbirth. Titania keeps the boy for her sake. Oberon never answers this. He simply asks how long she is staying.
Feminist critics have made the gap between the two accounts central to the play. Shirley Nelson Garner, in a 1981 essay for Women’s Studies, argued that the comic resolution of A Midsummer Night’s Dream requires the breaking of bonds between women, and that the boy is the price: Titania must give up the child of her dead friend before the fairy marriage, and with it the whole play, can be set right. Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), read the boy as the object over which male authority reasserts itself, noting that in the quarrel between the fairy queen and the fairy king "Oberon uses one against the other in order to reassert male prerogatives." On these readings the changeling is not a plot device but the play’s clearest statement about who is allowed to keep what. The theme of gender and patriarchy begins in the fairy court, and the boy never speaks a word.
Is Oberon a villain?
He behaves like one for two acts. He plans the drugging of his wife in advance, chooses the most degrading outcome he can imagine, and says so with relish:
Having once this juice,
I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.
The next thing then she waking looks upon,
Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape,
She shall pursue it with the soul of love...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Once I have this nectar,
I’ll spy upon Titania till she’s sleeping,
And then I’ll drop its nectar in her eyes.
The next thing that she sees when she wakes up,
If it’s a lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
Or cheeky monkey, or a busy ape,
She’ll fall head-over-heels in love with it.
A husband who hopes his wife will fall in love with a bear or an ape is not a sympathetic figure, and the play does not pretend he is. But it also gives him the two most generous acts in the wood: the rescue of Helena, whom he has no reason to help, and the release of Titania once he has what he wants. The same juice does both.
William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), refused to moralise about the fairy king at all: "Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists; but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies." On that reading Oberon is beyond good and evil in the way weather is. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), took the opposite view and called the Dream "the most erotic of Shakespeare’s plays", with Oberon as the stage-manager of a night in which Titania is made to couple with a beast. The play supports both readings because Oberon is not a moral character; he is a powerful one, and the play is interested in what power does when it is crossed. The theme of magic and illusion is never innocent in his hands, but it is never simply wicked either.
Who is the "fair vestal throned by the west"?
Almost certainly Queen Elizabeth I. Oberon is explaining to Puck where the magic flower came from, and the story requires a virgin so chaste that Cupid’s arrow bounces off her:
Cupid all armed: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Cupid all armed with bow and arrow, firing
At a sweet virgin seated on a throne,
And skilfully he fired a love arrow
As though to hit a hundred thousand hearts;
But I observed young Cupid’s burning arrow
Extinguished by the pure and dripping moonbeams,
To leave the royal virgin unaffected,
To ponder her virginity unswayed.
A vestal was a virgin priestess; "throned by the west" points at England; "imperial votaress" is a queen who has vowed herself to chastity. Elizabeth was sixty-two when the play was probably written, unmarried by choice, and celebrated in verse as Cynthia, Diana and the Faerie Queene. An audience in the 1590s would have taken the compliment at once. Sukanta Chaudhuri, in the Arden third series edition (2017), calls it Oberon’s unmissable compliment to the Queen.
The most influential modern reading is Louis Adrian Montrose’s "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), which set the passage against the historical fact that Elizabeth was a female ruler in a culture that expected women to be ruled. Montrose noticed the shape of the myth: Cupid misses the Queen, and the arrow that would have subjected her to love falls instead on a flower that subjects everybody else. "Thus, ironically," he wrote, "the vestal’s very freedom from fancy guarantees the subjections of others." The Queen stays untouched, and the play she may have watched is full of women, Titania, Hermia, Helena, Hippolyta, who do not. Whether this is flattery or something sharper is exactly the question Montrose leaves open.
Why does Oberon help Helena?
Because he happens to overhear her. Oberon has sent Puck for the flower and is waiting, invisible, when Demetrius and Helena cross the stage, he threatening to leave her to the wild beasts, she promising to follow him anyway. When Puck returns, Oberon gives him a second errand before he has finished describing the first:
A sweet Athenian lady is in love
With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes;
But do it when the next thing he espies
May be the lady: thou shalt know the man
By the Athenian garments he hath on.
Effect it with some care, that he may prove
More fond on her than she upon her love...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A sweet Athenian lady who’s in love
With a derisive boy: then douse his eyes;
But make sure that the first thing that he spies
Will be the lady. You will know the man
By the Athenian clothes that he has on.
Now, do it carefully, then he will prove
More fond of her than she’s fond of his love.
There is no advantage in it for him. The fairy king is moved by a mortal woman’s misery and decides to fix it, and the decision shows something about him that the quarrel with Titania hides. He is cruel to those who cross him and kind to those who do not.
The consequence is the play’s strangest loose end. Catherine Belsey, in her 1993 essay for the Folger edition, pointed out that at the end of the play "Demetrius still has the love-juice on his eyes, and yet the play gives no indication of a difference between this marriage and the others." Oberon never lifts the spell from Demetrius; Helena gets her man because a fairy decided she should. C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), treated the whole night as a holiday movement "through release to clarification", and on that reading Demetrius’s enchantment is simply the clarification that the others reach by waking up. It is still worth noticing that the one couple the fairy king arranges directly is the one couple whose love is, in the strict sense, artificial.
What has the quarrel done to the seasons?
Titania tells him at length. Because the king and queen have not met to dance since early summer, the winds have raised fogs, the rivers have flooded, the corn has rotted in the fields and the seasons have exchanged their clothes, so that frost falls on the roses and summer buds are set on winter’s head. She ends by naming the cause:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
(Titania, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And all this bad confusion has arisen
Out of our talking and our arguing;
We caused this; we’re the root cause of this problem.
Oberon does not dispute a word. His answer is that she can fix it by giving him the boy, which accepts the diagnosis and refuses the cure. The fairy marriage, in other words, is not a private matter. When the king and queen fall out, the harvest fails.
The passage has a likely topical edge. The summers of 1594, 1595 and 1596 were among the wettest and coldest of the century in England, with ruined harvests and high grain prices, and most editors since the eighteenth century have heard the bad weather in Titania’s speech. Samuel Johnson (1765) preferred a literary explanation and read the lines as an imitation of Ovid’s grieving Ceres; the two readings are not exclusive. What matters for the play is the scale it gives the quarrel. The theme of order and chaos is usually discussed through Athens and its law, but the largest disorder in the play is in the sky, and Oberon and Titania are its parents.
Are Oberon and Theseus meant to be the same man?
They never meet, and until 1970 almost nobody thought to ask. Then Peter Brook’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company cast Alan Howard as both Theseus and Oberon, and Sara Kestelman as both Hippolyta and Titania, and the doubling has been common practice ever since. The text gives it some support. Titania accuses Oberon of an old love for Hippolyta, and Oberon answers with Titania’s own history with the duke:
How canst thou thus for shame, Titania,
Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,
Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
How can you stand there shamelessly, Titania,
Referring to my past with Hippolyta,
When you know that I know that you love Theseus?
The fairy king and queen, it turns out, have been entangled with the human couple for years. The wood is not a separate world from Athens; it is Athens seen at night.
James L. Calderwood, in his 1992 study of the play, took the doubling further and read the whole night in the wood as something like Theseus’s own anxious dream before his wedding, with Oberon as the dreamer’s inner dramatist arranging the fantasy. Not every critic accepts this: the two kings behave differently, Theseus ruling by law and Oberon by magic, and Theseus’s speech about lovers and madmen is a flat denial that anything Oberon did was real. But the doubling has become one of the standard ways of staging the play, and it makes visible a pattern that was always in the text. Both rulers begin by trying to force a woman’s will, and both end by presiding over a wedding. The theme of dreams and reality depends on the audience half-believing they are the same man.
What does Oberon’s blessing at the end of the play mean?
It means the play is ending as a wedding masque. Once the mortals have gone to bed, the fairies fill the palace, and Oberon leads them in a charm that promises faithful marriages, healthy children and a house at peace. Every bedroom is to be blessed with field-dew, and the owner of the palace is to rest in safety for ever. The king who spent the night spoiling his wife’s revels ends it as the guardian of everyone else’s.
This is the strongest evidence for the old theory that the play was written for an aristocratic wedding, perhaps the marriage of William Stanley, Earl of Derby, to Elizabeth de Vere in January 1595, or of Thomas Berkeley to Elizabeth Carey in February 1596. No document proves it, and the theory should be stated as a possibility rather than a fact; but the ending certainly behaves like a court entertainment, and C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959) argued that the whole play gathers up the kinds of pageantry that were usually presented piecemeal at aristocratic celebrations. Louis Adrian Montrose (1983) read the same ending more coolly: "The festive conclusion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream depends upon the success of a process by which the female pride and power manifested in misanthropic warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and willful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands." Both critics are describing the same speech. Whether Oberon’s blessing is the play’s harmony or its final act of control depends on how much the audience remembers about how he won.
