Titania
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Queen of the fairies and wife of Oberon. She is raising a mortal boy for the sake of his dead mother and refuses to hand him over, which has split the fairy court and unbalanced the seasons.
- Key Traits: Proud, loyal and generous. Sure of her own authority. Tender to those she loves, whether a dead friend, a stolen child or a weaver with an ass’s head.
- The Core Conflict: Titania will not give up the changeling boy, and Oberon will not stop until she does. She loses the boy without ever agreeing to lose him.
- Key Actions: Refuses Oberon and describes the ruined seasons (A2S1). Is drugged in her sleep and wakes to fall in love with Bottom (A3S1). Lavishes fairies, flowers and music on him (A4S1). Surrenders the boy while enchanted, is released, and wakes to disgust. Leads the fairies in blessing the palace (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?"
(Act 3, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Reconciled with Oberon and dancing beside him, but with the boy gone and only a half-memory of the night she spent with an ass.
The Forgeries of Jealousy
Titania enters in the middle of a quarrel and gives as good as she gets. Oberon calls her proud; she calls him jealous, lists his affairs with mortal women, and refuses to share his bed. Then, when he asks why she is crossing him, she stops trading insults and describes what their fight has done to the world.
Original
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
These are all lies born of your jealousy.
And not since early summer have my fairies
And I met on a hill, dale, wood or meadow,
Or by a pebbled spring or flowing stream,
Or on the sandy beach beside the sea,
To dance in circles honouring the wind,
Without you shouting, ruining our dance.
The speech that follows is the longest in the play, and it is a weather report. The fairies have not danced since early summer; the winds have taken revenge with fog and flood; the corn has rotted, the sheepfolds stand empty, and the seasons have swapped their clothes. Titania ends by taking her share of the blame: "We are their parents and original." She is not pleading. She is telling her husband that a royal quarrel has consequences, and that he should know it.
It is a queen’s speech, and it establishes her as Oberon’s equal in everything but power. She has her own train, her own revels and her own bower, and the theme of order and chaos in the fairy world depends on the two of them keeping step. When they do not, the human world pays.
The Votaress and Her Boy
Asked directly for the changeling, Titania explains why she keeps him, and the explanation is a story about a woman. The boy’s mother was a mortal in her service; the two of them sat together on the Indian shore, laughed at the pregnant sails, and the mother, imitating them, went to fetch trifles for her queen. Then she died in childbirth.
Original
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake do I rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, being mortal, she died giving birth,
And, for her sake, I’m bringing up her boy,
And, for her sake, I will not part with him.
"For her sake" is said twice. The boy matters to Titania as the last piece of a friendship, not as a possession or a page, and that is why Oberon’s "I do but beg a little changeling boy" cannot move her. The two of them are not arguing about the same thing. He wants a henchman; she is keeping a promise to the dead.
This is one of the few places in Shakespeare where a friendship between women is described from the inside, and it is the first thing the play sacrifices. The theme of control and rebellion runs through the fairy plot as well as the lovers’: Titania’s refusal to hand over the boy is the play’s first act of rebellion, and her memory of the votaress is the reason for it.
Enamoured of an Ass
Oberon squeezes the flower on her eyes while she sleeps, and the next creature she sees is Bottom with an ass’s head, singing to keep his courage up. She wakes, asks what angel is singing, and within five lines has sworn she loves him.
Original
I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I beg you, gentle mortal, sing again:
My ears are so enamoured by your voice;
As are my eyes enchanted by your looks;
Your beauty makes me think no one’s above you,
And on first viewing, makes me swear, ‘I love you.’
Bottom’s reply is the wisest line in the scene: reason and love keep little company nowadays. Titania answers that he is as wise as he is beautiful, and the audience, who can see the ears, laughs. But the verse she speaks to him is not comic. It is some of the most beautiful in the play, and she means every word. The spell has not made her ridiculous; it has made her sincere about something ridiculous, which is a different and crueller thing.
What follows is a courtship in which the queen does all the giving. She promises him fairies, jewels, songs and a purged mortality, orders her attendants to feed him apricots and fan him with butterfly wings, and has him led to her bed. The theme of love and folly is the play’s subject, and Titania is its most extreme case: a great spirit doting on a workman with a donkey’s head, and never for a moment doubting her own taste.
What Visions Have I Seen
Oberon watches her garland Bottom with flowers, taunts her until she begs, takes the boy, and only then lifts the spell. Titania wakes to a husband she has not spoken to since summer, and her first words are about a dream.
Original
My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My Oberon! What things I have just seen!
I thought I was besotted with a donkey.
"There lies your love," Oberon says, and she looks. The disgust in her next line is immediate, and so is the question underneath it: how did this happen? Oberon tells her to be quiet for now, calls for music, and takes her hand. She asks again as they leave, and he does not answer on stage.
The reconciliation is real and the music is lovely, but the audience knows something Titania does not. She has been drugged, humiliated and robbed by the man now dancing with her, and she thinks she had a bad dream. The theme of dreams and reality is usually discussed through Bottom and the lovers, who wake and try to describe what happened to them. Titania is the one character who is never told.
"Titania, waking, tells Oberon ‘what visions have I seen’ but her ‘love’, the image she ascribes to her dream of an ass she had fallen in love with, lies rather solidly beside her."
— Peter Holland, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford Shakespeare), 1994
Key Quotes
Quote 1
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossiped by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following, – her womb then rich with my young squire, –
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And in those fragrant nights in India,
She often chatted with me by my side,
And sat with me upon the yellow beaches,
Observing merchant ships that came and went,
And we would laugh, pretending sails were pregnant,
Expanding out their bellies in the wind,
Which she, so pretty, with a gliding walk,
Would follow – she was pregnant with my young boy –
And mimic, sailing up and down the beach
To fetch me gifts, then coming back again
As if she were a laden merchant ship.
Quote Analysis: Titania’s memory of the changeling’s mother. Nothing in the plot requires this passage; Shakespeare could have had her refuse the boy in a line. Instead he gives her ten lines of shared laughter on a beach, with the pregnant woman sailing up and down the sand in imitation of the ships. The image joins her belly to the wind-filled sails, and the trifles she fetches to a merchant’s cargo, so that pregnancy becomes a voyage. It is the play’s one glimpse of a world of women in which men do not appear at all, and it is spoken by a queen who is about to lose it.
Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep;
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don’t strive to find your way out of this wood:
You shall not leave here, even if you could.
I’m not just any spirit, quite benign;
The summer waits upon each whim of mine;
And I do love you: therefore, come with me;
My fairies will all serve you faithfully,
And from the sea, fetch gems and precious metals
And sing while you’re asleep on flattened petals;
And I’ll remove your foul mortality
So that you’ll be a spirit, just like me.
Quote Analysis: Titania’s proposal to Bottom, and it is a proposal in the fullest sense: she will keep him, serve him, enrich him and finally transform him. "Whether thou wilt or no" is the queen speaking, not the lover. Even under the spell she gives orders, and the promise to purge his "mortal grossness" is both a compliment and a threat. Notice the shift from rhyme to rhyme: the couplets make the speech sound like a charm, which is what it is. Bottom, who only wanted to find his way home, is being enchanted for a second time.
Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bed.
The moon methinks looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Tie up my love's tongue; bring him silently.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Look after him, and take him to my bed.
I think the moon might start to cry and groan,
And when she cries, each flower drops its head,
In sadness someone’s forced to sleep alone.
Tie up my lover’s tongue; bring him in silence.
Quote Analysis: The close of the scene, and the strangest lines in it. The moon is weeping, and every flower weeps with her, for "some enforced chastity": a virginity taken by force. Editors have argued about whose. It may be a glance at Titania’s own drugged consent, or at the lovers lost in the wood, or simply at the night. Then the tenderness breaks: tie up his tongue. The queen who begged him to sing again now wants him silent, and the fairies lead the braying weaver away to bed.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Just like the woodbine wraps the honeysuckle,
I’ll wrap my arms around you; ivy, too,
Enwraps itself around an elm tree’s bark.
Oh, how I love you! How I dote on you!
Quote Analysis: Titania winding Bottom in her arms as he falls asleep. The two plants she names, woodbine and honeysuckle, are in fact the same plant, and editors have been puzzling over the line since the eighteenth century. It hardly matters. The image is of clinging growth, ivy on the elm, and the word "female" makes the embrace an emblem of the play’s marriages: the woman as the vine, the man as the tree. Oberon is watching, and his pity begins here.
Key Takeaways
- The Fairy Queen: Titania is Oberon's equal in rank and will, and their quarrel has unbalanced the seasons.
- The Promise to the Dead: She keeps the changeling for the sake of his mother, her mortal friend who died bearing him.
- Enchanted Love: Drugged by Oberon, she falls in love with Bottom and lavishes her court on him in the play's most beautiful verse.
- The Untold Dream: She surrenders the boy while enchanted, wakes to disgust, and is never told what was done to her.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why will Titania not give up the changeling boy?
Because of his mother. Oberon frames the dispute as a matter of rank, a king asking his subject for a page, and Titania refuses the frame in three lines:
Set your heart at rest:
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a votaress of my order...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Just let it go:
I wouldn’t sell the child for Fairyland.
His mother was supportive of my clan...
The story she then tells, of the votaress on the Indian shore who died in childbirth, makes the boy the memorial of a friendship. She is not hoarding him; she is keeping faith. Oberon has no answer to this and does not try to find one.
Shirley Nelson Garner, in her 1981 essay on the play for Women’s Studies, argued that this is the point: the comedy’s happy ending is built on the breaking of bonds between women, Titania’s with the votaress and Hermia’s with Helena, so that the men can be satisfied. Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), listed "possessive mothers" alongside "unruly wives" and "willful daughters" among the forms of female power the play brings "under the control of lords and husbands", and Titania is the play’s possessive mother. Readers who find these readings too stern should notice that the text supports them in one plain way: Titania never agrees to give the boy up. She hands him over under a spell, and when she wakes he is gone. The theme of gender and patriarchy in the fairy plot is not that the queen is persuaded but that she is not.
Is Titania degraded by her love for Bottom, or freed by it?
Both readings have a long history, and the scene that decides the question is the one in which she wakes beside him for the second time, garlands him with roses and kisses his ears:
Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come here and sit down on this bed of flowers,
While I caress your cheeks that I adore,
And stick sweet roses in your hair for hours,
And kiss your massive ears, my love amour.
On stage the passage is funny because Bottom is asking for oats. On the page it is a love poem, and the fact that the beloved is an ass does not change the quality of the verse. William Hazlitt (1817) heard in her earlier instructions to the fairies "a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the rhymes", and the sweetness is the point: Titania is not pretending.
Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), pushed the scene to its limit. In his reading the ass is not a symbol of stupidity but of sexual potency, and the night Titania spends with Bottom is the play’s hidden centre, a nightmare of desire that the morning politely forgets. Peter Brook’s 1970 production, which acknowledged Kott’s influence, carried Bottom off to Titania’s red-feather bower to the sound of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and left no doubt what happened there. Earlier critics and gentler productions have read the episode as a fairy’s whim, closer to a child dressing up a pet. The text supports the darker reading more than the lighter one, because it insists on the body: the ears, the hairy face, the honey-bag, the bed. Whether that makes Titania a victim or a woman briefly outside her husband’s rule is the question each production answers for itself.
Is Titania meant to be Queen Elizabeth?
Not directly, but the play keeps putting the two side by side. The name Titania comes from Ovid, where it is a title of Diana, the virgin goddess with whom Elizabeth was constantly identified. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published in 1590 and 1596, had already made the fairy queen a figure for the Queen of England. And when Oberon explains where his magic flower came from, he describes a virgin queen so chaste that Cupid’s arrow could not touch her:
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
(Oberon, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To leave the royal virgin unaffected,
To ponder her virginity unswayed.
The "imperial votaress" is almost certainly Elizabeth, and the compliment is pointed: the Queen is the one woman in the play who is never made to dote.
Louis Adrian Montrose’s "Shaping Fantasies" (1983) opens with a dream that the astrologer Simon Forman recorded in 1597, in which the Queen appeared to him as "a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready", and argues that the play, like the dream, is a fantasy shaped by living under a woman’s rule. On his reading Titania is not Elizabeth but Elizabeth’s shadow: a female sovereign who is drugged, humiliated and brought back under her husband’s authority, in a play performed before a queen who had no husband and answered to no one. Montrose is careful to say that the play does not attack Elizabeth. It does something subtler, which is to imagine, in the safe space of fairyland, what it would be like if the powerful woman could be mastered after all.
What does Titania’s speech about the seasons mean?
It means the fairy quarrel is a public disaster. Titania tells Oberon that because the two of them have not met to dance since early summer, the winds have raised fogs, the rivers have flooded, the corn has rotted and the folds stand empty. Then she describes the seasons themselves losing their places:
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We see the seasons change: severe frost
Destroys the freshly flowering crimson rose,
And Jack Frost wears a thin and icy crown
Made from a wreath of fragrant summer flowers
As if in mockery. The spring, the summer,
The fruitful autumn, angry winter, change
How they appear, and the befuddled world
Cannot discern one season from another.
Frost on the rose and summer buds on winter’s head: the images are of a world dressed in the wrong clothes, and the "mazed world" that cannot tell the seasons apart is the play’s first picture of confusion, before any lover has set foot in the wood.
The passage has usually been read topically. The English summers of 1594 to 1596 were disastrously wet and cold, with failed harvests and hunger, and most editors hear them in the speech. Samuel Johnson (1765) preferred to see an imitation of Ovid’s Ceres mourning the loss of her daughter, and the two explanations can both be true. What the speech does for the play is establish scale. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), described the green world of Shakespearean comedy as charged with "the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter", and Titania’s speech is the moment that victory is in doubt. The fairies’ marriage is a fertility rite, and while it is broken the land is barren. The theme of order and chaos reaches from the palace of Theseus to the weather.
Does Titania remember what happened to her?
Partly, and as a dream. When Oberon releases her she says she thought she was in love with an ass, sees Bottom asleep at her feet, and is revolted. She asks how it happened and is told to be quiet. Her last words before the fairies leave the wood are a request for an explanation:
Come, my lord, and in our flight
Tell me how it came this night
That I sleeping here was found
With these mortals on the ground.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come, my lord, and in our flight
Tell me what occurred tonight
That I, asleep, right here was found
With these humans on the ground.
Oberon has already told Puck that the mortals will remember the night only "as the fierce vexation of a dream", and he plainly intends the same for his wife. Whether he ever tells her the truth is not in the play.
Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), made the play’s treatment of dreams his central subject, observing that "nearly a third of all Shakespeare’s usages of the word ‘dream’ occur in only three plays, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream", and that this play contains only one real dream, Hermia’s of the serpent. Everything else called a dream, including Titania’s "visions", actually happened. Holland’s point is that the characters use the word to make the night bearable: what cannot be explained is filed as a dream and forgotten. For Titania this is convenient for her husband and troubling for the audience. She is the only character in the play who was wronged, and the only one who never learns it. The theme of dreams and reality is, in her case, a way of not knowing.
How does the fairy marriage compare with the human ones?
It is the play’s only existing marriage, and it is in trouble. The three human couples are on their way to the altar; Oberon and Titania have been married long enough to have histories, grievances and separate beds. Their first exchange sets the terms:
OBERON: Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?
TITANIA: Then I must be thy lady: but I know...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
OBERON: You are impetuous: aren’t I your husband?
TITANIA: If so, then I’m your wife, but I’m aware...
He claims lordship; she claims the title that goes with it and then reminds him of every time he has abused it. The quarrel is between equals who are not, in law, equal, and that is a fair description of an Elizabethan marriage.
Catherine Belsey, in her essay for the Folger edition (1993), noted that the play "does not ignore the trace of violence that exists within love when the other person fails to conform to the lover’s idealized image", and the fairy marriage is where that violence is most visible: Oberon’s response to being refused is to drug his wife. The human plot echoes it. Theseus wooed Hippolyta with his sword; Egeus threatens Hermia with death; Demetrius threatens Helena with worse. The fairies are not a contrast to the mortals but a magnified version of them, and the reconciliation at the end of Act 4, with its music and its dance, is achieved by the same means as the human ones: the woman gives way. Shirley Nelson Garner (1981) read this as the play’s design. Others read it as its honesty. Either way, Titania’s marriage is the model for the three that follow, and the audience has seen how it was mended.
How has Titania been staged?
For two centuries as a spectacle. Samuel Pepys saw the play in 1662 and called it "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life", adding that he had enjoyed "some good dancing and some handsome women", which tells us what the Restoration stage did with the fairy queen. Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy-Queen (1692) turned her scenes into masques, and the Victorian theatre gave her gauze wings, a troupe of child fairies and Mendelssohn.
The modern Titania begins with Peter Brook’s 1970 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Sara Kestelman played her as an adult woman, doubling Hippolyta, in a white box set with a bower of red ostrich feathers, and the scenes with Bottom were played for their sexual content rather than their charm. Since then the doubling with Hippolyta has become standard, and it makes a point the text only hints at: the conquered Amazon and the drugged fairy queen are the same woman, mastered twice.
The part remains one of the hardest in the play to cast, because it needs two things at once. Titania must be a sovereign, able to hold the stage against Oberon and describe the ruin of the seasons with authority; and she must then be foolish in front of everyone without losing the audience’s respect. Productions that manage only the second turn her into a joke. Productions that manage both make the humiliation hurt, which is what the play seems to want.
