Titania

"I am a spirit of no common rate"

I’ve been thinking about Titania a lot recently, both for my podcast and for the research project I’m working on, which I swear I’ll do a proper post about soon (also, I realize we’ve done quite a few Midsummer characters already, but don’t you find it hard to think about any other plays in the springtime?). I’ve been considering her through a lot of different frameworks—the queer angle of the podcast, ideas about agency and consent that are guiding the research project—but here I want to think about her in terms of the things she has lost and loses during the play.

love

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is all about disputes about love. Oberon and Titania are having marriage problems for a range of reasons, not least the changeling child they are arguing over. Oberon has no right to the child, he just wants him; Titania feels she has a duty to his deceased mother: ‘for her sake I do rear up her boy; / And for her sake, I will not part with him’ (2.1.136-7). The child is a symbol of her loss and her grief for this lost woman, both a ‘votaress of [her] order’ (2.1.123) but also, from her descriptions, an intimate friend.

While sniping at each other, both Oberon and Titania point out that they are both in Athens to acknowledge the loss of other lovers: Hippolyta and Theseus, who are getting married to one another and thus, they seem to suggest, will no longer be available for romantic trysts with the fairy King and Queen respectively. Titania dismisses this as ‘the forgeries of jealousy’ (2.1.81) and Oberon is quick to agree that their dispute over the changeling child is the real problem. But as she leaves, Titania offers a coy reminder of what she never quite denied: asked how long she’ll remain in Athens, she replies, ‘Perchance till after Theseus’ wedding day’ (2.1.139). In practical terms, this integrates the fairies into the limited timeline that the play has already set in motion for the other subplots. But it also bookends the scene, or at least Titania’s participation in it, with references to this past relationship to Theseus—and contained within these bookends is a discussion of all the other ways Titania’s intimate relationships are in a state of dissolution and flux, through death, through marriage to others, and through envy and misunderstanding.

sight

Put like that, maybe Titania’s ripe for a rebound relationship. That it isn’t one of her own choosing is the problem. The magical flower that Puck (on Oberon’s orders) doses her with takes away her judgment, and thus her ability to make informed choices—but it’s specifically described as a loss of sight. After all, Oberon and Puck repeatedly mention that the flower’s juice has to be applied to the eyes.

When she wakes and sees Bottom, she describes how her ‘eye [is] enthralled to thy shape,’ and she is moved ‘On the first view, to say, to swear, I love thee’ (3.1.135-6). Removing the flower’s effects is, Oberon says, to ‘undo / This hateful imperfection in her eyes’ (4.1.62). Titania, waking, exclaims, ‘what visions I have seen!’ and, noticing Bottom, that ‘mine eyes do loathe his visage now’ (4.1.75-8). Like the human lovers, who will confusedly dismiss their experiences as a hazy dream, Titania feels she has been induced to see things that weren’t really there. In other words, it isn’t that she’s not thinking straight, she’s not seeing straight.

dignity

Since he can’t take away the changeling child, Oberon’s plan is to take away Titania’s pride. The fact that he can’t quite settle on what this plan is for is probably a subject to save for his newsletter, but he seems to be preparing for a different reaction from Titania than the one he gets. He tells the audience that he’ll charm Titania, and then, ‘ere I take his charm from off her sight / […] I’ll make her render up her page to me’ (2.1.183-5) (and notice that it’s once again her vision itself that’s being enchanted!). Oberon seems to be picturing a kind of blackmail— she’ll be so humiliated by her lust for whatever monster Oberon and Puck send to her, she’ll give up the child in exchange for restored clarity of sight.

But here’s what happens:

Her dotage now I do begin to pity.
For meeting her of late behind the wood,
Seeking sweet favours for this hateful fool,
I did upbraid her and fall out with her;
For she his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers,
And that same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flowerets’ eyes
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.
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 (4.1.45-58)

The only one who seems to be humiliated by this situation is Oberon. He imagines the flowers that Titania has decked Bottom with are weeping with embarrassment, but there’s no one else he can pin these feelings on. Titania and Bottom don’t mind—Titania responds to his mockery with ‘mild terms.’ There are a lot of ways to imagine the exchange, and the reason it leads her to give up the changeling, but the one left angered, distressed, and embarrassed is not Titania. She’s calm and happy, finding gifts for Bottom and generally seems to just be trying to make Oberon shut up and go away.

Maybe the charm has worked too well: now Titania can’t even see herself. But who is the audience for this loss of dignity, anyway? If Titania doesn’t mind, can it really be said to be a humiliation at all?

the child

The fact that the nominal source of Oberon and Titania’s feud and thus of most of the play’s plot is so easily forgotten could be taken as a sign that Shakespeare did not care very much about the pretense he set up… or perhaps that the capricious Oberon and Titania in fact do not care very much, and their real problem is with one another. They are certainly where Shakespeare chooses to focus when it comes to the play’s resolution: the problem of the changeling is, as quoted above, resolved offstage and never referenced again. What we actually see is the moment of Titania’s release from the charm, and her and Oberon’s blessing of the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta as a symbol of their own newfound marital harmony.

Like Demetrius, to return to herself and to return to her first love seem to be the same thing for Titania. Even though in theory Demetrius is still under an enchantment, as discussed in that post, he doesn’t talk like it: he speaks directly of in fact having returned to a truer sense of himself, one that pre-dated being distracted by Hermia. Similarly, Titania seems to return to a self that pre-dates her falling out with Oberon, the self that recognizes that their quarrels have been over a pretense that maybe doesn’t matter that much—especially since, if they just reunite, they can keep and raise the changeling child together. At the beginning of the play, Titania describes herself and Oberon as the ‘parents and originals’ of the turmoil in nature that has resulted from their arguing. The changeling child perhaps represents a chance to be a different kind of parents, as well as the mystical godparents of the children to be born of the marriages that they bless.