"Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing" by William Blake
A Midsummer Night's Dream tells the story of two kingdoms and two monarchs: Theseus of ancient Athens and Oberon of Faerie. They rule cheek–by–jowl, one in the city and one in the forest wilderness, connected not only geographically, but by their love for Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, a race of female warriors. As the play begins, Theseus is about to wed Hippolyta, having defeated her in battle, and Oberon is in the midst of a serious rift with his wife, Titania, the Queen of Faerie. So the human couple, who began in strife, has moved into amity, and the Faerie couple, having begun in love, has moved into deadly hate.
The bone of contention between Oberon and Titania is "a little changeling boy." Fairy changelings were particularly beautiful human children stolen by fairies, who then left a fairy infant in their place. The substituted child, often a defective specimen to begin with and unused to human food and nurture, would slowly sicken and die. This belief may well have served to explain the tragic real–life cases of children who failed to thrive, providing some measure of comfort to grieving parents.
Titania's changeling boy, however, was not stolen but was willed to the Faerie Queen by a beloved human:
His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side . . .
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 (2.1).
Oberon has asked Titania to give him the boy for his own entourage, either because he has no son of his own, or perhaps purely out of vanity. Titania denies him, but we are not sure why; perhaps she truly loves the boy, or perhaps she is tired of Oberon's high–handed ways, or perhaps she is repaying Oberon for some infidelity. There is no source for this section of the play (and Shakespeare rarely created his tales from whole cloth), so we can presume Shakespeare had some particular point to make here about the relationships between the human and unseen worlds by complicating the relationship between Titania and Oberon.
"Puck, the Changeling, and Titania" by George RomneyOberon and Titania are characters with multiple origins — Shakespeare draws from Plutarch's Lives for their history and their connections to Theseus and Hippolyta, but from the medieval romance Huon of Bordeaux for Oberon's character. Titania's infatuation with Bottom has a comic Roman source in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, but liaisons between humans and fairies are as old as fairy lore itself. Puck himself has a similarly long and complex pedigree. Though most directly a form of the shape–shifting púca (a malicious Celtic fairy that took the form of various animals, most commonly a horse, to carry a hapless night wanderer on a terrifying journey), Puck is also related to the homely hob or hearth–spirit, in turn descended from the Greek fertility godlings who became the Roman household gods, the lares and penates.
So Shakespeare's fairies are a motley collection, sharing qualities with the alluring Daoine Sidhe of Irish tradition, the Shining ones who live under the hills, as well as the carefree nature spirits — the water, flower, and earth spirits of classical mythology — and the humanlike semi–divine heroes of medieval romance. Their activities are similarly varied, ranging from garden–variety mischief to near–apocalyptic disaster.
Puck's pranks center around the home and hearth, country roads and marshes, food and barnyard animals. Oberon and Titania's influence is much greater. Their discord has caused the seasons to alter and the land to become barren, subject to flood, drought, and pestilence. For Puck to meddle in the love affairs and petty fantasies of humankind is to be expected, and as such is a comfortingly familiar theme for Shakespeare's working–class audience; for Titania and Oberon to descend to such things is a piece of comic absurdity that Shakespeare's more educated viewers would have appreciated. Shakespeare's plays revel in the almost frantic sense of variety and change made possible by his new art form — the magical "Wooden O" that could be so many different places at once, peopled by that new breed of artist — the professional actor — who could be anyone or anything at a moment's notice. These actors, this theater, had never before existed on English soil until the 16th century; small wonder Shakespeare chose to present tales that were rooted in the oldest beliefs and oral traditions. The allure of the familiar in such a novel setting was irresistible to an artist of Shakespeare's caliber.
The worlds of Faerie and humankind were characterized in Celtic and even earlier myth as fatally separate from one another, yet interdependent. The legendary descendents of the Sidhe once lived in amity with humans, but that union had been breached long ago, and the split had been made permanent by the meddling of the Church. As Chaucer's Wife of Bath explains:
For now the so–great charity and prayers
Of limiters and other holy friars
That do infest each land and every stream
As thick as motes are in a bright sunbeam,
Blessing halls, chambers, kitchens, ladies' bowers,
Cities and towns and castles and high towers,
Manors and barns and stables, aye and dairies–
This causes it that there are now no fairies.
For where was wont to walk full many an elf,
Right there walks now the limiter himself
In noons and afternoons and in mornings,
Saying his matins and such holy things,
As he goes round his district in his gown. (871–83)
Post–Christian–era humans feared the Faerie realm, while fairies tormented and exploited any human foolish enough to meddle with them or their sacred places.