The rulers are constructed to correspond to Theseus, King of Athens and his wife to be, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The four characters correspond only in rank and thereafter differ almost completely. The humans rule in the city and the fairies in the forest, physically and ideologically; Hippolyta is the queen of a race of warrior women whilst Titania is the picture of delicate feminine grace; Theseus would force Hermia to deny love and marry Demetrius whilst Oberon would move heaven and earth merely to see two people in love. There is nothing more Oberon and Titania like than seeing love and being loved, even if it means extra marital affairs. In their tense meeting, after a lengthy separation, in 2.i they take each other to task over the fact that they are constantly adopting a variety of guises to woo influential or beautiful humans. Choosing usually to avoid each other, the only reason they meet in the Athenian forest that night is because they have come separately to Athens to bless the marital bed of one of their past loves: Oberon his Hippolyta, and Titania her Theseus. But even this is not the heart of the discord in the fairy ranks. Titania has a small changeling boy from India and Oberon wants it. Titania was unwilling to give the boy to him and so the fairies split into the two factions: those supporting the king, and those supporting the queen. It is acknowledged by both parties in 2.i that their quarrel is directly responsible for the wet weather and poor harvests of the previous summer. “The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn/Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard./The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,/And crows are fatted with the murrion flock.” (2/1/94-97). This infertile summer is actually a direct reference to the disastrously lean summer of 1594, the year before A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first produced. This reference to recent environmentally tragic events serves to make the influence of the fairies tangible and believable to the audience and makes quite a statement about the power of the fairy rulers and the role of the fairies in the natural order as a whole.
Of course, these characters also serve a very important role in the central plot of the piece. Oberon’s quarrel with Titania, he believes can be solved by anointing her eyes with the juice of a certain flower that would cause her to “… madly dote/Upon the next live creature that [she] sees.” (2/1/171-172) which just happens to be Bottom whose head is at that time that of an ass’s, transfigured thus by Puck in, he assures, an unrelated incident. This magical flower, made so by one of Cupid’s arrows which struck it after he misfired, is used by Oberon not only to teach Titania a lesson, but becomes embroiled in the love triangle plus one of the Athenian youths. Oberon sees Demetrius scorn Helena and so instructs Puck to anoint his eyes so that he will fall in love with her and they can then live happily ever after and propagate love and the human race. Puck, however, fails dismally in his task and causes Lysander to forsake Hermia, his true love, for his magical love, Helena. To try and repair the damage Oberon anoints Demetrius’ eyes and all chaos ensues as the love triangle is reversed leaving its previous focus, Hermia, to bemoan her newfound status as ‘plus one’. Eventually, as in all comedies based on the ancient Greek tradition, the situation is sorted out and we finally end up with two couples who are in love with each other and are ready to perform the ultimate fertility rite and get married, soon thereafter to consummate those marriages to be sure. Oberon also sorts out his quarrel with Titania, which I shall discuss later, so that we end the play with a multiple wedding, the Mechanicals’ anti-masque, a joyful blessing of all three marriages and marriage beds by the reunited fairy monarchs and a joyous, frenetic dance by the fairies to provide true conclusion to the happy ending.
But in the resolution of the flower crisis, many interesting questions are raised about the nature of love and whether it has anything to do with reason. Throughout the Athenian lovers’ plot there is constant reference to Cupid, the messenger of love, being blind or love being irrational to those who aren’t experiencing it. There is also a huge debate between reason and feeling. The royal fairies are embroiled in all three. Not only does Oberon force people to love against their sober judgement, but he also does it with a flower that became magical when Cupid missed his mark. It is a powerful image of the fallibility of Cupid and his enforced love and because the eventual resolution of the chaos comes through the antidote for the flower we see Shakespeare suggesting that true love is not simply passion or desire and is above reason and the intellect, existing as a pure emotion of the highest and most delicate order. The fairies and particularly their monarchs are the personification of this delicacy and truly establish the dreamlike quality of this play. From the moment we enter the forest and they arrive in 2.i to the moment they leave and we leave the forest in 4.i the play moves swiftly, tripping along from fantastic event to fantastic event creating the kind of chaos one can only expect in dreams combined with a refinement and a delicacy of speech and imagery that gives all their actions an ephemeral candy-floss feel. This seeming insubstantiality to everything that occurs, no matter how grave or monumental, creates a truly dreamlike experience. Their sweeping language and delicate activities offset by the size of their emotions and the huge repercussions of their argument serve to create believable dreamlike paradoxes revolving around the power of love and the role of reason in love and the natural world as a whole. Love has, Shakespeare suggests, the power to heal or to truly destroy and always has repercussions in the world around the couple, be they warring or loving each other, and he proposes that the amount of couples loving in any particular place is directly proportional to how pleasant the place is. Less is not more for Shakespeare, so too with the ancient Greeks, more is more and the more the merrier.
But then how does this theme tie up with the fact that Oberon forces Titania to love the ass-headed Bottom and thereby solves their conflict to both their satisfaction? To get to the heart of why the fairies are fighting we need to understand why Oberon wants the changeling boy more than a peaceful happy relationship with his queen. I believe that the answer lies in why Titania wants to keep the boy and that, in turn, is only solved by why she gives it up. Titania says in 2.i that she is keeping the boy simply for the sake of a votaress of her order that was a mortal and died giving birth to him. But when she is infatuated with Bottom, she gives up the boy to Oberon without a fight, suggesting to me that her love for the boy (or the mother) has been forgotten in her new passion for the Mechanical. After her love for Bottom is removed she falls in at Oberon’s side again asking only how she ended up in the company of mortals. Obviously, her passion for Bottom eclipsed her passion for the boy that had previously eclipsed her love for Oberon and therein lies the root of their conflict. The total discord in the fairy ranks and the resultant disharmony and infertility of nature is because Titania allowed her passion to eclipse her love and Oberon couldn’t bring himself to wait for it to pass. But then what about the extra-marital relations Oberon and Titania are supposed to have had? They were also passing passions, but I believe none of them was allowed to truly eclipse the one’s love for the other – if any of them were, in all time, similar natural strife would ensue until it was sorted out. But I feel that the natural disorder caused by their rows is the last thing on their mind. Oberon doesn’t want the boy because he is causing chaos in the natural world; he wants the boy because Titania wants the boy more than she wants him. He is jealous and quickly moved to anger, as all true lovers are, and in his effort to regain her love he also exacts a vindictive revenge by making her fall in love with an ass.
Oberon and Titania are powerful and petty and although their power and pettiness revolves around love, one cannot help seeing the correlation between them and ancient Greek gods. They are possessed of unfathomable powers and fight among themselves with little provocation completely unmindful of the havoc they are wreaking in the lives of ordinary mortals. They are conscious of their function in the natural order of things and of the disastrous consequences of their bickering, but they don’t care. In the moment their quarrel is of paramount importance and the effect it is having on the world is only brought up if one of them thinks that they can use it as a lever with which to win the argument. This very real, tangible effect that the fairy king and queen can have on the natural world of the Elizabethan audience and their value judgement that their fight is more important than the crops and indeed lives of this selfsame audience is what Shakespeare is establishing firmly through the Oberon-Titania plot. He wants his audience not only to fear the beings themselves, but also to realise their significance in the eyes of the fairies and to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing that they can do to stop their will. That is what makes them so frighteningly much like the ancient Greek gods, and that is what completes Shakespeare’s ‘Classical’ comedy excursion.
‘Classical’ comedy is a term that requires further explanation at this point. Aristotle set down in 350 BC exactly what he saw as the formula for good tragedy, epic poetry and comedy. This analysis included dissertations on plot, character playing and staging, but most importantly conventions of writing style. The classical Roman comedians adhered slavishly to the formulae set down by Aristotle and so it became the definitive starting point for most modern comedic conventions. Some Roman writers also simply translated certain Greek texts and merely added a few bits here and there to give the ‘new comedy’ an appeal in Rome. This activity added more conventions to ‘the definitive comedy’ like the fact that they should all be set in and around Athens, preferably in the woods. Aristotle stated that a comedy should be constructed of three parts: protasis, epitasis and catastrophe. The protasis creates the conditions upon which the subsequent events will depend; it’s where the comedy essentially gets kicked into gear. The epitasis is the phase where complication after complication arises for the main characters; things begin to go farcically wrong and chaos reigns supreme. The catastrophe is the resolution of all of the complications (quite often via a deus ex machina) and an imposition of ritual onto the chaos, but we are usually left with a sense that traces of the chaos remains and the ritual is all the better, and more fertile, for it. Aristotle’s choice of classic comedic conventions to record paints the picture that comedy is about making sense of the random, exploring alternate lifestyles and, most importantly, fertility. This fertility emphasis comes from the very origin of classical Greek comedy – the comos oide or ‘revelry song’ usually acted out by a group of men toting a giant phallus hurling comic abuse at each other in a powerful fertility rite at the earliest Dionyssiae. Over time, certain exchanges of wit became so popular they were repeated verbatim every year and eventually we have a definite form and ritual emerging that was the first comedy. Shakespeare chooses to end his comedies with weddings to stay true to the fertility roots of classical comedy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he tries to use every stricture and structure laid down by Aristotle and every convention cemented into place by the likes of Plautus and Meander to create a truly classic comedy. His protasis is 1.i where he sets up who the lovers are, why they leave the city and why there is such a convoluted relationship among the four of them. The epitasis all happens in the realm of, and is partially the agency of, Oberon and Titania. The catastrophe begins when all the lovers are finally asleep at the end of act 3 and continues right up until the end. The play is set in and around Athens and ends with, not only a triple marriage, but an actual fertility rite acted out by the fairies and their rulers to give the play a real fertility kick, whilst keeping the chaos at a perfect level. But to make this play more like a classical text than mere conventions could, Shakespeare endeavours to have his audience thinking of Oberon and Titania in the same way ancient Greeks and Romans viewed their gods, making the fertility rite at the end seem as promising and real as the summer in 1594 was dreadful.
By making his audience truly believe in the destructive power of Oberon and Titania’s love when it is disrupted, Shakespeare makes all the more powerful their united love and the great healing energy it would bestow upon the land. By making his audience truly believe in Oberon and Titania as godly figures, I believe that they would have left the theatre feeling much better about life and the situation in the world around them. Things had been really bad, but now life and love are on the rise again and being carefully watched over by two higher beings. Even though Oberon gets involved in mortals’ lives on passing fancy and proceeds to wreak havoc, it is never something he cannot solve with time, or will leave unfinished. Titania wants to create and preserve beauty at all costs and together with her husband is the most powerful force for good in the world. All of this good intent is based on fertility in its purest form, love. By making his audience really believe in the power of Oberon and Titania, he gets them to buy in to the power of love.
Oberon and Titania, for me, personify Shakespeare’s ideals for powerful love, the kind of love that can really work positive change. They are not humans, or anything lower, in the chain of being and so their love is not base or vulgar and purely about sex. They aren’t God either and so the love they have and exemplify is not the truest and most divine love, thank goodness, because this kind of love is totally platonic and ultimately infertile. Their love is a mixture of both the base and the divine that, whilst not vindicating orgies, promotes sex while at the same time is still firmly rooted in a true love. The arranged marriages that were so prevalent in Shakespeare’s time are the antithesis of this kind of love and so it is only fitting that the fairy monarchs succeed in breaking up the proposed unhappy marriage between Hermia and Demetrius, replacing it with two happy couples to dance down the aisle at the end. Fertility, love and luck all seem to multiply when the fairies are on your side. Fertility and luck both appear to have good, practical uses but why is an abundance of mortal love a good thing?
An abundance of love in the land of the fairies ensures a good crop and plenty of healthy children, but I think that Shakespeare was more concerned in his debate with the state of love between people and its nature. Oberon especially is responsible for stretching most Elizabethan preconceptions about love to breaking point. Taking them to their most ridiculous extreme not only heightens the comedy, but also helps Shakespeare explode these preconceptions in his audience’s face raising his debate about love. The awesome regenerative power of Oberon and Titania’s love is an amplification, Shakespeare suggests, of the power of our own love.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the closest Shakespeare ever got to pure classical comedy. It fulfils all the conventions of structure and style and can truly function as a fertility rite and stand as a testament to the power of love because of Oberon and Titania. The play puts forward that there are many types of illusory love out there but strongly asserts that true loves like Oberon and Titania’s and Lysander and Hermia’s do exist and that they are almost essential to the survival of England. Through the fairy monarchs Shakespeare intrinsically links love and the wellbeing of the natural world and therefore the natural order. A violation of Oberon or Titania’s love becomes a violation of the chain of being because they become believable god figures via Shakespeare’s allowing their actions to have a significant impact on the mortals’ world. Being in this position of almost blasé power, much like the Greek and Roman gods of old, makes Oberon and Titania the perfect vehicle and catalyst for Shakespeare’s debate about love because their every whimsical emotion is amplified in the natural world. Their world is ripe with dreamlike infinite possibility and functions clearly throughout the play to articulate not only the action, but Shakespeare’s themes as well. Oberon and Titania are the ultimate anti-agalasts and so it is only fitting that they end one of the greatest classical comedies ever written dancing through the palace of Athens performing a powerful and lasting fertility rite.
