Titania

Titania is a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the play, she is the queen of the fairies. Due to Shakespeare's influence, later fiction has often used the name "Titania" for fairy queen characters.

In traditional folklore, the fairy queen has no name. Shakespeare took the name "Titania" from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where it is an appellation given to the daughters of Titans.

Shakespeare's Titania is a very proud creature and as much of a force to contend with as her husband Oberon. The marital quarrel she and Oberon are engaged in over which of them should have the keeping of an Indian changeling boy is the engine that drives the mix ups and confusion of the other characters in the play. Due to an enchantment cast by Oberon's servant Puck, Titania magically falls in love with a 'rude mechanical' (a lower class labourer), Nick Bottom the Weaver, who has been given the head of an ass by Puck, who feels it is better suited to his character. It has been argued that this incident is an inversion of the Circe story. In this case the tables are turned on the character and, rather than the sorceress turning her lovers into animals, she is made to love an ass after Bottom has been transformed.

In the second act, Titania refers to the Athenians as "human mortals." Scholar John Hale interprets this as a reference to the mortality of humans from the fairy point of view, indicative of Shakespeare's ability to write from the perspective of all of his characters. Titania's use of the word "mortal" both looks down upon and sympathizes with youths.