From the words of Portia, a woman who had to disguise herself as a male lawyer to be heard, to the words of Titania, the Queen of the Fairies in her battle of words with her husband Oberon in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Interestingly there a fewer versions of this speech to be found online and many of those are obviously created by the performer themselves.
“These are the forgeries of jealousy” (Act 2 Scene 1) This is the first time we are introduced to the world of the fairies within the play. Puck has just introduced what is happening, and he has set the scene for the feud between the Titania and “her jealous Oberon – the king of the fairies. These two have fallen out over a changeling boy that Oberon “wants for his henchman”, but Titania will not surrender him. Like with most fights, however, we get the sense that there is more to it than meets the eye. Oberon before this speech accuses Titania of cheating on him with Theseus, and here is her powerful response. Similar to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale she is standing up proudly against a jealous partner!
The play is filled with incidences of women being oppressed by the actions of the powerful men who control them. Oberon responds to this challenge with a a love potion intended to make her fall in love with the first person she encounters after waking. There is a sense of disappointment that although Titania is able to stand up to Oberon, after she has been released from the spell and knows the source of her cruel treatment, she does not make any comebacks against Oberon.
The trick is particularly cruel because the potion has turned her from a strong, independent woman into a lovesick girl, completely subject to a man – a man who has no good qualities, literally a donkey, and devoid of any ability to make sensible judgments. This is a highly theatrical and ironic demonstration of one of the most dominant themes in Shakespeare’s plays – the oppression of women by powerful men, ironic because she is subservient to a man who is no more than an ass, as so many of the powerful men in Shakespeare are.
Titania’s marriage to Oberon is a version of an open relationship – an interesting thing in a play written more than four hundred years ago. Both partners enjoy consensual extra-marital episodes. One could, therefore, call Titania a forerunner of the figures who produced the feminist movement with its sexual liberation. She is also well before her time in being something of an eco-warrior in that she worries about her quarrel with Oberon having adverse consequences for the environment: she feels that as they are the leading spirits of the natural world their quarrel will upset the harmony and order of nature and bring about some unpleasant environmental conditions.
