Titania
Titania is the play's fairy queen and its most formally magnificent presence — her poetry among the richest in the play — but also its most involuntarily comic figure, the locus of the drama's central joke about the indignity of enchanted desire. Her arc traces the cost of Oberon's authority: a queen humiliated into compliance and restored to dignity without ever quite winning the argument.
Appears In
Biography
Titania is the Queen of the Fairies, a figure of sovereign beauty and fierce maternal loyalty whose refusal to yield the changeling boy to Oberon makes her the play's most sympathetic victim even before the enchantment begins. The boy's mother was her devoted companion, dead in childbirth, and Titania keeps the child for love of her — a reason the play presents as entirely honourable, even as Oberon treats it as mere stubbornness.
Her enchantment — the love-in-idleness juice causing her to wake and adore Bottom with his ass's head — is the play's most spectacular comic situation, and Shakespeare plays it with a full awareness of its simultaneous absurdity and pathos. Titania's love for Bottom is sincere within its enchantment: she calls him wise and beautiful, commands her fairies to tend him, and speaks to him with a tenderness that the comedy cannot quite strip of its dignity.
When Oberon lifts the spell, Titania wakes beside the sleeping Bottom with genuine revulsion — 'My Oberon, what visions have I seen!' — and is reunited with her husband without the play ever allowing her to argue her case about the changeling, which Oberon has already taken. Her reconciliation is gracious but the audience is permitted to notice its terms.
Motivation
Titania is motivated by loyalty to her dead votaress and by the sovereign pride of a queen who does not yield to demands, however insistent. Her love for the changeling is an expression of both, and her refusal to give him up is the play's only genuine act of principled stubbornness.
Personality
Titania is defined by the contrast between her grandeur and her vulnerability: she is the play's most powerful female figure and also its most thoroughly manipulated one. Her language is the play's most lavishly beautiful, her fairy world the most elaborately imagined, and her enchanted love for Bottom the most comic situation — yet Shakespeare never lets any of these facts cancel the others out. She is simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent, and the play is honest enough to make both things true at once.