“Well could he tournay, and in lists debate,
And knighthood tooke of good Sir Huon’s hand,
When with King Oberon he came to faery land.”
And in the tenth canto of the same book (stanza 75) he is the allegorical representative of Henry VIII. The wise Elficleos left two sons,
“of which faire Elferon,
The eldest brother, did untimely dy;
Whose emptie place the mightie Oberon
Doubly supplide, in spousall and dominion.”
“Oboram, King of Fayeries,” is one of the characters in Greene’s “James the Fourth.”[3]
The name Titania for the queen of the fairies appears to have been the invention of Shakespeare, for, as Mr. Ritson[4] remarks, she is not “so called by any other writer.” Why, however, the poet designated her by this title, presents, according to Mr. Keightley,[5] no difficulty. “It was,” he says, “the belief of those days that the fairies were the same as the classic nymphs, the attendants of Diana. The fairy queen was therefore the same as Diana, whom Ovid (Met. iii. 173) styles Titania.” In Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale” Pluto is the king of faerie, and his queen, Proserpina, “who danced and sang about the well under the laurel in January’s garden.”[6]
In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4) she is known by the more familiar appellation, Queen Mab. “I dream’d a dream to-night,” says Romeo, whereupon Mercutio replies, in that well-known famous passage—
“O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you,”
this being the earliest instance in which Mab is used to designate the fairy queen. Mr. Thoms[7] thinks that the origin of this name is to be found in the Celtic, and that it contains a distinct allusion to the diminutive form of the elfin sovereign. Mab, both in Welsh and in the kindred dialects of Brittany, signifies a child or infant, and hence it is a befitting epithet to one who
“comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman.”