A historicist angle comes out in Patterson’s discussion of the passage in 2.1.155-64, where Theseus describes the origin of the flower that Puck squeezes into the eyes of the lovers. Since the late 19 ^th century, critics have seen here a veiled reference to Elizabeth, who escaped Cupid’s arrow and continued in “maiden meditation, fancy-free.” Patterson notes, “As the moon goddess, Diana, Cynthia, or Phoebe, she was celebrated as the Belphoebe of Spenser’s Fairie Queene, and the Cynthia of Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Ralegh’s The Octean’s Love to Cynthia, all texts of the 1590s when Elizabeth was approaching or in her sixties . . . . Further, as the title of Spenser’s poem indicates, the myths of the classical moon-goddess also merged, for the unique moment of Elizabeth’s reign, with fairy legends of Titania and Oberan. Even in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Titania was another name for Diana (III, 173); during a royal progress of 1591 the ‘Fairy Queen’ presented Elizabeth with a chaplet that she had received from ‘Auberon the Fairy King’; and after her death Thomas Dekker referred to Elizabeth as Titania in his Whore of Babylon (1607).”

If this is the connection intended, Pattern suggests, it is not entirely complimentary to Elizabeth, because Titania’s intransigence has created turmoil in the natural world. Paternson suggests that the bad harvests of 1595-6, and the Oxfordshire revolt of November 1596, may be in the background here. Is this a suggestion that England’s Titania could stabilize things if she were to submit to some Oberan?