Titania

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 396, 24 January 1947, Page 18

Titania

\VAFTED on drifts of, Mendelssohniana, and preceded by what seemed like a good five minutes of BBC buil4up, Titania appeared to take her place in 2YA’s Friday night series Shakespeare’s Characters, But, like Cluny Brown, she seems to suffer from the fact that nobody (except possibly Titania herself) seems to know her place, least of all the gentleman responsible for the script. The announcer’s introductory remarks are extremely poetic. He describes A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Shakespeare’s Moonlight Sonata, declares that the moon or moonlight is mentioned 42 times therein (we have not checked this), that Titania is the personification of this moonlight, "Diana translated into Warwickshire." The gentleman whose remarks conclude the programme (is it the same gentleman?) stresses the everyday-ness of Shakespeare’s fairies. They do not vanish into thin air, he points out, but into the oven, the milk-churn, the gossip’s bowl. So here in the one programme we have Presented to us the two conflicting theories held by critics in regard to the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Are they of the earth, earthy; are they merely, to quote Ivor Brown, "ourselves in our livelier, more fantastical mo- ments?" Or shall we believe, as Agate and probably Peter Pan would have us believe, that Shakespeare’s fairies are more than mortal? Titania herself proclaims herself a spirit, yet appears to have worldly interests. I think she would rather bé regarded as near-mortal than non-mortal. Certainly she would lay no claim to the title of the Diana of Warwickshire (her references to the moun are always detached and not always complimentary) unless Diana is used, as King James used it in his Daemonologie -"That fourth kind of spirits, which by the Gentiles was called Diana... . how there was a King and Queen of Fairy .... how they naturally rode and went, and did all other actions like natural men and women." But whatever Titania’s status her yoice was music, and through the music she speaks for herself, making it clear that, in spite of the lapse of years neither she nor her creator has need of apologists. It is perhaps excusable if the BBC’s poetic eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, finds it dificult to find a suitable resting place between earth and heaven.