airy characters treated by Shakespeare may be mentioned Oberon,
king of fairyland, and Titania, his queen. They are represented as
keeping rival courts in consequence of a quarrel, the cause of which is
thus told by Puck ("Midsummer-Night's Dream," ii. 1):

"The king doth keep his revels here to-night:
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;
But she perforce withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy;
And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen," etc.

Oberon first appears in the old French romance of "Huon de Bourdeaux,"
and is identical with Elberich, the dwarf king of the German story of
Otuit in the "Heldenbuch." The name Elberich, or, as it appears in the
"Nibelungenlied," Albrich, was changed, in passing into French, first
into Auberich, then into Auberon, and finally became our Oberon. He is
introduced by Spenser in the "Fairy Queen" (book ii. cant. i. st. 6),
where he describes Sir Guyon:

"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]

[3] Aldis Wright's "Midsummer-Night's Dream," 1877, Preface,
pp. xv., xvi.; Ritson's "Fairy Mythology," 1875, pp. 22, 23.

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. i