A To Z Challenge 2022: Shakespeare - O Is For Oberon And Olivia

By Joseph Noel Paton. Public Domain

 A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my favourite Shakespeare comedies, along with Much Ado About Nothing and A Comedy Of Errors. It’s hilarious! Trying to explain the storyline is pretty hard, though. There are three stories, four if you count the royal wedding - and, in fact, quite often Theseus and Hippolyta also play Oberon and Titania. 

Anyway, O is for Oberon. Oberon is the king of the fairies. His wife is Titania. When the two of them have a real fight, the weather can go crazy, as mentioned in the play. 

In this story, though, the fight is over a changeling boy. You know what changelings are, right? Usually they are human children stolen away by the fairies and swapped for fairies, including elderly fairies who want a holiday. 

In this case, though, the boy is an orphan. Titania wants to hang on to him, because his mother was a dear friend, a priestess of her order in India. So, basically she and Oberon are minor gods. 

Oberon wants the kid to be a part of his retinue, hunting with him and such. When Titania refuses to hand him over, Oberon decides to have a bit of fun and hopefully get the child anyway. He sends his sidekick Puck to pick up a certain flower with interesting properties - not quite an aphrodisiac, but it does make you fall passionately in love with the next living thing you see. The idea is that Titania will make a fool of herself over someone totally ugly. Which she does, going crazy over a lower class mortal, Bottom, who is innocently rehearsing with his friends in the forest for a play they hope to perform for the royal wedding. To make absolutely certain, Puck gives him a donkey head. (Just as well, since in the most recent film version of Dream, the role of Bottom was played by the dashing Kevin Kline). 

While all this is going on, Oberon shows he is really quite kind, ordering Puck to use some of that juice to make young lover Demetrius fall back in love with Helena, his former girlfriend who has followed him into the forest. Puck gets the wrong couple, making Lysander, the other young man, fall in love with Helena and dump his own girlfriend, Hermia. In one scene BOTH boys are in love with Helena, who thinks they are sending her up. Oberon has to get it sorted out, but by morning the two couples are back to normal and ready to get married.

You realise just how powerful Oberon is when you see the National Theatre production, in which the lines are swapped and Titania does all this, while Oberon falls in love with Bottom. It does make a huge difference.

I confess I nearly wrote this couple into my novel Wolfborn, just for fun, but my editor told me firmly that they belong in Shakespeare and my story was set a few centuries earlier, so I replaced them with a couple of Gaulish gods who suited the story.

King Of Shadows, by the wonderful Susan Cooper, author of The Dark Is Rising series, is about Nat Field, an American boy actor in England to play Puck, who gets very sick one night and wakes to find himself in Shakespeare’s England. He is supposed to be playing Puck in a revival production, and the boy he has replaced has the same name as he has and has been brought in after the regular boy has gone on the road with comedian Will Kemp. The role of Oberon is being played by Shakespeare himself and they form a father/son relationship. The “King of shadows” is Oberon. I won’t tell you more, due to spoilers, but read it if you can, or there is a radio play.

O is for Olivia, from Twelfth Night. 

Olivia is a rich young woman who has vowed to stay away from men for a certain time, in mourning for her brother. Despite this, the Duke, Orsino, is wooing her and being sent away. Finally he sends his new servant, Cesario, who is really Viola, a shipwrecked girl, to woo Olivia for him. Apart from the fact that Viola is a girl, she is also in love with Orsino. She does her best anyway.

The real problem is when Olivia falls in love with “Cesario”, completely forgetting her vow, and makes her interest clear. Poor Viola has Olivia pursuing her on the one side and Orsino threatening her on the other, when he thinks she is his rival.

Fortunately for everyone, Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian, turns up and Olivia, thinking it’s Cesario, grabs him and promptly marries him. He has no idea what’s going on, but when a beautiful, rich girl wants you, why argue? 

This role can be very funny if played right, as I discovered when I saw a production done by the Melbourne Theatre Company. The actress playing Olivia was, in my opinion, the funniest cast member in the show. 

When I did a French language conversation class at university, our tutor was a professional French actor, who had played Orsino. He made the point that when Orsino accepts Viola at the end, as far as he is concerned she is Cesario. She doesn’t even change her clothes. It is an interesting point, which applies also to Olivia, though she does accept Sebastian. She fell in love with Cesario, not Viola. In a YA novel I read, she is still in love with Viola many years after they both marry. 

Just a thought! 

Tomorrow we will talk about Pericles, Prince of Tyre!