Titania is a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the play, she is the queen of the fairies. Due to Shakespeare's influence, later fiction has often used the name "Titania" for fairy queen characters.
In traditional folklore, the fairy queen has no name. Shakespeare took the name "Titania" from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where it is an appellation given to the daughters of Titans.
Shakespeare's Titania is a very proud creature and as much of a force to contend with as her husband Oberon. She and Oberon are engaged in a marital quarrel over which of them should have the keeping of an Indian changeling boy. This quarrel is the engine that drives the mix ups and confusion of the other characters in the play. Due to an enchantment cast by Oberon's servant Puck, Titania magically falls in love with a "rude mechanical" (a labourer), Nick Bottom the weaver, has been given the head of a donkey by Puck, who feels it is better suited to his character. It has been argued that this incident is an inversion of the Circe story. In this case the tables are turned on the character, and rather than the sorceress turning her lovers into animals, she is made to love a donkey after Bottom has been transformed.
Titania (Mary MacPherran), is a supervillainess appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. She is notable for being one of Marvel's strongest human female characters, and the wife of the Absorbing Man. She was created by then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter and was introduced in the 1984 crossover limited series Secret Wars. Titania became a rival of the She-Hulk. She has also been a member of several incarnations of the Masters of Evil and the Frightful Four.
MacPherran is the second Marvel supervillainess to use the name. The first Titania (Davida DaVito) was a female wrestler and member of The Grapplers who was murdered by the Scourge of the Underworld. Upon DaVito's resurrection, her powers were expanded and she took the name Lascivious, as MacPherran had become much more strongly identified with the name Titania.
Titania was introduced in Secret Wars #3, and has appeared in many Marvel comics since then.
Mary MacPherran is the name of a real-life Marvel production assistant who was asked by Jim Shooter if it was permissible to name a character after her. In 2011, Shooter posted a photo on his blog of a group of Marvel staffers, with a caption identifying the real MacPherran. In a comment, Shooter said of MacPherran,
Titania is a fictional character, a comic book faerie published by DC Comics. She first appeared in The Sandman #19 (September 1990), and was created by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. She is inspired by and implied to be the same as Titania as the faerie queen in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, .
As part of his comic The Sandman, writer Neil Gaiman planned a small arc involving William Shakespeare entering a deal with the Dream King to write plays that would live on after him. Having introduced Shakespeare, Gaiman then decided to tell the story of the first play that the writer wrote for Dream in payment of the bargain. He turned to his favourite of Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream creating analogues of the play's main otherworldly characters and inventing the fiction that Shakespeare wrote the play to Dream's instructions to ensure that humans never forgot Faerie and its rulers, Lord Auberon and Lady Titania. Having created her, Gaiman used Titania as a recurring character throughout the series, and when he was asked part way through his run on The Sandman to write a script to introduce DC's magical characters to a new audience he gave her a guest role in the resultant mini-series, The Books of Magic.