My right hip joint is now a metallic wonder, a titanium replacement in 2012 for the joint nature gave me, which had excruciatingly degenerated from osteoarthritis. I love the name titanium: it trips off the tongue, and as a proud gay man and an enthusiast of MND (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in several of its incarnations, I choose to understand the name as a reference to Titania, Queen of the Fairies — silly faggot, titanium is for ur-deities.
Now to unpack all of this.
First, yes, yes: silly rabbit, Trix is for kids. And then …
The chemical element. From Wikipedia:
Titanium is a chemical element; it has symbol Ti and atomic number 22. Found in nature only as an oxide, it can be reduced to produce a lustrous transition metal with a silver color, low density, and high strength that is resistant to corrosion in sea water, aqua regia, and chlorine.
Titanium was discovered in Cornwall, Great Britain, by William Gregor in 1791 and was named by Martin Heinrich Klaproth after the Titans of Greek mythology.
The ur-deities. From Wikipedia:
In Greek mythology, the Titans were the deities who preceded the Olympians. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, they were the twelve children of the primordial deities Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). The six male Titans were Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus, and the six female Titans … were Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys.
… The Titans were the former deities, the generation of gods preceding the Olympians. They were overthrown as part of the Greek succession myth, which tells how Cronus seized power from his father Uranus and ruled the cosmos with his fellow Titans before in turn being defeated and replaced as the ruling pantheon of gods by Zeus and the Olympians in a ten-year war known as the Titanomachy (‘battle of the Titans’)
Titania. From Wikipedia:
Titania is a character in William Shakespeare’s 1595–1596 play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In the play, she is the Queen of the fairies and wife of the Fairy King, Oberon. The pair are depicted as powerful natural spirits who together guarantee the fertility or health of the human and natural worlds. Yet their falling out has severely disrupted both worlds, as Titania explains at length in Act 2 Scene 1, ending “And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension.”
Reflections. I am not at all rational about MND, having been seized by it when I was 9 years old (how like a fagling, you will say, and I would not gainsay you). I have posted tons of stuff about it, its performances, and its offshoots (a few days ago I once again watched Were the World Mine). Here I’ll just remind you that the three central characters — Queen Titania, King Oberon, and the fairy Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow), who serves as both narrator and instigator of the main action — are ravishing creatures of great power, capable of unsettling the world, no matter that Puck is also both giggly-playful — well, Puckish — and (it turns out) sweetly irenic:
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend.
… Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
(So ends the play. For this night.)
August 22, 2026 at 7:29 am |
I still remember a production of MND that I saw in the summer of 2002, at an outdoor site on a very hot night in central Illinois; the show began at dusk, and the fairies entered from afar bearing little lights – a most remarkable effect – and several aspects of the show appealed to the faggot in me: Puck’s costume consisted of about the legal minimum of clothing (and his body was worth it), and in the scene where Lysander and Demetrius found themselves rivals for Helena’s love, they expressed their aggression by tearing off most of each other’s clothes.
August 22, 2026 at 7:39 am |
Lovely. I think that the little lights and the Lysander / Demetrius clothes-rending are not uncommon staging effects, but they *are* wonderful. And on a hot night at dusk, wow. (But, as I said, I’m not rational about MND.)
August 23, 2026 at 6:47 am |
I actually have a couple of connections with the play. At my high school the senior class always performed a play toward the end(?) of the academic year, with parents, etc., in attendance, and my brother’s class did MND (he played the part of Moonshine); and in the summer after my graduation from Harvard (1968) I was on the stage crew of a Harvard-adjacent summer-theater production (I was one of two people whose job it was to pull the ropes that moved a revolving platform on the stage).