1. It is true that on the ‘fairy level’ of the action, Titania is also confused by Puck’s trickery into her infatuation with Bottom, thus becoming for a while the most poignantly absurd figure in the play. But the very absurdity of her plight points up how unusual in stories is the spectacle of the ‘deluded feminine’. It is much more ‘natural’ that the male figures should be unable to see straight and whole. In this sense the journey into the dark wood and out again becomes a form of voyage and Return, where the male characters have needed the fall into a shadowy ‘other world’ for their limited awareness to be opened up to the point of transformation. They are only ready to emerge when they have all been brought into touch with that deeper feeling which can at last connect them up happily in all directions, with no one any longer rejecting or rejected by anyone else.