Large poster featuring William Blake's 'Oberon, Titania & Puck.'
This illustrates Titania's instruction to her fairy train in the last scene of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the fairies, are on the left. Puck, the perplexer of mortals, faces us. The fairies Moth and Peaseblossom are easily identifiable.
During the 1780s there was a growing taste for Shakespeare illustrations. Blake had formed a print-publishing partnership in 1784. If the approximate dating of this work is correct, it may represent an attempt by Blake to break into this market.
