With its entry into Titania's festive bower, the play fills with singing and dancing. The fairies sing a lullaby for Titania as they perform their duties of keeping all unpleasantness — spotted snakes, spiders, and beetles — away from their queen. Titania's world abounds with beauty, and her songs are filled with references to the natural world, over which she rules. While her fairies work to keep the insects and smaller beasts away, Oberon invokes larger animals into her bower: leopards or boars or bears. Notice that he, in particular, wants the love potion to make her fall in love with something "vile." This detail seems to suggest an element of maliciousness in Oberon's attempts to lure the Indian boy away, perhaps supporting the idea that he is jealous of the boy's relationship with Titania. In fact, his spiteful behavior toward Titania contrasts with his compassion for Helena and the other humans in the play. While he is a benevolent ruler where humans are concerned, his kindness does not necessarily extend to his own kin.
The worlds of the humans and fairies become further linked in this scene, as Puck applies the love potion to Lysander's eyes: The humans are now full participants in the fairies' magical world. Many performances of the play emphasize not only its obsession with love, but its focus on sexuality. Remember that in Act I, Scene 1, Theseus suggested that chastity was a fate almost worse than death, and Act II, Scene 1 listed all of Oberon and Titania's infidelities. Now Lysander and Hermia are spending the night together in the woods as they flee Athens. For them, the question is how close together they can modestly sleep.
