votress

Shakespeare evokes a comic version of Yeats's "dying generations" in the goddess Titania's "votress," who dies giving birth to the changeling at the center of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595): "She being mortal of that boy did die" (2.1.135).

The text is indubitably concerned with guardianship and its self-serving rewards, but it raises these questions within a scene whose language primarily and predominantly celebrates the relationship between Titania and her votress in very different terms.