Oberon Street (Stratford)

Oberon Street runs off Pembroke Road in Stratford and was named after a character in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The play was written around 1595 and is set in Athens where Duke Theseus and the Amazon Queen Hippolyta are about to be married. However, most of the action takes place in Fairyland, a woodland realm ruled by Oberon, King of the Fairies, and his wife Titania. Oberon plays a trick on Titania, using a magic flower to make her fall briefly in love with the bumbling Bottom who, thanks to another spell, has the head of a donkey. The fairies and humans all live happily ever after, of course, the play being one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies.

Oberon comes from the French Auberon, which derives from the name of a mythical Germanic elf king known as Alberich. Alberich first appeared in medieval stories and songs, playing tricks on humans by making himself invisible but also helping them find love. Shakespeare’s version is a somewhat darker character, more capricious than playful at times, but ultimately benevolent.

On 11 January 1787 the German astronomer William Herschel discovered two large moons circling Uranus and in 1852 his son, John Herschel, named them Oberon and Titania. There is also a type of orchid named after the character, Oberonia, commonly known as the fairy orchid, discovered by the English botanist John Lindley in 1830.

Oberon Street originally ran parallel to Pembroke Road, between it and Flint Road on the eastern side of the railway line. Ariel Street continued all the way up to Flint but this section was renamed Oberon in the 1960s, and the old parallel street disappeared.

There were plans in the late 1970s to extend the northern end of the Oberon Street, past Ulysses Street. The new section was to be named Hotspur Street, after Henry “Hotspur” Percy, a character in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part One. This additional thoroughfare would have run alongside the train tracks up to Flint Road and was even sketched onto several town maps, but in the end it was never formed.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.