Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare's Extrovert Actor With a Dream
A character study of Bottom the Weaver in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - an extrovert actor who blunders between the human and fairy worlds.
Nick Bottom is the most noticeable character amongst the “mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mostly because he seems to be constantly talking. At his first appearance, when Quince is giving out the parts for the play Pyramus and Thisbe, Bottom volunteers to play Pyramus, Thisbe and the lion, as well as giving an extempore example of how he would play Hercules, if he were ever called upon to do so.
Most people putting on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will have met a Bottom in drama groups at some point – he’s a complete extrovert, bossy, energetic and quite annoying. He tells the director what to do (“Now, name the rest of the players” I.2) argues with the audience, (“No, in truth, sir, he should not.” V.1) and messes up his lines (“Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet.” II.2) He’s a great character to play for someone who likes lots of stage business and mucking around.
However, this bumbling, noisy plebian is the only character who crosses over between the human and fairy worlds which run parallel in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Used as a pawn in the rivalry between Oberon and Titania, Bottom has his head changed for a donkey’s, and finds himself adored by a fairy queen. (A character called Bottom becomes an “ass-head”. Sometimes Shakespeare didn’t bother with the subtle jokes.)
Bottom mostly acts the clown in the fairy kingdom: commenting that Fairy Mustardseed’s family have made his eyes water, and declaring he needs a shave as his donkey’s fur is tickling him. On his return to the human world, he decides that his sojourn with the fairies must have been “a most rare vision...a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”(IV.1) This is an interesting twist on the tradition of dream visions in medieval English: a character who decides that actual events must have been a dream.
The words Bottom uses to talk about his dream are also worth considering: “man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought”. The image of a “patched fool” evokes a madman in ragged clothes, such as Tom a’Bedlam in King Lear, but it also suggests the Fool in the same play. The “patches” could be the motley clothing of a jester, or for that matter the shabby clothes which actors were mocked for wearing as they trudged the provinces. This vision, which only a “patched fool” would offer to present, could be taken as an image of the theatre itself.
Bottom’s comic confusion in this scene also has echoes of a more famous text. “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen...” is a mangling of St. Paul’s words in Corinthians, in the Bishops’ Bible which was generally used in English churches during Shakespeare’s youth. Readers, and directors, have to decide for themselves whether this is simply a joke about an illiterate craftsman messing up a quotation, or whether the echo means that Bottom’s experience has given him some glimpse of a great vision he cannot articulate properly.
