The Bottom line

So far in my posts about Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, I haven't mentioned the Athenian tradesmen: Nick Bottom, Peter Quince, Francis Flute, Tom Snout, Snug, and Robin Starveling. That's a shame, because they're quite entertaining. It's probably not necessary to have comic relief in this play, as the hapless lovers and the fairies' shenanigans are funny enough already, but comic relief is exactly what the tradesmen are. The tradesmen do interact with the other characters, but based on what I've seen through the first four acts, none of these interactions are vital to the main conflict over Hermia's and Helena's love. Structurally, the play would work just fine without them. That, as well as my own recollections from seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream a few years ago, leads me to believe that the tradesmen are there mainly to make us laugh.

From the first scene in which they appear, the bumbling tradesmen, who are planning to put on a play at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, bring oddball and offbeat humor to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom wants to play every part in the play; he accepts the role of Pyramus, the male lead, then asks to be Thisbe, Pyramus' star-crossed lover, then begs to be the lion as well. Bottom is also notable for his odd uses of language: "generally" to mean "individually," for example. A funny moment comes when Snug the joiner, the idiot of the group (though they're all portrayed as idiots with the possible exception of Quince), is given the lion part. "Have you the lion's part written?" he asks Quince, who is directing the play. "Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study." His admission of his own dimwittedness is unnecessary: Quince already knew he wasn't the brightest bulb and gave him a part to match his intelligence. "You may do it extempore," Quince says, "for it is nothing but roaring."

The tradesmen reappear at the beginning of Act III. During the course of rehearsals, the group dynamic comes into greater focus. Quince is the smart, practical one--he wrote the play, and he has an almanac handy when the others ask if the moon will shine the night of the performance. But Quince and the others defer to Bottom, the extroverted center of attention. When Bottom mentions his concerns about the violence in the play (Pyramus kills himself) and the scariness of the roaring lion ("to bring in a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing"), they all agree to add a prologue to clarify that the lion isn't actually a lion and no one is actually harmed when Pyramus dies. (This clarification is probably unnecessary for the audience, but the tradesmen don't quite seem to understand the concept of fiction.) When the other tradesmen are unsure about some practical aspect of the production, such as how to make a wall for Pyramus and Thisbe to talk through, they ask for Bottom's opinion and carry out whatever he suggests. He gets the final word.

More funny things happen once they actually begin rehearsing. Bottom reads his very first line wrong: "Thisbe, the flowers of odious savors sweet..." Quince corrects him, saying the word "odious" should be replaced with "odors." Now, I'm not an expert on 16th-century English, but I don't think the revised version of that sentence makes a lot of sense either: "The flowers of odors savors sweet..."?

Meanwhile, Flute (a man playing a woman, which I imagine would already make the audience laugh) reads all his lines at once rather than stopping and waiting for the other actors to speak and cue him. Also humorous are the lame attempts at rhyming ("hue" and "Jew", "brier" and "tire") and inventions of words ("brisky") to get the number of syllables right.

Right about this time, the fairy Robin Goodfellow, who has been invisibly watching the rehearsal, casts a spell on Bottom, giving him the head of an ass. The humor of this is heightened when Bottom, oblivious to his appearance, walks back onto the rehearsal stage. "O Bottom, thou art changed!" Snout says. "What do I see on thee?" Bottom replies, "What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you?" I'm not sure what he means by this--and knowing Bottom, he might not know either--but he certainly has no idea how true his words are. A few lines later, he responds to his friends' confusion at his appearance by saying, "I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could." This is the height of dramatic irony, and quite funny for the audience. It's also an apt transformation for Bottom to make, both because of his name (bottom and ass) and because of the slightly upside-down nature of his thinking.

Moments later, Titania, the queen of the fairies--who is under a spell that will make her fall in love with the next person she sees--is awakened by Bottom's singing and promptly declares that she loves him. So we now have a character with the head of an ass, and we have another character who is madly enamored of him. It doesn't get more absurd than that.

In Act IV, when Bottom wakes up on the ground, he can't believe what has happened to him. In keeping with his inept, blundering character, he misquotes St Paul's letter to the Corinthians in the Bible: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was." He continues: "I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream' because it hath no bottom." This doesn't make any sense, just like most of everything else about Bottom. He's just a little bit off, in a way that makes him unintentionally funny. Maybe he has a higher purpose in the story, one that will be illuminated in the final act. Or maybe he's just there to be the butt of our jokes. But if the latter is true, I'm still impressed by Shakespeare's sophistication in making him look like an idiot. The name, the double entendres, the reference to the Bible--it's all very clever and well thought-out. That kind of craft is, I guess, why there's so much fuss about Shakespeare.