Bottom's Role in A Midsummer Night's Dream Explained

Introduction: Complexity and Comedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Despite the simplicity — indeed, the very baseness — of much of its humor, A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually one of Shakespeare's more complex plays on several levels. The three distinct plots and their varying degrees of intersection can lead to a great deal of confusion for an unfamiliar reader or audience member. The language itself often runs to sentences that are long and convoluted even by Elizabethan standards, and the themes of sexuality, gender, and free will are complex enough to be interpreted in several conflicting ways. It is also one of Shakespeare's most hilarious comedies, with jokes that range from the aforementioned baseness and vulgarity to utterly delightful witticisms and turns of phrase, often from the most unlikely — and unsuspecting — of characters. The overall result is a full-bodied and yet strangely cerebral play whose text demands performance for even the slightest semblance of focus, purpose, meaning, and true understanding.

It is true that the play is quite complex and depends heavily on tricks with language for both its comedy and its philosophy; "it would be a mistake, however, to regard the interwoven strands which make up the tapestry of the comedy as being predominantly literary and intellectual" (Riverside 251). Enter Bottom the Weaver, along with the rest of the Rude Mechanicals. These Athenian craftsmen are trying to form an amateur acting company to perform at the Duke's wedding, and Bottom quickly becomes the group's center, largely through his own doing. Bottom is a very earthy character at the heart of what is an essentially earthy play, full of the motives of nature — as rendered by the passions of the flesh — and acting with the freedom that can only exist within the boundaries of the human spirit.

Bottom the Weaver: Ambition, Hedonism, and Honesty

Ambition and hedonism, in that order, seem to be Bottom's sole motives in the play, and in this he is representative of the other characters and the play as a whole. Shakespeare uses this character and the vulgarity associated with him to make this explicit, rather than couching these motives in more poetic terms as he does for both the lovers and the fairies. Bottom's comment toward the end of the play — that "Man is but an ass if he go about t' expound this dream" — pretty much sums up the entirety of the action for the bulk of the characters. The story is highly unbelievable to any who have not witnessed its full machinations, that is, except for Puck and the audience (Riverside 275, IV. i., 206). His overt pursuit of each of his desires — the various roles in the play-within-a-play, the glory he wants that performance to achieve, and even his enjoyment of the pleasures Titania offers (though this last is more implied) — shows him to be far more honest, and no worse, than any of the other characters.

Low Comedy as Social Commentary

This is why Shakespeare included a character and plot of such low comedy in a play with such far-reaching and complex themes: in the end, all of the complexity boils down to a few very simple facts about humanity. As Valerie Traub notes, "early modern England was a culture of contradictions, with official ideology often challenged by actual social practice," and Midsummer makes this exceedingly clear (131). Such contradictions necessarily lead to complications, as the central plot of the play — that of the lovers — clearly illustrates. Though these complications are comedic in their own way, it is also hysterical to watch someone who is unabashedly human, and quite asinine in several senses because of it. Bottom's transformation into a literal ass is yet one more piece of honesty that Shakespeare includes in his commentary on humanity.

Conclusion: Human Nature and the Fool of Love

It is impossible to determine precisely what Shakespeare meant to be the primary message or conclusions of his play, if indeed he intended any. What is clear in the text, however, is the willingness of human beings to be blinded by love and/or lust, and the fools that this willingness makes of mortals.

Works Cited

Evans, G. Blakemore and M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Riverside Shakespeare.

Traub, Valerie. "Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare." The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.