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A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of ThingsAuthor(s): Ronald F. MillerSource: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer, 1975), pp. 254-268Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2869606 .

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A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery

of Things

RONALD F. MILLER

I

HE complex and subtle intellectuality of Shakespeare's comic art was never better illustrated than by A Midsummer Night's Dream and, in particular, by Shakespeare's employment of the fairies in that play. Not only are they obviously the most striking feature of the comedy; intellectually they are the most provocative, too. By intruding the fictive worlds of Ovid

and English folklore into the doings of the nobles and the workmen of Athens, they pose open-ended questions about illusion and reality, existence and art to, those willing to press beyond the older interpretation of the play as a charming theatrical fantasy or a comic medley or a burlesque. Such puzzles have occupied so much recent critical attention that this comedy, once rather generally dismissed as a piece of fluff, is now more likely to 'be read as a study in the epistemology of the imagination.1

And this tendency seems justified. The fairies are a continual and un- avoidable reminder of a certain indefiniteness in the world of the play-an indefiniteness culminating in the suggestion by the fairy prankster Puck that the play itself may have only been a dream: "If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumb'red here / While these visions did appear" (V. i. 430-33) 2 With that final insinuation, the frame

I Instrumental in putting to rest the old pixie-dust trivialization of the play and establishing its intellectual substance have been (among others) C. L. Barber, "May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night" in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, i959), pp. ii9-62; Elizabeth

Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960),

passim; Frank Kermode, "The Mature Comedies," Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon

Studies 3 (New York: St. Martin's, i96i), pp. 2I4-20; R. W. Dent, "Imagination in A Mid-

summer Night's Dream," SQ, i5 (i964), II5-29; David P. Young, Something of Great Con-

stancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, i966),

pp. iII-66; and James Calderwood, "A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Illusion of Drama," MLQ,

26 (i965), 506-22, reprinted with alterations as "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Art's Illusory Sacri- fice" in Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, I971), pp. I20-48.

The precise tack of these critics varies, of course, from Barber's subtle and sensitive analysis of the

epistemology of the imitative act to Calderwood's attempt to untangle the ontological mare's

nest within the play. Young's entire book provides the most ambitious attempt to come to grips

with the intellectual breadth of A Midsummer Night's Dream. All seem persuaded that the

fairies possess what can only be called metaphysical implications. 2 The tendency of this and surrounding passages to expand the world of the stage to en-

compass the world of the audience is explored by Paul N. Siegel, "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Wedding Guests," SQ, 4 0953), I43-44. The text cited here and throughout is that of

W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill (Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, I942).



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 255

of dramatic illusion is irreparably compromised, and little remains besides a series of tantalizing riddles. Are the fairies real or unreal? Are the spectators no less than the Athenians subject to Puck's and Oberon's magic? How can we assign precedence to the various levels of reality-including our own- under the sway of Shakespeare's art? Such doubts tease us into abstract thoughts as inescapable as their conclusions are elusive and uncertain.

The intellectual implications of the fairies, however, have scarcely been ex- hausted once the puzzle of their metaphysical status has been explored. No doubt there is a certain fugitiveness to these beings. Shakespeare lets us have our fairies and doubt them too. Yet beyond these'formal uncertainties lie other uncertainties residing not in the world of the stage but in the world of ordinary human experience to which every dramatic representation, no matter how sophisticated, must ultimately refer. As theatrical immanences-ambulatory metaphors, if you wish-who secretly manipulate affections, cause transformations, and bring good luck, the fairies obliquely hint that our own offstage existence may be touched by mysteries no less genuine than those that disrupt the world of Theseus, Hermia, Bottom, and the rest. I would not, however, go so far as Harold C. Goddard, who speaks of the fairies as unequivocally repre- senting "a vaster unseen world by which the actions of men are affected and overruled." Shakespeare's art is surely not so blatantly allegorical. It is not so much the fairies per se as the mystery of the fairies-the very aura of evanescence and ambiguity surrounding their life on stage-that points to a mysteriousness in our own existence, and specifically in such ambivalent earthly matters as love, luck, imagination, and even faith. These are the elements of human experience with which the fairies are again and again associated. As Shakespeare plays his sly games with the insubstantial fairies, we are forced by the ambivalence in their status to ask questions, ultimately unanswerable, about the substance of those mortal experiences with which they are linked.

This suggestiveness can best lbe illustrated by looking at the crucial exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta about the experiences of the lovers in the forest, a locus classicus for every study reading the play in terms of the themes of illusion, art, or the creative imagination.4 Certainly Theseus touches these issues when he cautions against the fantasies created by the seething brains of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet:

Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear!

(V. i. I8-22)

By such explanation this advocate of daytime reason wishes to dismiss the reports of strange events in the midsummer night. Hippolyta objects by raising a question that asks more than merely whether fairies can truly be found wandering in the woods nearby:

3 The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1951), I, 74. See also pp. 78-79. 4 The opposition between the positions of Theseus and Hippolyta has engendered much

critical activity, some critics championing one side and some the other. Young discusses the issues very interestingly, pp. 137-41.



256 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur'd so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy; Yet howsoever, strange and admirable.

(V. i. 23-27)

Naturally, upon hearing this we comfortably assure ourselves of the secret presence of the fairies, and, if we are alert, we may also enjoy the fine irony that those fairies-and Theseus, too, and his speech-are all products of the seething brain of a poet. But this does not really exhaust the suggestiveness of the exchange. Behind Hippolyta's observation lies the question whether the "olde daunce" of love so brilliantly represented by the round in the nighttime woods does not reveal something orderly and purposeful behind its apparent chaos. The fairies are (among other things) the metamorphic agency of love personified, pansy-juice and all;5 and an ambivalence in the status of the fairies implies an ambivalence in the status of love. In the language of Theseus' rationalistic analysis, love is an apprehended joy and the fairies are the com- prehended bringers of that joy. That defines the fairies' function fairly well, but literary symbols are not so easily separated from the realities to which they point. If the fairies are complete delusions, then love itself will seem a delusion; if the fairies are real, then love, however incomprehensible to daytime reason, will seem something of great constancy, substantial, strange, and maybe even admirable. Shakespeare's puzzle goes beyond the puzzles of art: the greatest mystery is not that of the fairies but of life.

The immediate subject of the exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta, the adventures of the lovers in the forest, exhibits rather fully the way Shakespeare uses uncertainties in the frame of imitation to suggest more fundamental ambivalences. Soon after going into the woods, the four Athenian youths become subject to the magic of the fairies. A literalist of the imagination-one of Bottom's cousins, say-might confidently explain the mad pairings of Demetrius, Helena, Lysander, and Hermia as a result of their intercession. No doubt the play can so be read. Yet the magical aspect of love itself is pointedly impressed upon us before the fairies troop onto the stage with their charms. In the first scene of the first act Egeus accuses Lysander of having "bewitch'd" the bosom of his child:

Thou, thou, Lysander,, thou hast given her rhymes And interchang'd love-tokens with my child. Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung With faining voice verses of faining love, And stol'n the impression of her fantasy With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats,-messengers Of strong prevailment in unhard'ned youth.

(I. i. 28-35)

5 The important theme of metamorphosis in the play has been discussed by Sewell, pp. 139-41,

and Barber, pp. I35-37.




The connection between the moon (that magic planet), witchery, fancy, fantasy, and love is here made explicit. Significantly, Egeus treats the paraphernalia of young love and courtship as though these were charms no less occult than Oberon's pansy. The effect of this is double. First, it provides an excuse for seeing the fairies as a mere objectification of the well-known irrationalities of love. What could be more silly than a spell provoked by the geegaws and gestures traditionally associated with courtship? Puck's tricks are but an ex- tension of this perspective. Secondly, Egeus's connection of love with magic tends to make the audience look upon love as a mystery beyond explanation by the orderly processes of cool reason. So when at the end of the play we comprehend that fairy magic is both purposeful and good, then the charms of love-bracelets of hair, rings, gawds, and so on-may be seen as mysteriously beneficent, too.

This ambivalence is continued at the end of the first scene. Helena, excusing her betrayal of her dear friend Hermia, discusses the arbitrariness of Demetrius' choice of a love-object. She moves from her own dilemma to a few generaliza- tions about love: "Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity" (I. i. 232-33). Here love itself is said to effect such magical transformations as we later see the fairies effect; yet before we accept this vision too complacently, Helena joins hands with that Renaissance psychologist Theseus in viewing this magic as the product of a seething brain: "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, / And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind" (I. i. 234-35). The uncertainty, then, is whether the "form and dignity" seen by love is the effect of hallucination or of a sight transcend- ing the physical. When the lover, as Theseus says, "Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt" (V. i. ii), is that act of imaginative faith a piece of intoxicated folly? One answer is given by Titania's infatuation with ass-headed Bottom, another by the lovers' discovery upon waking that their pairings-off have happily ended in a combination fortunate for them all.

When the fairies come on stage themselves, their status is immediately called into question. Puck's first extended speech is full of what C. L. Barber calls "a conscious double vision": "The plain implication of the lines, though Puck speaks them, is that Puck does not really exist-that he is a figment of the naive imagination, projected to motivate the little accidents of household life."6 Though finely said, this is incomplete. Theseus in emphasizing the delusions of the imagination might interpret Puck's words in such a way. Puck's words do assure us that his deeds can all be explained away as accident by those who are so inclined. But Hippolyta might as easily observe that the little accidents of household life are here being shown to suggest something of great constancy, though that something may only work for rustic joie de vivre:

And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks, against her lips I bob And on her withered dewlap pour the ale. The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

6 Barber, p. I43.




Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me. Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And "tailor" cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh, And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear A merrier hour was never wasted there.

(II. i. 47-57)

Such a passage, as Thersites once said of opinion, a man may wear on both sides, like a leather jerkin. Paradoxically, the fairies are both real and imagined; life provides its little accidents which are at one and the same time pure chance and the work of an immanence bent upon fostering good fellowship and laughter.

A similar paradox characterizes the presentation of the other fairies. We are given to understand in most mannered verse that they are vegetation spirits whose quarrel explains the chaotic effects of bad weather. The very artificiality of their language keeps us from ever becoming truly caught up in Titania and Oberon as dramatic characters. They are stage-figures whose artful speech suggests that they are literary ornamentation.' Surely Oberon says a lot when he informs Puck that, though they are not damned spirits that love the night, they are spirits who cannot withstand the full light of day (III. ii. 388-95). From this perspective they are seen as fanciful entities embodying the chance of agricultural misfortune: an actual reference to the year I594 has been detected by some scholars.8 Yet there they are. Visible. Audible. On stage. Has anyone ever found a more believable explanation for climatic vicissitudes? And the fairies do make up at the end, promising a return to good harvests. I assume that if the weather had improved the year A Midsummer Night's Dream was produced, the existence of the fairies would have seemed to be confirmed.

Thus when these elusive beings begin to interfere with the lovers and their pairings-off, we have been prepared to interpret the comic transformations effected by their magic in two contradictory ways: first, as a natural disorder mythologized and, second, as the working of some immanence behind events. In defiance of all logic, neither alternative is rejected; both coexist in the complex comic vision. The whirligig in the woods is, no doubt, a fine extended image of the irrationality and arbitrariness of young love, in and out of affection with this or that member of the opposite sex according to availability and chance. The startling result of the juice from a magic plant seems as descriptive a metaphor as any for the ordinary inclination of youth to dote and dote utterly upon one out of a set of apparently interchangeable persons of the opposite sex. Our knowledge of the way of the world and our familiarity with Puck's activities work in concert to underscore the irony of Lysander's speech upon waking to discover his affections changed:

The will of man is by his reason sway'd; And reason says you are the worthier maid.

7 Barber develops this point at some length, pp. 147-48. 8 The rainy summer of 1594 has traditionally been used to date the play in i595. Madeleine

Doran, in her introductory remarks to the play in the Penguin edition, ed. Alfred Harbage (Balti- more: Penguin, i969), p. 146, notes that the next two summers were also unseasonable.




Things growing are not ripe until their season, So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason; And touching now the point of human skill, Reason becomes the marshal to my will And leads me to your eyes, where I o'erlook Love's stories written in Love's richest book.

(II. ii. 115-22)

So much for reason in love, on or off stage. Nonetheless, the confusions of the night do ultimately work for the good,

whatever the intermediate delight Puck takes in the agitations of the mortals. Judging by the results, the events seem to have been governed by an effective albeit inefficient benevolence. Though all seemed chaotic at the time, in the end (as Puck promises) "Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill; / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well" (III.ii 46i-63). There is something profoundly suggestive in the reverent mix of wonder and joy the lovers convey when they wake to find themselves blessed with an end to their tribulations. They are not unlike Milton's Adam, waking to find his dream was real:

Demetrius. These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.

Hermia. Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When every thing seems double.

Helena. So methinks; And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own.

Demetrius. [But] are you sure That we are [now] awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream.

(IV. i. i9-i98)

Something approaching religious awe is revealed in this bewildered recognition of their mysterious good fortune. So moving is this association of the fairies with immanent benevolence that, for a moment, all formal ambiguities-all questions of the reality of the fairies-fade to insignificance before the greater mysteries underlying all mortal existence.

II

Waking at the same moment is another dreamer, Bottom, who also rises temporarily bewildered by the wonders of the past night. The slightest uncertainty or hesitation on the part of Bottom is truly noteworthy, for he has previously shown himself to be overwhelmingly matter-of-fact about everything. The anomalies of fairy magic have as little immediate appeal to him as they do to Theseus-but with a difference. Theseus is a conscious rationalist; in his famous speech at the beginning of Act V he condescendingly explains away the inexplicable events of the night as "airy nothings," as the psychological de- ception of the "strong imagination." Theseus consistently embodies this skeptical side of the dialectic of the play, just as our visual and aural experience of the




fairies embodies the credulous side. Even when Theseus defends Pyramus and Thisby from attack by Hippolyta ("This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard" [V. i. 2I2]), he does so with an urbane assurance that all works of the imagination are harmless, airy fantasies: "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them" (V. i. 2I3-

I4). In his attitude he is no less condescending toward the dramatist than he is toward the lunatic, the lover, or the poet. If (as now seems conventional) we wish to invert Theseus' statement to affirm the genuine creativity of the imaginative response, we may find justification in the play as a whole, but certainly not in Theseus' own intent.

Bottom, on the other hand, does not represent a position so much as a problem, in particular the characteristic problem of men-all men-immersed in an ambivalent reality. In his own benighted way he, more than any other figure on stage, must confront the central intellectual issue of the play. He is consistently shown encountering mysteries, the mystery of the mimetic act, the mystery of love, and (above all else) the mystery of the fairies; and his comic struggles with the complexities of experience are Shakespeare's primary means of exploring the dilemma presented by a world characterized by what Norman Rabkin would call "complementarity," a world in which reality is necessarily perceived in terms of opposing and apparently contradictory modes of being.9 As the "bottom" of mankind, Bottom's solution for the irreducible complementarity of things is really quite simple: ignore the problem. He sees the mysterious and accepts it as perfectly ordinary; he behaves as though the inexplicable and the explicable were simply no different at all. The central ambiguities of the play are hidden from him because all experiences, irrational or rational, magical or mundane, are of the same order in his sight.

Consider for a moment his attitude toward the drama. The world of the stage bears a significant resemblance to the world of the fairies. Both define a mode of existence separate from but interacting with quotidian existence; both challenge an outsider either to rejection or to a tentative surrendering of his skeptical instincts. An intelligence capable of understanding that fairies may be real on one level and be metaphors on another is also needed to comprehend that a man may be both an actor on the literal level and a lover or a tyrant on stage. Such subtleties are quite beyond Bottom. According to his understanding, either a lion on stage must be accepted by the spectators as a genuine lion or else the audience must remain continuously aware that the beast is in fact an actor-a specific actor-impersonating a lion. "That willing suspension of dis- belief . . which constitutes the poetic faith" is for Bottom indistinguishable from mere credulity, so he must assume that a spectator seeing a lion in the world of the stage must fear for his safety in his own sphere of existence:

Bottom. Masters, you ought to consider with yourselves. To bring in- God shield us!-a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living; and we ought to look to't.

Snout. Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion. Bottom. Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen

9Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, i967), pp. 19-28.



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 26i

through the lion's neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect, "Ladies," or "Fair ladies, I would wish you," or "I would request you," or "I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing; I am a man as other men are;" and there indeed let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.

(III. i. 30-47)

Theseus denies the validity of the works of the strong imagination; Bottom acts as if the imagination did not exist at all.

Of course this is rollicking good fun, and Shakespeare repeats the joke several times over for good measure. The crudities of the actual presentation of Pyramus and Thisby are so great that Bottom triumphantly attains his goal of having spectators ever aware of the actors qua actors. No one is ever allowed to escape into the state of mind which tentatively accepts as true that which is untrue from a strictly mundane perspective. Bottom is even willing to con- verse directly with the audience if his commitment to the literal truth seems to demand it:

Pyramus. Thanks, courteous wall; Jove shield thee well for this! But what see I? No Thisby do I see. 0 wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss! Curs'd be thy stones for thus deceiving me!

Theseus. The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again. Pyramus. No, in truth, sir, he should not. "Deceiving me" is Thisby's

cue. She is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see it will fall pat as I told you. Yonder she comes. (V. i. 179-89)

Nothing could better exhibit his willingness to run roughshod over the boundaries between different modes of existence, his tendency to impose a prosaic uniformity upon a many-faceted reality.

Not that Bottom is unique in this assault upon the dramatic illusion. The court party and the other players join in. Shakespeare is obviously having his fun creating what Anne Righter has called "an essay on the art of destroying a play."'0 Bottom's approach to the drama deserves special notice, however, because it is of a piece with his approach to other works of the imagination; all the mysteries of life, which certainly include the epistemological mysteries of the drama, are as vulnerable to his literalism as they are to Theseus' rationalism. Yet Bottom's stupidity is actually suggestive, whereas Theseus' attitude, for all its wisdom, is ultimately reductionistic. By not detecting complexities that are obvious to the audience, Bottom puts these complexities into bold relief and makes us more, not less, conscious of the myriad-mindedness necessary for men to confront experience whole. As has often been remarked, the various aspects of this play are linked together by the common theme of the imagination, but it is Bottom's undiscriminating desire to treat all products of the imagination as quotidian reality which provides this linkage.

This thematic significance is evident if we look at the havoc wrought by Bottom when he turns his brutal literalism upon the fanciful world of the

10 Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, i962), p. io8.




fairies. As the very embodiment of a sensibility that finds nothing mysterious either in art or in life, as the negative image of that pluralistic intellectual vision toward which Shakespeare's comedy moves, Bottom is bound to prove himself inadequate to the encounter. A lesser artist might have made Bottom symbolically blind to the fairies; in a masterstroke Shakespeare chooses the witty opposite. While the court party sees the fairies only indirectly through their effects and through the intimation of patterns seemingly too constant to be explained as mere chance, Bottom, literalist that he is, meets the fairies face- to-face.

The meeting of course does not work solely to Bottom's disadvantage. His equanimity before the airy nothings of Titania's passion lets us appreciate the silliness of the agitations of all the lovers, fairy and mortal alike. Titania in- fatuated with ass-headed Bottom provides a perfect image of love's irrational frenzy, and Bottom's prosaic skepticism makes him tellingly superior to this general madness, just as his obtuseness had made him immune to the airy nothings of the stage:11

Titania. I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again. Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note; So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape; And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

Bottom. Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that; and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a- days; the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.

Titania. Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful. Bottom. Not so, neither; but if I had wit enough to get out of this wood,

I have enough to serve mine own turn. (III. i. 140-54)

His plain good sense surely triumphs here; yet here is a mortal, transported into the lap of the fairy queen-that sanctum sanctorum of an imaginative (and imaginary?) world sustaining and informing the world of common reality -and all he can do is think in terms of country proverbs and homespun experience. Offered any blessing from the rich store of a world freed from the limitations of reason and likelihood, he desires nothing more than a scratch on his head and a peck of provender. If, as suggested, Bottom is a comic image of ourselves, Everyman-as-Fool, then his failure to grasp the wonder and op- portunity of his predicament reflects our common failure to prevent worldliness from dimming our vision and blunting our hopes. Observing Bottom ask for a handful or two of dried peas, I am forcefully reminded of Emerson's "Days":

11 Coming at the ambiguities of love in the play from a different direction, John Russell Brown makes a similar connection between these aspects of the comedy: "The play's greatest triumph is the manner in which our wavering acceptance of the illusion of drama is used as a kind of flesh-and-blood image of the acceptance which is appropriate to the strange and private 'truth' of those who enact the play of love" (Shakespeare and his Comedies, 2nd. ed. [London: Methuen, 1926], p. 90).




Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.12

One has only to compare the relative simplicity of Emerson's message with the complex countercurrents of irony, metaphysics, and broad humor in Bot- tom's request for provender to recognize that Shakespeare is not only the best but, in this comedy at least, also one of the most intellectually vigorous of our poets.

Still, for a comic routine, the dissonance between Titania's passion and Bottom's obliviousness is hilariously deflating. For just a moment Bottom's imaginative fundamentalism asks us to take the fairies literally and to observe how much these airy, symbolic creatures suffer by the touch of the earthy and the actual. That stroke of making love and reason country neighbors is a triumph of the same literal-mindedness that allows Bottom to treat Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed as a physical cobweb, peaseblossom, and mustardseed, thus reducing personification to vulgar fact:

Bottom. I cry your worships mercy, heartily. I beseech your worship's name.

Cobweb. Cobweb. Bottom. I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb.

If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you. (III. i. 182-87)

On one level, of course, this is simply the play's most vivid realization of that double vision which has characterized everything having to do with the fairies. In the comic encounter, extremes meet and coexist: imagination and love and magic at their most entrancing in Titania, philistine realism at its most appealingly vulgar in Bottom. But Shakespeare does not exhaust the suggestiveness of this pairing when he sets these two off against each other. Ironically, Bottom's unblinking acceptance of the fairies provides these meta- phoric beings with a solidity that nothing else, not even their presence on stage, can provide. As I have indicated, the fairies are almost always presented in a context that suggests that they could be explained away. The fact that not one of the court party sees them is certainly suggestive. Were it not for Bottom, the fairies might be passed off as simply a personification of the providence that governs, or seems to govern, or we would like to have govern, events. But Bottom is of all men the least prone to the delusions of the imagination, and when he confronts transcendence face-to-face, transcendence itself takes on a certain matter-of-factness. If we have become too complacent in viewing the

12 Centenary edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-04), IX, 228.




mysteries of the world of the play and the mysteries of our own world in terms of a neatly compartmentalized vision, Bottom's stumbling across the line into the fairy world gives us a jolt. In other words, the weaver's unimaginative literalism gives Shakespeare a perfect opening to expand the intellectual scope of the play to suggest not just the mystery of our experience in this world, but also the mystery of our experience with some other world.

At the level of pure fun, Bottom's acquisition of an ass's noll may simply be a metaphor objectified, perhaps the only natural way for such a thorough- going imaginative fundamentalist to prove himself an ass; but since the other rude mechanicals see what James Calderwood calls "the genuine apple-munch- ing ear-twitching article,"13 the existence of the supernatural is strongly indicated. Though in the widest perspective falling in love may be as magical a metamorphosis as becoming part beast, Theseus would have a harder time explaining the latter away. The interconnection between actuality and transcendence is palpable in all matters touching Bottom. This is dramatically illustrated by the great parallel waking scene at the end of Act IV. When the lovers awake from the night, they can only speak distractedly about the half- glimpsed wonders they have "dreamed"; they find themselves blessed, but they know not how. Bottom knows, though he finds his language inadequate to describe his "vision":

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was-there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,-and methought I had,-but man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. (IV. i. 208-15)

Shakespeare's art achieves a density and complexity here that even he seldom attained. The passage is of course funny. To find garrulous Bottom at a loss for words is delightful. His apparently unconscious reference to his past condition in "Man is but an ass" is sure to draw a laugh from the groundings. His waking reverence clashes pointedly with his phlegmatic approach to the events when he was actually experiencing them. This humor, however, does not prevent Shakespeare from touching deeper chords. By speaking so, generally of man and human capacities, Bottom reconfirms himself as a comic mirror for the general human condition. Bottom becomes any man awaking from a visionary glimpse into orders other than those of his workaday world. What Bottom has seen is of course hardly ineffable-inexpressible by him though it be-yet Shakespeare gives him language that echoes the traditional humble admission of the mystic that the substance of his visions is beyond recounting by the tongues of men. For Bottom after his earthy fashion is a mystic of sorts; in his flatfooted way he has truly entered into a transcendent existence which has been closed to the rest of the mortals upon whom the transcendence has also impinged.

A suggestive analogy is thus being established: as Bottom is to the world of the fairies, so man in the height of his powers is to-is to what? If Bottom, the least perceptive of men, can glimpse into the shadowy world of the fairies,

13 Calderwood, p. I 29.




what do we who master Bottom's confusions glimpse in our own moments of unarticulated wonder? Here Shakespeare brilliantly reverses the age-old comic tactic of correction through diminution; the comic mirror is here being em- ployed not to belittle that which is reflected but to show by association and suggestion the potential latent even in the lowly image of man we see. A theatrical coup, a witty toying with the levels of reality in the world on stage, comes very close to becoming a parody of mankind caught up in a religious vision of worlds beyond the physical. Amid all the laughter there is something touchingly pitiful in watching poor, stammering Bottom admit his inability to seize and hold in language that fleeting moment when he too saw beneath the surface of things. And that pity is not just for Bottom.

To redouble these associations, Shakespeare has Bottom babble on about his vision. He speaks, of course, only of those mysterious fairies, but in his speech he rises to an echo of St. Paul:

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. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called "Bottom's Dream," because it hath no bottom....

(IV. i. 2I5-21)

The setting for the corresponding Pauline passage needs to be quoted at some length. I cite Tyndale's version:

That we speake of, is wysdome amonge them that are perfecte: not the wysdome of this worlde nether of the rulars of this worlde (which go to nought) but we speake the wysdome of God, which is in secrete and lieth hyd, which God ordeyned before the worlde vnto oure glory; which wysdome none of the rulars of the worlde knewe. For had they knowen it, they wolde not have crucified the Lorde of glory. But as it is written: The eye hath not sene, and the eare hath not hearde, nether have entred into the herte of man, the thinges which God hath prepared for them that love him.

But God hath opened them vnto vs by his sprete. For the sprete searcheth all things, ye the bottome of Goddes secretes. (I Corinthians ii. 6-Io)14

14I have chosen Tyndale (The New Testament: Translated by William Tyndale, I534, ed. N. Hardy Wallis [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, I9381, p. 349) because Tyndale's translation, like other early versions, retains the phrase "the bottome of Goddes secretes" as opposed to the later Authorized Version's familiar "the deep things of God." Tyndale seems preferable to the alternative Geneva Bible (1557) because in this case his version seems grammatically closer to Shakespeare:

Bottom: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste.

Tyndale: "The eye hath not sene, and the eare hath not hearde, nether have entred into the herte of man...

Geneva: "Things we eye hath not sene, & eare hath not hearde, nether haue entred into mans mynde.

For comparison, here is the Authorized Version: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man...." Coverdale is practically identical to Tyndale in this passage. The Geneva Version of i560 alters the 1557 phrase "the bottome of Goddes secretes" to "the deepe things of God."




Here St. Paul, like his comic avatar Bottom, speaks as a visionary in avouching an insight into a transcendent reality which cool reason cannot comprehend. Throughout the early chapters of I Corinthians Paul relates again and again his central distinction between the wisdom of the world and the foolishness of God, bearing witness to the mystery that fools for Christ's sake know truths unfathomable to those wise after the flesh. Shakespeare must surely have ex- pected his Bible-reading patrons to recall amid their laughter at least the general drift of the context wherein St. Paul speaks of God's strange and admirable choice of foolish things to confound the certitudes of the material world.15 In the twinkling of an eye and the turn of a phrase Shakespeare has associated the fairies, however fugitively, with other realities apart from but informing mortal existence.

To elaborate upon this connection between St. Paul and Bottom presents a distinct risk for the critic, and yet an attempt must be made, for this passage represents the provocative climax to Shakespeare's use of the mystery of the fairies to suggest other mysteries in the world offstage; it also marks the culmination of Bottom's role as a representative man confronted by an ambivalent reality. Obviously, the problem is how to explore the rich implications of the echo without overdoing it, without becoming tendentious or converting fugitive associations into a ponderous affirmation of Christian doctrine. The irony with which the fairies have been presented throughout will embarrass any solemn designs. However rich the suggestiveness of the passage, the play will simply not hold still long enough to be read allegorically with Bottom as the Fool of Faith, the world of the fairies as eternity, and Theseus as a prince of this world wise after the flesh-though the travesty inevitably teases us with just such associations.

As a matter of fact, though most readers will grant that Bottom's echo of St. Paul is one of the supreme moments in the play, and indeed in all of Shake- spearean drama, there has been surprisingly little convergence toward a general agreement about its exact significance. Frank Kermode gives a valuable reading by linking this passage to the venerable tradition of the visionary dream, "ambiguous, enigmatic, of high import." What the import is he does not say. In his indispensable article on the play, R. W. Dent connects the Pauline echoes with the fairy grace of love, but exploits the parallels no further. A recent critic makes the institution of marriage at least one of the blessings obliquely referred to.16 Most critics seem to find connections even less immediate. The problem confronting anyone who would discover in Bottom's words intima- tions of some specific insight-whether into love or into the imagination or into some transcendent order-is that he must covertly or overtly make weighty symbols of the fairies and so run roughshod over the delicate distinctions which have characterized the mode of existence of these elusive beings. The moment he becomes too precise in identifying the fairies, the critic might well recall the example of Bottom and his desire to tell everyone plainly that

15 I Corinthians i. 28 gives this dichotomy in a particularly striking form: "And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are...." (Authorized Version).

16 See Kermode, p. 2I9; Dent, p. i2i; and Andrew D. Weiner, "'Multiformitie Uniforme': A Midsummer Night's Dream," ELH, 38 (I97I), 343-49.




the lion is no lion at all, but Snug the joiner. As Bottom says, "Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream."

What seems to me most important about Bottom's echo is not so much the higher meanings of the dream-if there are any-as the nimble play of the mind reflected in the conjunction between Bottom and St. Paul, the fairies and the objects of faith. Whether the topic be fairies or love or drama, throughout the play Shakespeare has given with the right hand and taken away with the left. In Bottom's remarks upon waking he gives us a fleeting glimpse into St. Paul's vision of the foolishness of faith, and then takes it away by jumbling the words and putting them into the mouth of no holy fool but a fool natural. This playfulness is no different in kind from that which Shakespeare has shown toward the uncertain fairies and the ambiguous human experiences with which the fairies are linked. The important thing is the multivalency of the perspective. In Bottom's speech faith itself is subsumed into the catalog of ambiguities with which the fairies are associated-and in fact there is a kind of startling propriety to the association: the play has consistently encouraged a complementary vision in which credulity and skepticism, acceptance and rejection can coexist, and Bottom speaking of his experiences hints at what is surely the most provocative complementary vision of all, St. Paul's paradox that faith is both folly and the highest wisdom. As Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out, in I Corinthians St. Paul explores the metaphysics of faith by de- tailing a whole series of dichotomies, balancing that which seems true to the eye of the flesh against that which is true indeed.17 To draw an analogy to the mortal-fairy dichotomy in A Midsummer Night's Dream seems very tempt- ing, to say the least. No one's eye is more fleshly than Bottom's, and yet in spite of his childish intellectual limitations-and perhaps because of them- he catches a glimpse into a genuine extra-physical order. The mysteriousness of the fairies momentarily becomes linked with the highest mystery of all. Bottom and St. Paul: here indeed "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven"-and winks. The sheer breadth of Shakespeare's daring is almost overwhelming.18

17 "As Deceivers, Yet True," Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of His- tory (New York: Scribner's, 1937), pp. 3-24.

18 A provocatively similar connection is made by Erasmus at the very last of his Moriae Enco- mium. At the culmination of Stultitia's praise of folly is a discussion of the folly and madness of the mystical rapture. She cites I Corinthians ii. 9 ("was neuer mans eie sawe . . .") and elaborates:

Who so euer therefore haue suche grace (whiche sure is geuin to few) by theyr life tyme to tast of this saied felicitee, they are subiecte to a certaine passion muche lyke vnto madnesse or witrauyng, when rauisshed so in the sprite, or beyng in a traunce, thei doo speake certaine thynges not hangyng one with an other, nor after any earthly facion, but rather dooe put foorth a voyce they wote neuer what, muche lesse to be vnderstode of others: and sodeinely without any apparent cause why, dooe chaunge the state of theyr countenaunces. For now shall ye see theim of glad chere, now of as sadde againe, now thei wepe, now thei laugh, now they sighe, for briefe, it is certaine that they are wholy distraught and rapte out of theim selues. In sort that whan a little after thei come againe to their former wittes, thei denie plainly thei wote where thei became, or whether thei were than in theyr bodies, or out of theyr bodies, wakyng or slepyng: remembring also as little, either what they heard, saw, saied, or did than, sauyng as it were through a cloude, or by a dreame: but this thei know certainely, that whiles their mindes so roued and wandred, thei were most happie and blisfull, so that they lament and wepe at theyr retourne vnto theyr former senses, as who saieth, nothyng were leefer vnto theim than




But Bottom's provocative hint of higher meanings remains no more than a hint, perhaps even a trap for the unwary. His dream "hath no bottom" in it both because the dream has lifted Bottom for once out of his lowly self and because the fairy world is still far from a vision of (as Tyndale phrases it) "the bottome of Goddes secretes." For all the resonances, the world of comedy cannot really assimilate the mysteries of faith, nor is the gift of an acquaintance with the fairy queen quite the same thing as grace; so Bottom must relapse from a dream that "hath no bottom" into his usual Bottom-y self, ready to make Pyramus alnd Thisby an even more lamentable comedy with his stupidity. But for an instant we are given another perspective, one in which Bottom's simple- mindedness seems enviable rather than ludicrous, and literalism and faith seem impossible to tell apart. A play which has consistently encouraged a pluralistic vision for a moment lets us see that even sophistication can have its disad- vantages.

Having made the point, Shakespeare moves on. Perhaps this is the most frustrating aspect of Shakespeare's comic art. The intellectual content is never labored, never ponderous, and always there to belie those who would treat the plays as frivolous and to lure those who would analyze them into pompous terms and academic abstractions. So especially in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Philosophical distinctions and metaphysical terminology seem absurd before the easy grace of the play, and Pauline discourses on faith seem a far cry from a production full of low comedy and Ovidian fancies. Yet the critic must inevitably risk bringing up such concepts and such discourses if he is to discuss the intellectual complexities of a comedy ending with Puck's suggestion that the play itself may be no more-or less-than another fairy-induced vision. And that may be Shakespeare's ultimate ironic insight: it is your loss if you think fairies simply unreal or their works mere disorder, but as soon as you try like Bottom to capture them in words and treat them as if they were literally there, they will be off in another wood dancing.

The University of West Florida

continually to raue and be deteigned with suche a spece of madnesse. And this is but a certaine smacke or thinne taste of theyr blisse to come.

I cite the Chaloner translation, The Praise of Folie (1549; ed. Clarence Miller [London: Oxford Univ. Press, i965], pp. I27-28). The scene imagined, the references to sleeping, waking, and dreaming suggest that Shakespeare may have been remembering this passage.



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