Analysis of Nick Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Nick Bottom, along with Puck, is one of the two characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who are centrally involved with all three of the stories taking place throughout the play. He is a member of the Mechanicals, a group of fools who also work as craftsmen in Athens. They also perform plays for fun and are currently working on Pyramus and Thisbe, in the hopes that Duke Theseus would want to see the play on his wedding day, and be so moved by the performance that he would grand them sixpence each day into perpetuity. Bottom plays the lead role (Pyramus) and engages in a power struggle of sorts with Peter Quince, who is the playwright and director. He is the semi-unfortunate victim of Puck’s folly, as Puck replaces Bottom’s head with one of a donkey, just in time for Titania, queen of the fairies, to see him and fall in love with him (having been enchanted by a love potion mixed by her own jealous husband, Oberon). She commands the fairies who serve her to wait upon Bottom as well; after a time, Oberon pities his wife and releases her from the spell. Once she comes to herself and realizes the person with whom she has been in love, she is humiliated and suspicious. Puck restores him to his normal appearance while he is sleeping in the forest; later, when he wakes up, he remembers enough to know that he has had a most unusual experience. Eventually, Duke Theseus does choose Pyramus and Thisbe for his wedding day, much more because of the passion with which it is presented than for any sort of quality.
An interesting aspect of Nick Bottom’s development in the play is the explicitness of his humor. Compared with Puck, who often uses subtle humor and plays tricks that people do not see right away, Bottom is a bull in a china shop, plodding loudly through every situation in which he appears. This makes him the dominant character in his acting crew, because of his seemingly limitless confidence in his own ability, but also because of his utter inability to carry out roles with the excellence that he thinks he has. Because he is oblivious of his own shortcomings, his grandiose, over-the-top speeches are even more important than they would be otherwise. The ridiculous pomp with which Bottom carries himself hits a climax when Bottom has the head of a donkey. When Titania is parading him around, madly in love with him, he believes that the love she gives him is just his due, including the fact that all of her servants kowtow before him. The fact that he cannot tell that his own head has been replaced with a donkey’s is a parallel expression for his overall absurdity. After all, there is no reason why the queen of the fairies would fall in love with an average artisan (and a dreadful actor). The fact that she does should have indicated to someone, somewhere, the dreadfulness of the situation. Bottom’s development shows the absurdity of the world view at the time.
During this play, Bottom develops as he does to show the folly of many things: of jealousy, of enchantment, of those who would involve the ego in love – and even of those who see themselves as being much better actors than they are. The jealousy of Oberon makes him look small-minded, particularly given his status as king of the fairies. He has total control of his world; however, even a king cannot control the mind of others. This frustrates him and leads him to enchant his wife. However, while her infatuation with Nick Bottom does make her look ridiculous, it does nothing to endear her to Oberon. So it is with jealousy – when we feel jealousy with regard to a beloved, many times that emotion is simply self-serving and is, ultimately, selfish. When there is true betrayal, that is one thing; however, there is no evidence that Titania has actually betrayed her husband. As a result, his jealousy makes him look ridiculous. The folly of enchantment in love is also made clear. Love potions and aphrodisiacs have been available for sale for centuries; the only thing that they have in common is their ineffectiveness. Love is not something that can be manipulated by a potion or by whim. Instead, love is something much deeper and much stronger – so strong, in fact, that it makes the idea of a powerful magic spell sound like a children’s chant instead. Even those who believe that they are better actors than they are, as Bottom does, are exposed for ridicule in this play. When Bottom is taking on his playwright and director with challenge after silly challenge, one can almost see Shakespeare himself laughing and nodding, having been through similar arguments himself with actors who believe that they are God’s gift to drama, all the while having extremely low levels of talent.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has much to say about a number of themes. The role of the play within a play (Pyramus and Thisbe) is to show the powerful role that art can play in society. It allows the creativity that is leached out of the soul through so many different situations in life to find its way to paper: the play Pyramus and Thisbe allows those who appear in it to enjoy a different aspect of their lives by performing. Also, the story in the mini-play reflects themes that are at work in the larger play – and in the lives of many of the viewers. This brings the theme to the attention of the characters in the main story – and to the attention of the reader/viewer. Hearing a lecture about some of these themes in this book can be instructive; however, watching a play that incorporates these themes allows the characters who are in the larger play, as well as the audience members, to experience those themes in a different way than a lecture, by living vicariously through the experiences of others.
The relationship between imagination and reality is much more tenuous than we would think. This has less to do with the real existence with fairies than it has to do with the fact that each of us perceives reality in a different way, because of the network of experiences that each of us has. These different networks cause us to approach the same event, the same situation, the same song, the same story differently. Oberon and Titania view their relationship quite differently at the beginning of the play; it is their adventure with Nick Bottom that brings their reality into focus.
