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Bottom, His Dream and Pyramus:

Transformation through Intimate Immensity

Thesis: Bottom, by exploring his inner immensity through dream, gains a more intimate

awareness of himself, his place in the world, and the complicated realities of love. Furthermore,

Bottom’s Dream seen along with his final performance in Pyramus and Thisbe effects a

transformation of understanding that also becomes intimate and immense for the reader as

Shakespeare crafts the phenomenon of dreams.

• Part 1: Bachelard’s idea of intimate immensity helps explain the nature of Bottom’s

Dream and why his Dream effects a lasting epiphany

• Part 2: Bottom practically applies the meaning of his dream through his role as Pyramus

in the play-within-a-play, affording Shakespeare’s audience the opportunity to explore

Bottom’s Dream in a new and more meaningful intimate space

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Alyssa Ruege

Dr. Ankerberg

ENG 321 Shakespeare 1

26 March 2010

Bottom, His Dream and Pyramus:

Transformation through Intimate Immensity

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…But it is a characteristic of wisdom

not to do desperate things.” American author Henry David Thoreau writes this reflection in

Walden after having spent two years in the woods learning to “live deliberately” a simple and

contented life, a life free from the “quiet desperation” of the restrictive outside world. It is only

after he is free to contemplate his natural surroundings that Thoreau is able to truly contemplate

the space within himself. As Bachelard might say, Thoreau experiences an “expansion of being

that life curbs and caution arrests” (184); he learns from the forest that his own “intimate” space

is “immense,” full of possibility and integrity that allows him to live without need for the “quiet

desperation” of other men. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the effect of the

Green World on the character Bottom can also be viewed in the light of Bachelard’s intimate

immensity. Bottom is constantly set apart from the other characters, especially the several pairs

of lovers, who lead their desperate lives inside and outside of Athens. Though of a lower social

rank, Bottom is the man who lives life simply, though not always deliberately, whether he is a

citizen in the political realm of Athens or in the magical fairy wood realm, an opposite world of

transformation, dream, disorder, and imagination. Marjorie Garber notes:

As he progresses from Bottom the weaver to Titania’s ass-headed lover to the

classical hero Pyramus, Bottom does so with unflagging zeal, equanimity, and

enthusiasm, all qualities Theseus and the others might do well to emulate (225).
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Certainly Bottom is not one to do “desperate things,” which he demonstrates after his

fellow actors leave him alone in the woods with his recently-acquired ass-head:

I see their knavery: this is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could; but I
will not stir from this place, do what they can. I will walk up and down here, and
I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid (3.1.85-87).

Bottom’s propensity to be content and with whatever life throws at him, be it an ass’s head or the

crazed Fairy Queen, would make Bottom the wisest of all the characters, according to Thoreau.

Even so, not even the stable Bottom is immune to the transformative atmosphere of the Green

World. Though he may be “wise” compared to other characters, Bottom the man is unaware of

his strengths and his flaws; though he is enthusiastic, he is also seemingly ignorant and self-

centered, wanting to play all the roles in Pyramus and Thisbe. It is not until he enters the woods

and becomes Bottom the ass that he becomes truly “translated.” Bottom, by exploring his inner

immensity through dream, gains a more intimate awareness of himself, his place in the world,

and the complicated realities of love. Furthermore, Bottom’s Dream seen along with his final

performance in Pyramus and Thisbe effects a transformation of understanding that also becomes

intimate and immense for the reader as Shakespeare crafts the phenomenon of dreams.

In order to completely understand Bottom’s transformation and epiphany in 4.1, it is

important to first analyze the nature of Bottom’s “dream.” First, one must realize that to pinpoint

the exact moment when Bottom begins to dream is nothing short of ambiguous and uncertain,

and yet this uncertainty lies at the root of the lesson Bottom intimates. Such uncertainty is truly

the nature of the Green World and, Shakespeare would argue, reality itself. In this play,

perception ceases to be reality, while that which is held to be “real” becomes imperceptible

without the aid and acceptance of dreams. Whether or not he is aware of it, Bottom accepts this

uncertainty with absolute certainty and confidence in himself; thus he is able to encounter change
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and magic without need for desperate measures. For example, one observes that Bottom

ventures into the woods and accepts whatever he meets there as completely normal; while he

may have his doubts, at no point does he become consumed with an effort to explain his meeting

of the spirit world, simply because he has not encountered it before. When he awakes from

sleep, he automatically and validly assumes his experiences were a vision, a waking-dream of

sorts. Yet he does not try to explain it. If anything, Bottom’s dream makes him even more

certain that inexplicable experiences are simply inexplicable, and that “[m]an is but an ass if he

go about to expound this dream” (4.1.195-206).

Although Bottom is completely “awake” while Titania whisks him away, and although he

describes his experiences as a dream only until after he has slept and returns to the mortal world,

this does not mean that his experiences cannot be understood as a type of dream-phenomenon.

Bachelard counsels against such a propensity to cast a strict dividing line between spaces of

inside and outside, dreams and waking consciousness (211-212). Instead, he offers a way to look

at Bottom’s dream which demonstrates that Bottom has truly learned something about himself

through his experiences and his epiphany at the end of 4.1.

Once Bottom and his fellow actors leave the realm of reason in Athens, they exit that

space and enter the space of the fairy world, where dream-qualities of magic and disorder reign.

Clearly, to be inside in the Green World is to be outside of Athens, and this juxtaposition of

inside and outside worlds lends insight into the nature of Bottom’s dream. According to

Bachelard:

[T]he daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world
that bears the mark of infinity…We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the
same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere,
in the space of elsewhere. When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings…it is
immense…Immensity is within ourselves (183-184).
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When Bottom ventures into the forest, he indeed flees to a realm “bearing the mark of infinity”

as well as immensity, for the Green World is a world of infinite possibility. It can turn lovers into

enemies, change humans into asses, and ascribe human emotions and quarrels to immortal

beings, namely Oberon and Titania. However, by entering into this space of infinite immensity,

Bottom enters into another space, the intimate space inside himself, the world of intimate

immensity. He is elsewhere: inside himself by virtue of his dream-like experience.

Neither he nor the audience sees the dream begin, but instead Bottom’s daydream begins

slowly, as by stages he encounters more and more of the fairy world and the supernatural. First,

Puck “translates” Bottom’s existence by giving him an ass’s head; Bottom’s friends flee in fear

and desperate horror; Bottom wakes the bewitched Titania, who immediately loves the ass,

captivates him, commands her fairy spirits to attend him, and falls asleep with him in a nest of

foliage. Although the normal Bottom, Bottom the man, is a creature who seems inherently

childish and egotistical, the audience will see that Bottom the ass is not altogether unaware of

what is going on whilst in the company of spirits. As enters more deeply into his dream, Bottom

enters more deeply into his own intimate space, so that his true qualities are embodied outwardly

and concretely through his dream experience. Bottom is “transformed” into an ass; but his

asshood is “redundant, in that he has been essentially an ass all his life and will always be one”

(Allen 108). Instead, one sees new sides to Bottom, the infinite possibilities of his character.

John Allen explains further:

…Bottom as ass is the epitome of common sense. In this guise, he displays a

modesty and insouciance which are particularly notable, because they are absent
from his character elsewhere in the play (107).

As is the case in many of Shakespeare’s plays, the fools and the low-born become the

wisest characters to any discerning and open-hearted spectator.

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Bottom’s “common sense” comes into play as soon as he arrives in the fairy

world, but one shall see that he does not allow reason to completely take over. He is

understandably skeptical at first, when the beautiful Fairy Queen praises his singing, his

“shape,” even his “virtue,” and swears her love to him instantly. Bottom immediately

realizes a host of unspoken reasons why Titania’s expression of love is unusual, if not

completely unreasonable. Surely something must be amiss:

Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that, and yet, to say the truth,
reason and love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity that
some honest neighbors will not make them friends (3.1.104-106).

Titania’s honesty reply, “Thou art as wise as thou are beautiful,” may be a seeming mockery of

Bottom’s physical state, but the audience recognizes that perhaps it is Bottom’s sudden

transformation that suddenly makes him wise. Unknowingly he sums up the root of the

desperation going on in other parts of the wood: Hermia and Helena, Lysander and Demetrius

are about to rip each other apart in furious and unreasonable passions, perhaps because they

merely refuse to strike a healthy balance between reason and love.

However, Bottom at this point has no idea how sensible he really is. He only knows that

sometimes love does not makes sense, and he is okay with playing along for a while: “Nay, I can

gleek [make a jest] upon the occasion” (3.1.106). One might argue he has no choice, since

Titania is “a spirit of no common rate,” and Bottom “shalt remain here, whether [he] wilt or no”

(3.1.112,111), but all the better for Bottom: he is used to playing along, acting, making an “ass”

of himself. Giving in to the dream before him will not hurt him a bit.

By choosing to embrace the dream before him, instead of struggling against as situation

that leaves him powerless, Bottom continues to further embrace himself and his identity. He

literally confronts his inner nature, his asshood, head-on. As Titania brings him further into the
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magical wood, he begins to really live inside the very type of “limitless world” which Bachelard

comments on:

We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious
impression of “going deeper and deeper” into a limitless world. Soon, if we do
not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are (185).

It is obvious that Bottom does not know where he is going when he accompanies Titania, but he

is clearly not anxious about the choice. Soon he is no longer aware of geography, only that he is

“marvelous hairy about the face…such a tender ass” with fairies to order about and a devoted

lover to dote on him constantly. The lowly weaver-turned-ass has become a king in the lap of

luxury; he is living in a limitless world that one might be a fool to reject. He falls asleep a true

ass, acting like one and needing “good, sweet hay,” but knowing peace, security, and pleasure.

Bottom becomes aware of the implications of his dream only after he and all the lovers

wake from sleep, and he finds himself “untranslated.” He embarks upon his epiphany speech,

seemingly confused and discombobulated by a vague memory and understanding like the lovers

when they awake. Yet what is true for Bottom can be true for the mass of men, that the

possession of mere vague understanding sums up the truth and ability of humanity. His

synesthesia experience paradoxically makes this clear:

I have had a most rare vision. I 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...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 (4.1.197-
198; 201-203).

The mangled biblical allusion to 1 Corinthians 2:9 is what brings about Bottom’s sense of self-

recognition, but also a realization of the deep “mystery” of reality. His dream that “hath no

bottom” has revealed “things beyond the powers of men’s senses to comprehend” (Stroup 81).
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It is an epiphany that is “profound and lasting,” “much more than a hint,” according to Thomas

Stroup:

Bottom has indeed been changed. He has come to realize, not momentarily, that
this tailor’s life he leads is no more real than the play in which he would play all
parts, and less real than the brief vision wherein he alone of all the characters of
the play has lived among the mortals. Bottom has become for a time a character
in that infinite world simply because, ironically, he was more literal-minded, more
innocent, less questioning, less doubtful than any other mortal in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (81-82).

Stroup also demonstrates that Bottom realizes a truth about the Athenian world and its

characters which any other mortal would be unequipped to grasp:

Bottom…has become an exemplar of St. Paul’s later statement (in the same
second chapter of I Corinthians) “that if any man among you seemeth to be wise
in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise” (81).

Thus it is the high-brow lovers of Athens, those who lead desperate lives failing to

properly negotiate love and law, who become the fools against the wisdom of Bottom the

Weaver.

Bottom further demonstrates his lasting transformation through his desire to make his

experience lasting and public. Since he cannot explain it in words, his natural inclination is to do

this through art, by singing a ballad at the end of the production of Pyramus and Thisbe, which

becomes the practical implication of Bottom’s epiphany. As he explains to his fellows,

“Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not what, for if I tell you, I am no true

Athenian” (4.2.18). Once again, “man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what

methought I had,” and instead of trying to describe his epiphany in normal, mathematical, and

plain speech, it will be divined by way of “a sweet comedy” and a beautiful ballad. Although he

will have Peter Quince compose the dream ballad, it is more significant that Bottom has urge to
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associate his intimate experiences in the wood with matters of love: the ballad would attempt to

disclose the meanings of his dream at the conclusion of Pyramus and Thisbe.

In addition, it is a further indication of Bottom’s lasting transformation that he will resign

himself to playing only one character, the hero Pyramus, rather than trying to hoard all the roles

for himself. He now cares more about the message of his bottomless dream:

The man who enacts Pyramus is not quite identical with the one who had
announced that his suicide most gallantly for love would “ask some tears in the
true performing of it”…his role has become significant for him not because it
exalts him as an individual but because he understands its significance in relation
to the action of the play as a whole. The play is about the death of lovers, and
Bottom has become conversant with the mysteries of love (Allen 110).

Thus one sees that Bottom’s Dream, an intimate experience of immense wisdom and truth that he

longs to share, can only become an intimate experience for the audience until the play-within-a-

play completes its meaning. However, there are still questions of what that meaning is and

which audience will fully understand the message.

One can be sure that Bottom, the wise and inspired fool, sees how the rich meanings of

his dream intertwine in the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. He cannot let this wisdom be

wasted, no matter how bad the production is. In one sense, Pyramus and Thisbe reenacts the

situation of the lovers in the Green World, but with a demonstration of what might have

happened if the spirit-world had not been involved, and if Midsummer had not been a comedy.

In the scheme of the larger play, the comedy, order is restored when Oberon and Titania make

up, and through the final marriages which resolve the desperate quarreling and anxiety of the

troubled Athenian lovers. Yet Shakespeare, like Bottom, cannot let his audience think that life

will always give lovers what they desperately strive to achieve; by adding the strain of tragedy in

Pyramus and Thisbe, he rounds out naïveté with a dose of skepticism. In the end, Shakespeare

creates a new intimate space for the reader by enclosing a tragedy within a comedy. It is a world
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which, though intimate, is also immense, and it echoes the lesson of Bottom’s dream and

epiphany. Shakespeare’s audience learns finally that the uncertainty of change and struggle is

the only certain reality of life. It is a reality that should be accepted by balancing love and law,

expounded upon through art, and learned by experience, just as Bottom is only transformed by

contentedly embracing his dream life.

Bottom’s audience, however, is not so easily persuaded. Being characters and

participants in the comedy, the lovers have difficulty seeing the wisdom in tragedy when

comedy’s restoration has been good to them, and when the actors themselves are so raw and

unpolished. As Allen explains:

…Theseus and his courtiers, preoccupied with ridiculing the performance of

Pyramus and Thisbe, cannot be expected to amend its crudity and supply reality
to its shadows…But they are privileged to enjoy an imaginative truth of their own
– that of love, now about to be consummated to everyone’s satisfaction (112).

Theseus, speaking both for himself as Duke and on behalf of his subjects, makes attempts to be

diplomatic at the tragedy’s conclusion; however, his condescension makes it clear that he does

not very much care about the moral of the story:

No epilogue, I pray you, for your play needs no excuse…for when the players are
all dead, there need none to be blamed. Marry, if he that writ it had played
Pyramus and hung himself in Thisbe’s garter, it would have been a fine tragedy:
and so it is…But come…let your epilogue alone…Lovers, to bed, ‘tis almost fairy
time (5.1.328-332; 334).

Theseus had wanted the play to please his happy subjects, but now that it is over, the magic of

the wedding night is the only end to be achieved. Theseus has his own notions of plays and

lovers: the best of plays, he says, are “but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination

amend them” (5.1.206-207). Indeed, Theseus knows that the same is true of lovers, even if he

doesn’t apply it to himself. He doesn’t need art to help expound on another man’s wisdom. In
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this sense, Theseus “is very like the man of the world to whom the Spirit does not communicate;

and this just at the time when the Spirit is strong in prosaic Bottom” (Allen 112).

In describing how dreams transport one to the infinite space within oneself, Bachelard

explains that “we open the world, as it were, by transcending the world seen as it is” (184). In A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare orchestrates Bottom’s Dream, his transformative

epiphany, and the play-within-the-play in a harmony that allows the audience to accomplish the

same thing which the weaver himself does, to transcend “the world seen as it is.” In

accomplishing this transcendence, one is afforded not only an opportunity for daydreaming, but

also an opportunity to transport one’s being back to the world outside the play, just as Bottom

and the lovers return to Athens with experiences they can’t fully describe, and changed in ways

they don’t fully understand.

Only Bottom understands and accepts the inability to fully grasp the relationships

between reality and perception, reason and love, law and disorder; he understands that

negotiation of such things has no bottom, no end and no completion in the waking world. They

are complicated, confusing, and they cannot be expounded by any attempt of man – except

through imagination and art, as Shakespeare himself clearly knew. Perhaps, after waking from A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s audience should chime in along with Bottom, “I had

a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” One can only embrace life with the

Weaver’s courage, escape it once in a while through dreams and art, and then return to the

outside world once again. One may be changed in ways one cannot “taste” or “conceive” or

“report,” but at least the dreamer may find himself somewhat wiser, fortified against leading a

life of quiet desperation like the mass of men.

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Works Cited

Allen, John A. “Bottom and Titania.” Shakespeare Quarterly 18.2 (Spring 1967): 107-117.

JSTOR. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2867696>.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate

Places. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shakespeare: Complete Works.

Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. New York: Modern-Random, 2007. 369-411.

Stroup, Thomas B. “Bottom’s Name and His Epiphany.” Shakespeare Quarterly 29.1 (Winter

1978): 79-82. JSTOR. 24 Mar. 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2869173>.