A Midsummer Night Dream
In William Shakespeare's, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom the weaver is one of Shakespeare's finest clowns. He is portrayed as a weaver, an ass, and as Pyramus throughout the play and all play a significant role. Bottom is a multi-faceted figure as one of Shakespeare's greatest comical creations. Unpredictable, witty, a master ironist, and the only mortal capable of communicating directly with the fairy world. Bottom embodies the dramatist himself, who introduces his fellow mortals to the world of fantasy, using his pen to capture the essence of a dream ( Scott 359).
Bottom's most famous character is being an ass. It is Bottom's imagination that makes his transformation into an ass and ensuing encounter with the Queen of Fairies. He is the only mortal in the play that has an interaction with the fairy world. When he is transformed into an ass, his friends run away in terror, but he cannot conceive that he has changed. He states that it must be a trick on their part: "Why do they run away? This is a knavery of them to make me afeardÂ…(II i. 106-107). 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 will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid."(III i. 115-119). Bottom is clearly the ladies man. He shows himself sensitive to the delicacy of the sex in the matter of the killing of the lion and the critics feel that his insistence upon a prologue(Scott 401).
Throughout the play, Bottom appears to be anything but romantic. He is a trades-unionist amongst butterflies, a rateplayer in Elfland (Scott 402). Puck who is responsible for Bottom's transformation described him as "the shallowest thickskin of that barren sort" (III ii. 13), the biggest fool in a company of fools. Bottom being portrayed as a fool, is really the least shallow and thickskinned of his group, as he shows up as the imaginative man. (Scott...
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