Shakespeare

Vol. 4, No. 1, March 2008, 4564

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Changeling Bottom: Speech prefixes, acting, and character in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Lina Perkins Wildera*
a
Department of English, Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut, USA

While Nick Bottom, in exception to the current scholarly consensus about early
modern ‘‘character’’, continues to be described in terms that suggest a fixed
identity, his speech prefixes tell another story. Called ‘‘Bottom’’ in speech prefixes
since the eighteenth century, in the speech prefixes of the earliest printed texts
Bottom is identified by three different names: Bottom, Pyramus, and Clown.
Bottom’s three names outline a tension between professional/trade, professional/
theatrical, and class roles. As he negotiates among these roles and names, Bottom
becomes not a stable ‘‘character’’ but a figure in whom changefulness and
permanence are at odds: a ‘‘changeling Proteus’’, in Joseph Roach’s formulation,
an actor.
Keywords: Shakespeare; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; character; Bottom; speech
prefixes; clown; acting; changeling Proteus

‘‘O Bottom, thou art changed.’’

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.109)

In her preface to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Riverside Shakespeare, Anne

Barton parenthetically sums up what remains a surprisingly durable view of Nick
Bottom’s role in the play:
In the remarkably generous and inclusive order of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where
Bottom can converse amiably with the fairy queen without losing a jot of his own
identity, there seems to be nothing which the shaping spirit of imagination cannot use
and, in some way, make relevant to the whole. (253)

While it is now far from standard practice among literary critics to assign a stable
‘‘identity’’ to any person in early modern English drama, descriptions of Bottom in
such terms nonetheless remain common: even Stephen Greenblatt, in his introduc-
tion to the play in the Norton Shakespeare, assumes that Bottom remains ‘‘the most
flatulently absurd of the mechanicals’’ (811) throughout his time in Titania’s bower.
Bottom’s apparent exemption from the scholarly shift towards a more historicized,
more fluid view of character deserves scrutiny. This is particularly crucial given the
history of Bottom’s name*and thus the punning around which many critics
construct his supposedly stable ‘‘identity’’*in printed texts of the plays and the

*Email: lwilder@conncoll.edu

ISSN 1745-0918 print/1745-0926 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17450910801902767
http://www.informaworld.com
46 L. P. Wilder

central role of such material textual evidence in discussions of Shakespearean

‘‘character’’ in the last twenty years (e.g., De Grazia and Stallybrass 25657; Stern
98; Cloud).
Before the eighteenth century and the first ‘‘modern’’ editors of Shakespeare’s
plays, Shakespeare’s speech prefixes*including Bottom’s*often give multiple names
to single ‘‘characters’’. In one of the most influential articles on this subject, written
in 1935, R. B. McKerrow lists significant variations in early printed texts of Two
Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Love’s Labours Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, and
Titus Andronicus (‘‘Suggestion’’ 46063). A significant number of Bottom’s speeches
in the 1600 Quarto, the 1619 Quarto, the 1623 Folio, and later seventeenth-century
printed texts are not spoken by ‘‘Bot’’, as they are in every edition after Nicholas
Rowe’s edition of 1709. Of Bottom’s 59 speeches in the Folio,1 the majority (38), are
tagged as belonging to ‘‘Bottome’’ or some abbreviation thereof. Twelve are spoken
by ‘‘Piramus’’ (or ‘‘Pir’’, ‘‘Pyra’’, etc.); not all of these are in Pyramus’s voice, though
all are spoken in the immediate context of the play-within-the-play. In nine cases,
Bottom speaks as ‘‘Clowne’’. In stage directions, he is ‘‘Bottome’’ three times,
‘‘Piramus’’ twice, and ‘‘Clowne’’ three times.
In fact, the presence of a character named ‘‘Bottom’’ in the scene to which
Barton alludes (4.1) is an editorial construction. At the beginning of the scene, the
Folio’s stage direction for Bottom’s entrance along with Titania, a number of her
fairies, and Oberon identifies them by function rather than by name: ‘‘Enter Queene
of Fairies, and Clowne, and Fairies, and the King behinde them’’ (sig. O1r). Beginning
with Rowe’s edition, ‘‘Clowne’’ is abruptly renamed ‘‘Bottom’’, while the others
retain their original designations: ‘‘Enter Queen of Fairies, Bottom, Fairies attending,
and the King behind them’’ (Rowe 504). Rowe’s normalization of Bottom’s speech
prefixes has been followed by almost all subsequent editors, up to and including the
most recent.2 Student and even some professional editions of the plays absorb such
emendations so thoroughly as to leave no indication in the text or in footnotes that a
change has been made.3 (One partial exception is the Norton Shakespeare, in which a
textual note lists variant speech prefixes*although not their specific locations in the
text*and indicates that each ‘‘has been standardized throughout’’ [Greenblatt et al.
862].) What I wish to argue here is not only that Bottom’s ‘‘identity’’ is multiple, but
that the qualities to which Barton alludes (generosity, inclusiveness, and imagination)
are not properties of the play itself but of Bottom’s negotiation among his and
others’ many names. That is, Bottom’s appealing ‘‘character’’*if any*is both
threatened and constituted by its embeddedness in social and dramatic relationships.
That changefulness is above all an actorly quality, especially in the early modern
English theatre, leads to my second point: while parodying the player’s trade socially
and affectively, Bottom nonetheless comes to embody many of these traits without
parody. (The fine line between parody and performance can be seen in Joseph
Roach’s definition of both terms: ‘‘repetition with revision’’ [Roach Cities 34, 29
30].4) I base this argument in part on the fact that, when playing the role of Pyramus,
Bottom’s speech prefix is always ‘‘Pyramus’’*an actorly transformation that has
received even less attention than his stint as ‘‘Clown’’. As player, clown, and named
character, Bottom distils a changefulness already present in his contemporary (and
one of Will Kemp’s other roles) Costard, of Love’s Labours Lost. By expanding the
name-changing introduced in the ‘‘Nine Worthies’’ segment in Love’s Labours Lost,
 Shakespeare 47

A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes the link between clowning and acting explicit.
Bottom’s many changes, textually and visually, evoke the figure of Proteus so often
associated with players in this period (Roach Player’s Passion 41, 4950). This
changefulness resonates in the speech prefixes that so many editions of the plays
silently ‘‘correct’’.

Bottom and his Editors

When the earliest editors of Shakespeare’s texts impose consistent speech prefixes,
they are in part affirming their own beliefs about the nature of character in
Shakespeare’s plays. In an often-cited passage, Alexander Pope insists that identity in
Shakespeare’s plays is always stable and that this stability can be traced to the speech
prefixes of the characters in question. In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s
plays, Pope claims that each character in a play by Shakespeare
is as much an Individual, as those in Life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike;
and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be Twins, will
upon comparison be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of Character, we
must add the wonderful Preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays, that had
all the Speeches been printed without the very names of the Persons, I believe one might
have apply’d them with certainty to every speaker. (iii)

The problem with this formulation, as Random Cloud points out, is that the only
editions of Shakespeare in which all names are ‘‘apply’d . . . with certainty’’ are those
in which an editor has applied them (13441). Cloud has long argued that
inconsistent speech prefixes provide crucial evidence that Shakespeare’s ‘‘characters’’
are not ‘‘solid entities . . . that pre-exist their functions in the play, [but] . . .
illusions . . . built up out of the simultitudinous dynamic of all the ingredients of
dramatic art, of which character is only a part’’ (143, emphasis in original).
So far, so good. A version of Cloud’s theory of character has become the
dominant view, thanks in part to an essay by Margreta de Grazia and Peter
Stallybrass, ‘‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’’, which began life as an
introduction to a collection of essays by Cloud.5 In direct opposition to editorial
principles that originate in the eighteenth century, de Grazia and Stallybrass argue
against ‘‘the assumption . . . that texts are representations or embodiments of
something else, and that it is that something which the performer or editor
undertakes to reveal’’ (256n). The actual text, not an ideal text, is their object of
study. Lacking a list of dramatis personae and normalized speech prefixes, readers
of early texts would not have received the suggestion embedded in this editorial
apparatus ‘‘that characters preexist their speeches . . . . Readers had to arbitrate for
themselves the boundaries of identity, constructing (or failing to construct, or
refusing to construct) ‘individual’ characters in the process of reading’’ (267).
But while such arguments have usefully decentred the critical reception of plays
that had long been limited by (and sometimes to) character criticism, readings of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream have followed a different path. The critical resuscitation
of this play in the 1980s relied heavily on Bottom as a character. Readings that place
the play in the intellectual and cultural tradition of Carnival, in particular, expand
on the significance of Bottom’s name and, more specifically, on the passage that
Annabel Patterson calls Shakespeare’s ‘‘brilliant gloss on the multiple pun that is
48 L. P. Wilder

Bottom’’: Bottom’s awakening in 4.1 (68).6 For Jan Kott, Bottom’s reflection on his
name in this speech cements the play’s construction of the paired oppositions
(coincidentia oppositorum) of ‘‘bottom’’ and top, sacred and secular (31, 61), that
characterize early modern neoplatonic mysticism.7 For Patterson, the significance of
Bottom’s name is similar: ‘‘At the moment of his transformation back to manhood,
Bottom implicates his own ritual naming in the central act of interpretation that the
Dream demands’’*that is, the question whether the play is to be taken as light
comedy or as something darker (68). Establishing Bottom’s name, then, has to do
not only with the construction of Bottom as a ‘‘character’’ but with the intellectual
fabric of the play as a whole. While Kott and Patterson are hardly character critics,
their treatment of Bottom takes for granted a stability of character which Cloud, and
De Grazia and Stallybrass, argue should be avoided as anachronistic. Some
disagreement is to be expected, since all five scholars published their cutting-edge
work within a few years of one another. But it is striking that Bottom should be the
‘‘character’’ for whom the pendulum swung (and to some degree continues to swing)
away from what was about to become a critical consensus.
Nor are twentieth-century critics alone in making an exception for Bottom as a
character. Eighteenth-century editions do not generally use clowns’ proper names in
speech prefixes; instead, they are tagged as ‘‘Clown’’. There is an inconsistency here.
Expanding on Pope’s description of Shakespeare’s characters in the preface to his
1733 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, Lewis Theobald credits Shakespeare’s clowns
with individuality:
Shakespeare’s Clowns and Fops come all of a different House: they are no farther allied
to one another than as Man to Man, Members of the same Species: but as different in
Features and Lineaments of Character, as we are from one another in face, or
Complexion[.] (iii, emphasis in original.)

Nevertheless, Theobald, like Rowe and Pope, prefers to identify clowns in speech
prefixes as ‘‘Clown’’, not by name. The majority of Theobald’s clowns, like those in
nearly all eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare’s plays, are tagged as ‘‘Clown’’,
and their names are given only in the dramatis personae, if at all.
In contrast to their general practice, and in more direct affirmation of Theobald’s
reading of Shakespearean clowns as distinct characters, eighteenth-century editions
consistently identify Bottom not as ‘‘Clown’’ but as ‘‘Bottom’’. (Touchstone, in
contrast, is not named in speech prefixes until the end of the eighteenth century.8)
There are many possible reasons for this exception. The most obvious is practical:
along with Peter Quince, Flute, Snout, Snug, and Starveling, Bottom is one of a
company, all of whom are identified collectively as ‘‘clowns’’ in stage directions.
Costard in Love’s Labours Lost, another clown among other comic characters and
whose situation in many ways parallels that of Bottom, is also tagged by name by
eighteenth-century editors. Like Costard, Bottom must be distinguished from that
company; a proper name is one way to do this.9 But Bottom, unlike Costard and
despite his fascination with stock lovers and tyrants, cares very much about the
protocol and the rituals of naming: he demands that Peter Quince call the players
‘‘generally, man by man, according to the scrip’’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1.2.23), and, stuck in Titania’s bower, he courteously asks each fairy his name
 Shakespeare 49

(3.1.17188). Bottom, then, has been identified by name from a period in which most
of his fellow clowns were instead identified by their theatrical function.
When bibliographers, primed by the renewed scholarly interest in authority and
authorship at the beginning of the twentieth century, return to the first printed texts
of early modern English plays, speech prefixes receive new prominence. While it may
not be entirely fair to argue, as Paul Werstine does, that editors’ answers to
fundamental textual puzzles depend on what they are looking for (155), there is a
close relationship between scholarly expectations and results. In his early article,
McKerrow seeks, and finds, the author in inconsistent speech prefixes, a playwright
‘‘in the heat of composition’’ who would feel no need for ‘‘formal consistency’’ in
naming characters (‘‘Suggestion’’ 465).10 Later bibliographers look for, and find,
evidence of playhouse revision. More intriguingly, Richard F. Kennedy, editor of the
New Variorum edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has suggested that
inconsistent speech prefixes are the result of printing-house practice rather than
the choices of an author or the vagaries of a playhouse text and are in fact
‘‘indications of a compositor switching SP’s [speech prefixes] because of type
shortage’’ (Kennedy 179).11
But as Werstine points out, the manuscript evidence on this point suggests that
identifying a single source for variant speech prefixes is a doomed enterprise. Both
playhouse texts in manuscript and authorial manuscripts include variant speech
prefixes and introduce new variations (Werstine 15253; Cloud 101131, 18990).12
(Werstine, whose article predates Kennedy’s by some ten years, does not discuss the
possibility that compositors are a source for variant speech prefixes, but given the
variations present in manuscript before compositors have seen, let alone set, the text,
it seems unwise to exclude the possibility that playwrights and playhouse personnel
as well as compositors introduce variant speech prefixes.) And in any case, Werstine
notes, the quest for an ‘‘original’’, stable text*wherever it originates*is a poor
substitute for that which certain cannot be entirely recaptured, the bodies of
particular performers in actual productions of the plays (169; Long 23).13 As De
Grazia and Stallybrass, among others, point out, the only evidence of speech prefix
practice that could potentially be traced to Shakespeare himself is in The Book of Sir
Thomas More. Here, the hand said to be Shakespeare’s ‘‘gives generic speech
prefixes’’ and proper names are put in by another hand (De Grazia and Stallybrass
26869).
But for my purposes it does not matter who gives Bottom his various names:
playwright, prompter, compositor.14 What matters is that the variation exists, that
readers, compositors, and playwrights seem perfectly content with inconsistent
speech prefixes. While the speech prefixes in printed editions do not tell us much
about how Will Kemp (who presumably played this role and like other players of the
time memorized his lines from a part, not a full script15) viewed his part, they do tell
us something about the way the part was viewed at different times by others, possibly
including the playwright, scribes, book-keepers, and/or compositors. Identifying
Kemp’s roles by his theatrical function, as ‘‘Clown’’, suggests that these interpreters
and observers saw the character we call ‘‘Bottom’’ as yet another performance by a
very accomplished professional. But the presence of two proper names, Bottom and
Pyramus, suggests that unique thematic links to the plot and to other characters are
equally important. Calling the Clown ‘‘Pyramus’’ in particular suggests that
something else, a ‘‘stranger Pyramus’’ who demands yet another kind of theatrical
50 L. P. Wilder

impersonation (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.83), is also present in the role. No

matter the source of the variation in Bottom’s speech prefixes, the variation of
functional title and proper names reflects the same kind of uncertainty about
dramatic roles that John Drakakis finds in The Merchant of Venice (108).
This uncertainty is particularly relevant in the case of clowns. The clown’s
theatrical function is only just beginning to take shape at the end of the sixteenth
century. The word ‘‘clown’’ first appears in the English language in the sixteenth
century (see Wiles 23, 61). Possibly beginning with Richard Tarlton, who was known
for playing rustics (Wiles 17), as a caricature of rustic behaviour meant to provoke
laughter, this new word takes on other characteristics more specifically related to the
clown’s professional role in the theatre company: characteristics of the Vice from
mediaeval mystery plays, physical skills such as dancing drawn from the entertain-
ments of previous generations (see Wiles 7172). While Drakakis finds economic and
social change reflected in the variation from ‘‘Shylock’’ to ‘‘Iewe’’ in speech prefixes,
the instability of clowns’ speech prefixes reflects a shift in the professional world of
the theatre. Clowns are beginning to emerge from stereotype to become, on the one
hand, professional performers with their own repertoire of comic skills recognizable
from one play to another, and on the other, discrete individuals with specific tasks
within specific plays. This is also a social change: for the urban audiences of the
London theatres, laughing at a rustic is one thing; laughing at someone who shares
your own social milieu could be quite another.
As this change takes shape, Shakespeare’s clowns frequently construct themselves
in dialectic with other, rustic clowns. Bottom, Touchstone, Costard, and the First
Clown (the sexton) in Hamlet set their skills against clowns whose clownishness is
defined primarily in social and class terms: Peter Quince, Flute, Snout, Starveling,
and Snug in Midsummer; William the country clown in As You Like It; the hapless
Boyet in Love’s Labours Lost; the Second Clown in Hamlet. Robin Goodfellow, the
first onstage audience to Pyramus and Thisbe, has no trouble recognizing Peter
Quince’s players as clowns, but he cannot decide which kind of clown he is dealing
with. Indeed, like the compositor, scribe, or author confronted with Hamlet’s
clown(s), he conflates the two. (Robin, of course, is also called by multiple names,
one of them a proper name and one*the ‘‘Puck’’*a generic category.) The epithet
‘‘rude mechanicals’’ so frequently applied to Quince’s company is Robin’s (3.2.9);16 in
the same line, Robin also refers to them as a ‘‘crew of patches’’ (3.2.9)*that is,
clowns. Bottom himself is, in Robin’s judgement, ‘‘The shallowest thickskin of that
barren sort’’ and a ‘‘mimic’’ (3.2.13, 19); that is, a coarse country clown or bumpkin
and the crudest kind of actor. On Bottom’s next entrance, the stage directions and
speech prefixes announce him to be at least one of the things that Puck has just
called him out loud: a clown.
The speech prefixes in the printed text choose one designation from the many
available when they replace Bottom’s name with his theatrical function. When Peter
Quince’s speech prefixes change from the usual ‘‘Quince’’, he is newly tagged
‘‘Peter’’, not ‘‘Clown’’ (or for that matter, ‘‘Bookkeeper’’ or ‘‘Author’’, two of his
other theatrical functions). That Bottom is not called ‘‘Nick’’ in speech prefixes in
4.1 could suggest either that the new speech prefix is already present in the copy text
or, if it is a compositorial change, that the generic speech prefix is the product of an
informed reading of the play, not just of necessity. (That the speech prefix ‘‘Clown’’
is, as Kennedy points out, consistently used ‘‘in the outer forme of sheet F’’ as well as
 Shakespeare 51

for thematic reasons, as I am suggesting, may indicate that the interpreter in this case
was the compositor [187].) If the change is the compositor’s, he or she knows enough
about playhouse conventions to recognize that a ‘‘patch’’ is a clown and to know
which of these clowns is the Clown. Then again, there is no reason that the printers
should not also be playgoers. They may know which character Will Kemp or his
successors played because they saw him do it.
Bottom’s three names outline a tension between professional/trade, professional/
theatrical, and class roles. But all of Bottom’s names can place him in more than one
of these categories. That is, there is an instability, a Protean doubleness, not just
among Bottom’s speech prefixes but within each of the names by which he is
identified. As ‘‘Clown’’, Bottom is both a ‘‘hempen homespun’’ and a ‘‘patch’’, a
country bumpkin and a city-dwelling professional performer. As Pyramus, he
hesitates initially between characterizing himself as ‘‘a lover or a tyrant’’, an
instability that contributes to the play’s (for its unimaginative onstage audience)
paradoxical mixture of comedy and tragedy. Like ‘‘Clown’’, ‘‘Bottom’’ identifies the
character both in class terms and in professional terms. Not only does the name
‘‘Bottom’’ define this Clown in terms of his profession as a weaver, but it becomes
reminder of the trope of inversion and, when the name is absent in the dream that
‘‘hath no bottom’’, an evocation of the profound as well as the foundationless
(Brooks cxvii). (The ‘‘central act of interpretation’’ in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream*whether the play is to be taken seriously or not*is made fundamentally
ambiguous in Bottom. The play isn’t either dark or light; it is both: ‘‘tragical mirth’’
[5.1.57].) Nothing so elaborate attends the naming of the play’s other ‘‘clowns’’, who
in stage directions are sometimes named individually, but are twice lumped together
in terms that evoke their class status as much as their theatrical function: ‘‘Enter the
Clownes’’ (Q1 sig. D1r; the group includes Bottom); ‘‘Enter Quince, Flute, Thisbie
[sic] and the rabble’’ (Q1 sig. G2r).17 (This second group does not include Bottom.)
But while we might expect Bottom’s physical separation from this class-inflected
‘‘rabble’’ of ‘‘clowns’’ to provide him with the space he needs to become a fully
individuated character*and indeed that is in part what Barton’s reading suggests*
as far as the speech prefixes are concerned the opposite is the case. Bottom is
‘‘Clown’’ in stage directions and speech prefixes when with Titania and a nameless
‘‘mortal’’ (a far broader category than any in which he has yet been included) in the
spoken dialogue.
Both ‘‘Bottom’’ and ‘‘Clown’’ underline qualities already present in Bottom, above all
his desire to play not one but many parts. But Robin makes Bottom’s eagerness a means
of control in a game in which Bottom, name(s) and all, is little more than a pawn.
Giving a name to another character can be*and certainly is for the Puck*an assertion
of power or control. To return for a moment to Cloud: examining the tendency to
normalize character names in speech prefixes, Cloud gives the example of ‘‘Eliza’’
Doolittle, as she is now usually called, from Shaw’s Pygmalion. ‘‘Liza’’*the name she
calls herself*is given multiple names not only in the text, speech prefixes, and stage
directions (rigorously preserved by Shaw) but by the other characters: ‘‘the Flower
Girl’’, ‘‘Eliza’’, ‘‘Liza’’. But when Higgins deliberately sets out to change who she is, he
begins by aggressively revising her name: ‘‘when the heroine finally states her name’’*
Liza*Cloud points out that ‘‘Higgins simply will not take it literally’’. With help from
Pickering he declaims gravely the old nursery rhyme, ‘‘Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess’’,
52 L. P. Wilder

and completely omits her own name for herself, Liza, by which, in fact, he never
addresses or refers to her in the play. (12627)

Among the issues at stake in naming characters, then, is control over the thing
named. Silent acquiescence on the part of editors and, following their lead, readers,
to aggressive naming by other characters produces such peculiarities as the name
usually applied to the heroine of The Taming of the Shrew: Kate. By her own account,
this is not her name: ‘‘They call me Katerine, that do talke of me’’ (Folio sig. S4v).18
She refers to herself as ‘‘Katherine’’. While her father and sister do each refer to her
as ‘‘Kate’’ once (sig. S6r; sig. S5v), their usual name for her is Katherine (e.g., T2r). It
is Petruccio who insists on the nickname. Because Petruccio calls Katherine ‘‘Kate’’
and emphasizes this name-change through repetition and an elaborate series of puns,
most of us do likewise. (She is, admittedly, an abbreviated ‘‘Kate’’*ambiguously
either the nickname or a short form of Katerine*in the Folio’s speech prefixes.) Our
acquiescence to Petruccio’s naming suggests that we also approve of his goal in the
play: taming/naming the shrew. Peter Quince, Flute, Starveling, Snout, Snug, and
Nick Bottom have undergone a similar fate in being called by Robin Goodfellow’s
name for them, ‘‘rude mechanicals’’. This class-inflected title licenses us not to take
their dramatic work at all seriously. Repeating the Puck’s mockery as well as his
naming, we dismiss the dramatic ambitions of Quince’s company along with their
hopes for aristocratic patronage. The question I wish to consider next is whether this
attitude is warranted.

Bottom the Actor; Or, ‘‘What is Pyramus?’’

The ‘‘ambition’’ of the clown, as Hamlet defines it, is to draw the attention of the
audience away from ‘‘necessary question[s]’’ of the plot. For Hamlet, the important,
the ‘‘necessary’’ materials of the play are defined in social terms that mirror the
classical distinction between the noble persons who engage in tragic action and the
rustic clown who distracts from it. But prior to the 1590s and thus within memory of
the players in London’s public theatres, such class distinctions had been artificial: all
players had the same low social status. Bottom’s ‘‘change’’, like theirs, comes about
as a result of his acting*a change in profession that he and his fellows hope will
become permanent. When they daydream about becoming ‘‘made men’’ (4.2.17) and
receiving ‘‘sixpence a day’’ (4.2.1819, 1920, 20, 22) for their efforts, the members of
Quince’s company hope to make their dramatic profession their only profession. It is
not clear whether they intend to perform more plays after this first effort, but like the
company of which Shakespeare was a part, Quince’s company curries favor with
the nobility in order to reap material rewards. Bottom’s impersonation of Pyramus in
the forest rehearsal begins the process of this ‘‘change’’ in dramatic character and
profession, but it is Robin’s response to the performance that finally transforms
Bottom in name as well as in appearance. Bottom’s transformation into an ass
parodies the craft of acting in the seventeenth century, as described by Joseph Roach:
while players were celebrated for their ‘‘power of self-abdication in favor of the role’’
as well as the ability to change rapidly from one passion to another,19 there was a
growing fear that assumed identities could prove permanent (Player’s Passion 41, 42,
4950).
 Shakespeare 53

The more threatening of the two major metaphors that Roach identifies in
discussions of theatre in early modern England is particularly appropriate for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The rapid succession of passions, an effect associated
with Proteus, was particularly prized among early modern theatregoers. But such
abilities were also dangerous: ‘‘The figure of Proteus, in myth and metaphor, was . . .
ambiguous, for he who can assume any shape is in danger of losing his own’’
(Player’s Passion 49). The metaphor of the changeling, which Roach traces to the
latter half of the seventeenth century, implies that an actor could unwittingly become
the mask he assumes. (It is important to note that ‘‘self-abdication’’*cognate with
some current ideas of actorly characterization*is in seventeenth-century England a
result of, not a separate skill from, the Protean changefulness that editorial
correction of inconsistent speech prefixes works to stabilize.)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides evidence that changelings and actors were
paired earlier than Roach proposes. The action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is
motivated in part by a quarrel over a child whom Oberon twice calls a ‘‘changeling’’
(2.1.120, 4.1.58). Oberon’s revenge on Titania produces another ‘‘changeling’’ in
Bottom himself, who replaces the ‘‘changeling boy’’ in Titania’s affections: having
Bottom, she willingly surrenders the boy to Oberon (4.1.4560). For Bottom, fairy
change is not just a matter of abduction but produces the physical and perhaps even
mental transformation that led children to be called changelings. Wearing the ass’s
head, Bottom becomes one of those whom, in Spenser’s words, ‘‘men do
Chaungelings call, so chaunged by Faeries theft’’ (1.10.65.9).
That Bottom is abducted at the instigation of an actual Proteus figure, moreover,
and partly in response to the crudeness of his acting further suggests that
Shakespeare is engaging directly with the acting terminology identified by Roach.
After changing Bottom, Robin plans to chase Quince’s acting company through the
woods while constantly transforming his own physical appearance: ‘‘[s]ometime a
horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,/A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire’’ (3.1.103
4). This is his method elsewhere as well: he leads the lovers through the woods by
mimicking their voices, and accordingly to his own information he changes his
bodily appearance in order to gull gossips and young women.
But Bottom’s own physical transformation is the result not of innate ability (or his own
volition) but of magic. According to Reginald Scot’s The discoverie of witchcraft, ‘‘To set
an horsses or an asses head on a mans neck and shoulders’’ (the marginal note), one
need only ‘‘Cut off the head of a horsse or an asse (before they be dead) otherwise the
vertue or strength thereof will be the lesse effectuall, and make an earthen vessell of fit
capacitie to conteine the same, and let it be filled with the oile and fatte thereof; couer it
close, and dawbe it over with lome: let it boile over a soft fier three daies continuallie,
that the flesh boiled may run into oile, so as the bare bones may be seene: beate the haire
into powder, and mingle the same with the oile; and annoint the heads of the standers
by, and they shall seeme to have horsses or asses heads.’’ (sig. Bb6r)

While for polemical reasons Scot describes this transformation as illusory (‘‘they
shall seeme to have horsses or asses heads’’), in relating the story of a reputedly
factual animal transformation, Scot collapses this comforting distinction. The
bewitched creature in this story is ambiguously ‘‘asse or yoong man (I cannot tell
by which name I should terme him)’’ (sig. J1r). In a similarly double state, Bottom
presents visually the spectacle of the actor as changeling. Scot argues that such
54 L. P. Wilder

stories must be false, not only because they require matter to be ‘‘transubstantiated’’
and thus call up the spectre of Catholicism (sig. J2r) but because of the consequences
for the relationship between human beings and God:
Now, if a witch or a divell can so alter the shape of a man, as contrarilie to make him
look down to hell, like a beast; Gods works should not onelie be defaced and disgraced,
but his ordinance should be woonderfully altered, and thereby confounded. (sig. J3r)

Bottom’s physical transformation not only endangers his immortal soul but is an
affront to God. Add to this the echo of Pasiphae and the bull, invoked by the Puck
when he gleefully celebrates the fact that his ‘‘mistress with a monster is in love’’
(3.2.6), and Bottom*an ass-headed Minotaur as well as a clueless bull, lost in a
woodsy labyrinth*is in a very dangerous place indeed.
Bottom’s physical transformation and his abduction are thus potentially anything
but comic. Bottom’s problem is not the mésalliance registered in the stage direction
for his entrance in 4.1, Clown and Queen embracing. The danger is that having been
‘‘translated’’ he may not be able to regain his former shape. (In the case described by
Scot, the removal of enchantments involved some very underhanded dealing: the
witch offered to return the young man to his human shape in exchange for her
freedom; after she removed the enchantment, the witch hunters arrested her again
and burned her.) Given that they cast players as Wall and Moonshine, Peter Quince’s
company is sometimes derided for their overenthusiastic commitment to verisimi-
litude. But even for these players, verisimilitude is a threat, not a goal. Wall and
Moonshine are not direct representations but approximations based on conventional
signs (bush, lantern; plaster, loam, roughcast) and glossed with dialogue. (The
players consider and then reject more realistic alternatives for practical reasons*
‘‘You can never bring in a wall’’ [3.1.60]*and out of an apparent preference for the
symbolic over merely mimetic or even presentational staging: the moon will shine on
the night the play is to be presented, but Quince nonetheless proposes with great
enthusiasm the allegorical representation of Moonshine on which they eventually
settle [see 3.1.4856].) Bottom is the one to advise Snug the joiner, who finally
undertakes the lion’s part, to break the illusion, peer through the lion’s neck, ‘‘name
his name’’, and tell the company ‘‘plainly he is Snug the joiner’’ (3.1.4142). As
Cloud points out, all their characterizations are partial: the Moon (‘‘th’inconstant
Moon’’!) can’t even stick to the script long enough to get through the speech in which
he is to explain his costume (Cloud 200). (Of course, that particular inconstancy is in
part the fault of the audience.)
Bottom’s response to his transformation, though, is not to insist on his own name
but to establish the names of others. The clown is not the only character whose
connection to his name is tenuous. Titania,20 Oberon,21 Robin Goodfellow,22 and
Theseus receive similar treatment, as do, not surprisingly, the Fairies. Bottom’s
attempt to deal with Titania’s fairies produces a textual crux in act 3. Titania calls
the fairies:
Tita. Pease-blossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed.
Enter foure Fairies.
Fai. Ready; and I, and I, and I. Where shall we go?

Titania directs the fairies to greet Bottom, which they do:

 Shakespeare 55

1. Fai. Haile mortall, haile.

2. Fai. Haile.
3. Fai. Haile.
Bot. I cry your worships mercy hartily; I beseech your worships name.
Cob. Cobweb.
(Q1 sig. D3rv)

At first, the fairies are an undifferentiated mass of ‘‘Fai’’. that speaks all in a heap;
then, as they speak individually to Bottom, they become a set of interchangeable
numbered Fairies. But it is only when Bottom asks their names that the fairies are
named by their speech tags. (As each fairy gives its name, their speeches, like
Cobweb’s, are tagged by name rather than number.) The speech prefixes in the
earliest printed edition of the play follow Bottom’s naming as sensitively as they
respond to his transformation into a Clown-figure. (They do not register Titania’s
naming, and, oddly, some confusion exists among early editions of the play as to
whether she names the fairies at all: in the Folio, Titania’s identification of the fairies
is not spoken but combined with the stage directions: ‘‘Enter Pease-blossome,
Cobweb, Moth, Mustard-seede, and foure Fairies’’ [sig. N4v].) In the last moment
before Bottom loses his name temporarily, and while his identity is being threatened
by Robin and by the Queen of Fairies, Bottom is engaged in naming other
characters.
Bottom’s concern with names precedes his clownish sojourn in the forest. When
Quince’s company enters for the first time, Bottom insists on a roll call:
QUINCE Is all our company here?
BOTTOM You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.
QUINCE Here is the scroll of every man’s name which is thought fit through all Athens,
to play in our interlude . . . .
BOTTOM First, good Peter Quince, say what the play treats on; then read the names of
the actors; and so grow to a point . . . . Now, good Peter Quince, call forth your actors by
the scroll. Masters, spread yourselves.
QUINCE Answer as I call you. Nick Bottom, the weaver?
BOTTOM Ready. Name what part I am for, and proceed.
QUINCE You, Nick Bottom, are set down for Pyramus.
(1.2.15, 810, 1418)
Bottom not only asks that his fellow-players be named, but he arranges them on
the stage in such a way that the audience can easily understand which player will be
called by which name, both in the play-within-the-play and outside of it. By
‘‘spread[ing] [them]selves’’, the players do for the audience what speech-prefixes do
for a reader or performer of the play: clearly identify each player by name and
associate him with a role in the play-within-the-play. But each of Quince’s players is
given two names, not one, and some (when Thisbe’s mother and father and
Pyramus’s father are apparently written out of the script in favour of Wall,
Moonshine, and a Prologue) more than two. While printed editions of the play,
beginning with the 1600 Quarto, lump the players together indiscriminately as
Clowns or as a rabble, Bottom wishes them to be very carefully distinguished from
one another*but none of them by a single name. The written ‘‘scroll’’ of their names
is insufficient, not because the players are illiterate (even Snug the joiner, while he
describes himself as ‘‘slow of study’’, asks for ‘‘the lion’s part written’’ [1.2.62, 63,
56 L. P. Wilder

emphasis added]) but because Bottom apparently sees the identification of the
players as part of the performance, not merely a property of the text: the Prologue to
the play-within will also identify them all by name, some by their own names as well
as those of their characters.
The players’ desire to act leads them toward the changes created by fairy magic.
Having not only aspired to but actually demonstrated something like the rapid self-
transformation for which Burbage was celebrated, Bottom is the most thoroughly
transformed. (After having ranted a speech in ‘‘’ercles’ vein’’, Bottom switches
abruptly to detached commentary: ‘‘This was lofty’’ [1.2.36, 35]. The fact that the
change is comic rather than impressive does not change the fact that it is what it
parodies, a quick succession of different affects.) By putting the ass’s head on
Bottom, Robin Goodfellow not only mocks him but forces him to encounter the
consequences of theatrical impersonation. Bottom’s promise to sing a ballad about
being made into an ass ‘‘at her [Thisbe’s] death’’ (4.1.215) may or may not actually be
realized, but Bottom’s experience in the forest transforms his acting.

Bottom and His Own Name

Bottom engages directly with his own proper name in not one but two crucial
moments: his narration of his ‘‘dream’’ in 4.1 and a second ‘‘awakening’’ at the end
of the play-within-the-play in 5.1. The second of these offers the possibility that
Bottom finally releases his claim on his name and becomes the self-abdicating actor
he aspires to be. Bottom’s experience in the forest makes him even more acutely
aware of the significance of naming and of the difficulty of maintaining names
during performance.
On waking from his charmed sleep, Bottom begins calling out names: Pyramus,
the names of the other players, ass, patched fool, Bottom. The speech is not simply
an extended pun but an active reconstruction of a name that was lost in previous
scenes. The speech-prefix is Clo:
When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is ‘‘most fair Pyramus’’. Heigh-
ho. Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my
life! Stolen hence, and left me asleep?*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 t’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 patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I
had. 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[.]
(4.1.198213)

The Protean naming of this speech returns Bottom to his own name through other
names. When the Clown wakes up, he requests that someone ‘‘call’’ not Bottom but
Pyramus, a name that is also a cue to speak. The name ‘‘Bottom’’ emerges only after
Bottom has reflected on the events of the play’s third act: ‘‘Methought I was*and
methought I had’’ something that Bottom does not explicitly identify but that he
links to the words of a ‘‘patched fool’’ (a clown). By naming this experience as his
own (‘‘[I]t shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’’’), Bottom reclaims a name that has not
 Shakespeare 57

been spoken by anyone since the other members of the cast of Pyramus and Thisbe
ran off in 3.1. Bottom also acknowledges the erasure of his name from Titania’s
bower: ‘‘Bottom’s Dream’’ is so called ‘‘because it hath no bottom’’ and can be
described only by a clown.23 Like the names of the fairies, Bottom’s name returns to
the speech-prefixes only after he speaks it out loud. Bottom is identified by name in
the stage direction that precedes the speech in the Folio but not in either of the
Quartos, a fact that may reflect both the uncertainty of Bottom’s theatrical allegiance
at this point and, since it seems probable that it was inserted into the text either as a
playhouse annotation or by one of the Folio’s compositors, the already-encroaching
habit of naming him throughout.
There is a marked separation between the lovers, who wake up and, with
Theseus’s help, resolve the confusion of their night in the forest while Bottom
continues to sleep, and Bottom, who wakes up alone (see Huston 22122). Bottom
has been left out of the comic solution just created by Theseus. Theseus does, after a
fashion, provide the solution to Bottom’s problems by ‘‘preferr[ing]’’ his play over
the other proffered entertainments. But Bottom awakens from the forest without any
help and devises his own solution to the forest’s problems. Filling an empty stage
with presence, Bottom actively reconstructs himself and his own peculiar and
dynamic version of theatrical character. But there is more at stake here than dramatic
self-creation. Bottom’s naming of himself and others recalls the combined creative
efforts of Adam (who also sleeps and awakens) and God, the voice that calls matter
into being ex nihilo and the voice that, imitating the creator, gives names to the
creatures brought before him. Waking from his dream of clowning, Bottom finds
himself, as Helena does Demetrius, ‘‘mine own and not mine own’’ (4.1.192).24
Bottom’s return to his name here anticipates a second potential ‘‘awakening’’ at
the end of the play-within-the-play which is also the occasion for a textual crux in the
speech prefixes. At the end of Pyramus and Thisbe, Bottom may reassert his presence
in his own person by jumping up and ‘‘assur[ing]’’ the audience that ‘‘the wall is
down that parted their fathers’’ (5.1.34546), or, since the 1600 and 1619 Quartos do
not assign this speech to Bottom, he may remain ‘‘dead’’ as Pyramus. Since Bottom’s
first awakening visually prepares the audience for his second ‘‘awakening’’, its
potential absence is all the more significant. We expect Bottom to break character. If
he does not, our surprise focuses our attention on what the speech prefixes in the
earliest printed texts suggests could be a moment of actorly self-abdication.
Most editors25 follow the Folio, which assigns the speech to Bottom and tags it as
‘‘Bot’’, and not, like all his speeches in character as Pyramus in the scene, as ‘‘Pyr’’
(Folio sig. O3v). (This inconsistency in itself could suggest that the ‘‘Bot’’ speech
prefix is a later revision.) Both Quartos assign the speech to ‘‘Lyon’’ (Q1 sig. H3r; Q2
sig. H3r). If Pyramus and Thisbe are still ‘‘dead’’ after the play ends, the only player
left to speak is the one who is least sure of his linguistic abilities: inarticulate Snug
the joiner. If he remains silent, Bottom yields his boisterous place at centre stage to a
far less dynamic character, abandoning the self-assertion that has at least partially
preserved him (textually and personally) thus far in order to hold onto the illusion of
character in his role as Pyramus. Both are playable alternatives. It is possible that the
speech prefix in the Folio represents a changed (or simply a different strain of)
playhouse practice, a hint of the tragic effect of Romeo and Juliet that most observers
assume to be merely burlesqued in the Pyramus and Thisbe playlet (see Greenblatt
811; Riess and Williams 21418).26 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at least one
58 L. P. Wilder

member of the onstage audience responds to Pyramus and Thisbe as tragedy:

Hippolyta interrupts her husband’s banter with Lysander and Demetrius to say,
‘‘Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man’’ (5.1.285); her ‘‘pity’’ might almost be
Aristotelian. Bottom wants to play all the parts, and he does: ‘‘lover’’ to Thisbe and
Titania, ‘‘tyrant’’ to his fellow-players (1.2.19), clown to Puck and Oberon. Choosing
whether or not to silence Bottom means choosing among these, choosing between a
comic and a tragic sensibility.
In many ways, the command performance of Pyramus and Thisbe returns Bottom
and the company to their social origins. The laughter modelled by most of the
onstage audience in the fifth act derives from a perceived cultural, social, and
intellectual superiority over the onstage players. Like the ring trick in the fifth act of
The Merchant of Venice, this unkind laughter redirects conflicts only half-solved by
the comic plot: the forced conversion of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice; the
forced redirection of paternal will and even the lovers’ own sexual desire in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus’s disbelief in
the lovers’ account of their nights in the Athenian woods is displaced onto the play-
within-the-play, where he more generously allows his own ‘‘imagination’’ to ‘‘amend’’
their efforts (5.1.211). But even here Theseus casts the spectacle in class terms: ‘‘The
best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse’’ (5.1.21011, emphasis
added). The fact that Theseus’s judgement can also be taken to refer to the players’
skill in their craft, however, suggests that concerns other than social class are in play.

Conclusion
Changing speech prefixes suggest that Bottom’s famous affability is not the result of
a firm allegiance to a single, imperturbable identity but of a willingness to accept,
and finally transform, numerous identities offered by his theatrical and social
circumstances. At times, Bottom’s enthusiasm for playing multiple roles leads him
towards clowning. But at other times, the ability to transform himself makes Bottom,
despite his onstage audience’s loudly voiced expectations to the contrary, a tragedian.
The celebration of Bottom as a character is also a reply to the traditional classist
reading of the Pyramus and Thisbe players as ignorant yokels. Bakhtinian readings of
the play, reversing the class-based denigration of the so-called ‘‘rude mechanicals’’ in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, emphasize Bottom’s imperturbability in the face of
changing social circumstances and the physical inversion implied and celebrated in
his name. Critics have frequently linked Bakhtin’s supposedly unindividuated
‘‘grotesque body’’ to the construction of individuality (see Paster 1416), and indeed
Bakhtin himself notes that beyond the mediaeval period the bodily principle can be a
source of individuation (Bakhtin, 1819, 23). But it is interesting that such a populist
concept should provide the theoretical underpinning for readings that emphasize
Bottom’s separation from his social milieu.
The question remains just how significant the ‘‘very names of the persons’’ can be
among the many other factors that feed into the construction of ‘‘character’’ in early
modern drama. Once it left the author’s (or authors’) hands, ‘‘character’’ was largely
in the hands of players who memorized their lines from parts, not whole scripts. That
shifts in naming seem to have to do with relationships between persons onstage,
however, offers a significant corrective to the extreme position taken by Tiffany
Stern, who argues that part-based memorization would have encouraged players not
 Shakespeare 59

to interact with one another onstage and even to ‘‘drop character’’ when they were
not speaking (Stern 64). That the playwright, the bookkeeper, and/or the
compositors in this case seem to have imagined these ‘‘persons’’ in terms of their
relationships with one another (mother, daughter; clown, queen) as well as the
passions embodied in their speeches suggests that some attention, however brief,
must have been given to such relationships by the players. The fact that speech
prefixes that derive from relationships between characters can also describe
character ‘‘types’’ undertaken by specific members of the theatre company further
suggests that the repertory system encouraged the development of dramatic
relationships across different plays. Such a construction of relational character,
while conventional, nonetheless provides an important backdrop for the assertions
of individuality that emerge as Bottom negotiates a place in many different social
strata.
The emergence of a named character from this particular clown role is not
necessarily the intended or indeed a desirable outcome. As Hamlet (whose snobbery
does not necessarily reflect Shakespeare’s) complains in the first ‘‘bad’’ Quarto of
Hamlet, a clown’s performance is to some degree both separable from the play and at
odds with the construction of an individual ‘‘character’’ unique to the play: ‘‘And
then you have some again that keeps one suit of jests*as a man is known by one suit
of apparel*and gentlemen quotes his jests down in their tables before they come to
the play’’ (9.2932).27 The clown interrupts with laughter even when ‘‘there is some
necessary point in the play then to be observed’’, and this competition with the other
players shows a ‘‘pitiful ambition in the fool that useth it’’ (9.2627, 28).
In competition with other clowns, however, and in his concern with his own name
(another factor distinguishing him from his fellows) and with the names of others,
Bottom gains a distinctiveness that cannot be reduced to social or professional
difference. When Bottom announces that his account of the events in the forest must
be called ‘‘Bottom’s Dream because it hath no Bottom’’, he corrects his own
namelessness in Titania’s bower by converting name into title, in many senses of the
word. Bottom removes his name from the story while also enshrining that name
outside the ongoing negotiations that affect naming in the script. Such negotiations
can also affect naming in titles, of course (i.e. The Merchant of Venice), and since
‘‘Bottom’s Dream’’ does not reappear later in the text (unless the ‘‘Bergomask’’ is
‘‘Bottom’s Dream’’), a further erasure of Bottom’s name does seem to have occurred.
The bottomlessness of the forest world, however, suggests a more tragic side to
Bottom’s ballad. Many Biblical resonances have been found in this passage, most
notably an inversion of Paul’s description of heaven (‘‘no eye has seen’’, etc.; see
Kállay; Peters; Stroup). But there is also the suggestion that the lack of limits in the
fairies’ world renders it not just inexpressible but hellish. The ‘‘bottom’’ in ‘‘Bottom’s
Dream’’ could also be seen as echoing the destitution of Psalm 130: De profundis
clamavi ad te; ‘‘I call to you from the depths’’. Bottom’s De profundis offers a comic
version of the ‘‘unaccommodated man’’ in King Lear. Like Lear’s Edgar in his guise
as Poor Tom, Bottom is textually transformed into a theatrical ‘‘type’’ when he finds
himself in this position. But it is important to remember the kind of power against
which Bottom finds himself struggling, the fairy magic by which Bottom is physically
changed as he undertakes the theatrical role textually marked as ‘‘Clown’’. Animal
transformation is especially dangerous in a society that draws a supposedly
uncrossable line between human beings (who require salvation) and animals (who
60 L. P. Wilder

cannot be saved). Bottom regains his proper name when he regains his human shape.
Bottom himself is a theatrical creation, of course, but Bottom’s ‘‘translation’’ reflects
the physical effort and the moral and eternal threat involved in the demonic process
of theatrical impersonation.

Notes
1. The Folio follows the 1619 Quarto closely in this case, with two exceptions: in the Quarto,
no stage direction is given for Bottom’s waking, and the final line from the Rude
Mechanicals is spoken by ‘‘Lyon’’, not by Bottom. More on that later.
2. Some editions preserve the custom of tagging Bottom as ‘‘Pyramus’’ when he speaks his
lines in the play-within-the-play. Harold Brooks’s edition for the Arden Shakespeare
somewhat oddly tags the players as ‘‘Bottom’’, ‘‘Flute’’, and so on when they are
rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe and then as ‘‘Pyramus’’, ‘‘Thisbe’’, etc., when they are per-
forming the play-within-the-play in 5.1.
3. See, for example, the Riverside (Barton); the New Cambridge Shakespeare (Foakes); the
Penguin Shakespeare (Doran). The Arden edition (Brooks) includes changes made to
speech prefixes in the textual notes at the bottom of each page, as does the single-volume
Oxford edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Holland); the Oxford Complete Works
(Shakespeare), however, makes no indication that speech prefixes have been normalized,
although square brackets are used when there is a question as to which character speaks a
particular speech (e.g., when assigning the announcement that ‘‘the wall is down that
parted their fathers’’ to Bottom).
4. Roach derives this definition of performance ultimately from Margaret Thomson
Drewal’s discussion of parody (45).
5. See also (among others) Harry Berger, Jr., esp. 813, 823.
6. Patterson argues that the OED’s exclusion of the ass/arse/Bottom pun is overly
conservative but offers little external evidence for her claim.
7. On early modern ‘‘mysteries’’, see Wind. The ‘‘mystery’’ evoked by the paradoxes of the
play (not specifically Bottom) is the basis for serious reconsiderations of the play (Young;
Huston) in the decades leading up to Patterson’s and Kott’s work.
8. Bell is the earliest editor I have found who gives Touchstone a name. In some twentieth-
century editions of the plays (e.g., Riverside, Signet Classic, Norton), clowns have
returned to a nameless state.
9. While it seems clear that Elizabethan and Jacobean companies had one specialized comic
actor who played all ‘‘clown’’ roles, the fact that the term can also distinguish characters
socially and in class terms means that while playhouse usage may recognize a single
‘‘clown’’, the theatrical clown does not have exclusive rights to the title ‘‘clown’’ (see
David Wiles 6172). Wiles’s dismissal of the multiple ‘‘clowns’’ in stage directions in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream as the work of ‘‘the book-keeper or editor’’ seems more
convenient than convincing, especially since he gives no evidence for his supposition (70).
10. Several years after first publishing his ‘‘Suggestion’’, McKerrow would go further: ‘‘To
follow the original texts in this irregularity [in speech prefixes] would . . . be unnecessarily
confusing to a reader, and as, after all, these speech-prefixes are merely labels intending to
show to whom the various speeches are to be attributed, it seems to me an editor’s clear
duty to treat them as labels and to make the labels uniform’’ (Prolegomena 5657).
Although McKerrow presents his argument as a ‘‘suggestion’’, it was adopted as
authoritative by many subsequent editors, including McKerrow’s friend W. W. Greg, from
whose work many editors’ conclusions derive their authority (see Brooks xxviiixxxiv).
On the connection between Greg and McKerrow, see Werstine 15054, 15760, 16769.
11. On the theory of authorial revision in Midsummer, first put forth by Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch and J. Dover Wilson (77100), see Turner 4647.
 Shakespeare 61

12. As Long notes, the only evidence for Greg’s conclusion that the first Quarto of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream derives from an authorial manuscript is the inconsistent
speech prefixes, features demonstrably present in extant playhouse texts. Long also points
out that book-keepers in early modern playhouses seem to have been ‘‘concerned chiefly
with synchronizing backstage happenings with those onstage’’ and especially with ‘‘the
proper timing of off-stage noises’’ (33, 24). Brooks’s supposition that a prompter would
not be able to identify the ‘‘Clown’’ of 4.1 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Bottom*
especially given the fact that, in all probability and according to Brooks’s own argument,
Bottom was played by Will Kemp, the clown in the company*and that therefore the text
at hand cannot be a prompt-book copy*is very hard to accept and reveals just how
flimsy McKerrow’s ‘‘suggestion’’ really is (Brooks xxx).
13. On the recently rekindled relationship between editors and theatre history, see Cordner;
Kidnie.
14. In this I differ from Cloud, who unexpectedly (and silently) grants McKerrow’s claim that
variant speech prefixes are evidence of authorial choice: ‘‘The residual variant speech tags,
however, remain behind in Shakespere’s [sic] ‘voice’; for surely they are all his vocatives.
To whom else can we ascribe his naming?’’ (135).
15. On part-based memorization in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theatre, see
Stern 1314, 64, 98. While playwrights, book-keepers, compositors, and readers dealt with
the text as a whole, the varying speech prefixes in those texts are simply not the primary
means by which players encountered their parts. (Names of characters in ‘‘plats’’ or
‘‘plots’’ may be a different issue: actors’ names and characters’ names are intermingled in
the plot of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins.) What we are talking about, then, is
not the player’s experience of the role but a form of external criticism on the construction
of that role in dialogue with others. The player (if Edward Alleyn’s extant part from
Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso is any evidence) would memorize his part without any
name attached to it whatsoever. These documents are reproduced in the catalogue that
accompanied the exhibit ‘‘Searching for Shakespeare’’ at the National Portrait Gallery
and the Yale Center for British Art (27, 103).
16. The absorption of this phrase is evident in Greenblatt’s preface to A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, where its agency is elided through passive voice: ‘‘The artisans*or ‘rude
mechanicals’, as they are called*enable Shakespeare to introduce wonderful swoops into
earthy prose’’ (807, emphasis added).
17. The Folio adds the rest of the players’ names, but still includes Thisbe (sig. O1v). Andrew
Gurr points out that ‘‘rabble’’ was among the more common words used to denote a
crowd of people (98).
18. Lawrence Manley makes this point in his lectures to undergraduates at Yale University.
19. Stern notes that Burbage in particular had what was seen as an unusual ability to ‘‘keep
part’’ (98).
20. When not identified by name, Titania is often tagged as ‘‘Queen’’, both in seventeenth-
and in eighteenth-century editions.
21. In the Folio, Oberon is often identified as ‘‘King’’ or ‘‘King of Fairies’’. After Rowe, he is
tagged consistently as Oberon, but not always referred to in stage directions as Oberon.
22. Robin Goodfellow is variously ‘‘Puck’’ and ‘‘Robin’’.
23. On the significance of this paradox as it relates to 1 Corinthians 2, see Miller 268; Stroup
7982; Wilson 4078; Kott 31.
24. On the parallels between Bottom’s speech and Demetrius’ and Lysander’s preceding
remarks, see Huston 210.
25. Doran’s edition is an exception.
26. Whether A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet came first is an open question:
Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. date both plays to 1595 (11819).
62 L. P. Wilder

27. Quotations from Hamlet Q1 follow Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s edition for the
Arden Shakespeare.

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