[In the following excerpt, Stewart examines Bottom's insights regarding the relationship between dream and drama, and the language he uses to express his revelation.]

“I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.”

—Bottom

“Your actions are my dreams.”

—Leontes

Passing the tests of New and then Myth Criticism, with their bias respectively toward close and deep reading, Shakespeare's plays have come of late into an epoch of supra-reading, which boasts its own exhilaration as well as its own excess.¹ With the texts open before us, we are no longer asked to imagine the plays on the boards at the Globe, but rather staged in some obliquely lit metatheater, attended by its audience not just as a chosen drama but as the Idea of Drama. By treating their own formal properties as part of their business as dramatic action, however, Shakespeare's metaplays need not detour from human pertinence into ingrown wit. Art, raised to self-consciousness, can reroute its themes into life at an even deeper level, and our best access to this underlying psychological stratum is to recover close reading for the service of the supratextual, to see how language styles the action of the metadrama.

The focus of this essay is on the kind of language that tends to be spoken by Shakespearean characters when that language is obviously most cognizant of itself as aesthetic discourse, whether couched in the pregnant gropings of a muddled mind like Bottom's or the masterful figures of a keen intelligence like Leontes'. The hypothesis I wish to test, first with A Midsummer Night's Dream and then with The Winter's Tale, is that certain characters gravitate at moments of greatest intensity, moments closest to the ineffable, toward what might be called the metastyle of dream speech. My chosen plays represent those two dramatic modes in Shakespeare which depart most unabashedly from the probable, supernatural comedy and fantastic romance, for it is in such plays that style is most urgently obliged to reveal the profound reality beneath illusion, and to do so by being more than ordinarily self-conscious about drama's roots in the symbolic concentration, verbal and temporal, of dream. When Bottom returns from his forest interlude with Titania to his role in the amateur theatricals, from bizarre reality to the stage of art, and when Hermione later comes to life out of supposed stone, from art back into breathing reality, the account Bottom gives of his adventure and the reaction of Leontes to the astonishing spectacle before him, as if it were his own unconscious fantasy translated by and beyond art, are each a welling up into utterance of dream's metaphoric displacements and cryptic disorientation. Transitional passages about transitions passing strange, whether aesthetic or miraculous or both, these signal speeches by Bottom and Leontes send into motion an ambiguous and shifting language, dazed, reeling, and elliptical, that answers to the semantic duplicities of dream symbolism, in which puns or contradictions, paradoxes, transferred epithets, dead metaphors and the like are the covert dictation of the unconscious mind.

I

My mentor in this essay's approach to the metatheater of dream is a rather unlikely literary critic, a weaver by trade and a dramatic theorist only by fleeting avocation. Yet Nick Bottom's insights about the interweaving of dream and drama have never been taken seriously enough in commentary, perhaps because he seems to lapse into nonsensical stammering in his effort to recount his dreamlike spree in the forest. His blurted stabs at an explanation, however, manage to hammer out a revelatory if unwitting link between dream and drama. Because Titania was drugged by Oberon, she was able to think Bottom a fit love object even though he wore that innate asininity for which he is named in the stage prop of an ass's head. The subtitle of Jackson Cope's The Theater and the Dream is thus illustrated perfectly by the “doubleness” (one of Cope's central terms) of Bottom even before he tries to impersonate Pyramus in the play-within-the-play; in character twice over as a costumed ass, Bottom neatly incarnates the conversion From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama. “He is Bottom and he is an ass,”² writes Cope, and so Bottom as walking metaphor, vehicle to his own tenor, captures at once the split perspective of self and its dream avatars on the one hand and on the other the stage's overt duality of actor and the role through which he projects himself. Before Bottom returns to his cripplingly self-conscious role as amateur actor, that is, he has had an experience which is more like costumed impersonation, more like theatrical farce where personal names are allegorical tags, costumes and props a declaration of character, than it is like sleep or daydream.

Often criticism loosely uses the term “dream” for Bottom's fantastic holiday with Titania, as Bottom himself does. His only interlude of unconsciousness, however, is at the very end of his affair with the fairy queen. When Bottom wakes he seems to forget that he has been briefly asleep, and thinks, naturally enough, that he has all along been getting up his part in the play. The point sharpens itself as we go, for his magic detour from reality, not a sleeping dream at all, has most in common with the very comic stagecraft that materializes the episode before us. Bottom is, therefore, only keeping counsel and continuity with dramatic practice when he uses the formal mechanism of the play-within-the-play to rescue him, as we will see, from direct report on his forest visions. Surely he is less amnesiac than analogically minded when he thinks, upon waking out of this “dream” (understood to have quotation marks around it from here on), that he is still rehearsing his part as the lover Pyramus. “When my cue comes, call me,” he suddenly blurts out, “and I will answer. My next is ‘Most fair Pyramus’” (IV. ii. 203-04). Until this moment he has been cued by many such epithets as “Most fair” from the lips of Titania, and for the moment he cannot separate the play he was rehearsing from the magic which removed him from waking reality.

If a discernible thread runs through Bottom's subsequent confused explanation to Peter Quince, it is the analogy between fantasy and theatrical artifice that is forming somewhere at the back of his mind. Having just had an experience beyond the realm of waking possibility, and been forced to return from it to his amateur dramatic obligations, Bottom is compelled from within to make what bridge he can between these two spheres of palpable illusion. Here, and later with The Winter's Tale, it is this correspondence between dream and drama which I wish to explore with passages verbally concentrated beyond the ordinary expectations of dialogue, however daft and illogically jostled in Bottom's case—passages that also fall into place with recent critical speculation about self-referential strategies in Shakespearean drama. Metalanguage is often such stuff as dreams are made on, and Bottom, waking directly from a short sleep after a long dreamlike hiatus, still seems to be talking in his sleep, with the dizzy non sequiturs of dream, trying to explain to Quince where and what he has been. All the while the playwright shapes his character's fathomless nonsense into the garbled eloquence of reflexive aesthetic insight.

“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream” (IV. ii. 208-10). The curious circularity of that last logic seems to ignore the fact that since the dream is centered upon a man turned into an ass, its ideal expositor might well be Bottom himself. The dream is, indeed, intimately bound to the character of the dreamer because it is a dramatized self-discovery: “Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had” (IV. ii. 212-14). Surely the blanks are there to be filled in. The verb “had” leans by turns toward the “was” of attribution and toward sexual possession: “Methought I was an ass and had an ass's head” and/or “Methought I was a great lover and had a queen.” In the double grammar of his dreamlike experience, verbs of definition and possession simultaneously articulate both the excoriating self-analysis and the compensatory ingredient of sexual fantasy made flesh.

Bottom continues valiantly in his effort to create the orderly contour of story, but “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” (IV. ii. 214-17). Synesthesia in A Midsummer Night's Dream is first cousin to malapropism in a comic pattern composed of slips of tongue, sense, and the senses. Working backwards through the subsequent fifth act, for instance, we see such confusions in the “Pyramus and Thisby” play as the inversion of Pyramus' features in Thisby's “These lily lips, / This cherry nose” (V. i. 332-33), a description closer to Bottom's physiognomy than its intended opposite would have been; the fortuitous astronomical accuracy about reflected light in “Sweet Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams” (V. i. 273); and the direct synesthetic switch of “I see a voice: now will I to the chink, / To spy an I can hear my Thisby's face” (V. i. 192-93). The instances are too numerous not to grow into something of constancy, something strange and even rich, especially when we recall that after Bottom's disappearance earlier from the rehearsal, the exit that gives him entrance to the world of dream and its dislocations, Quince explains that “he goes but to see a noise” (III. i. 92). Perhaps the late-coming clue to this widespread disintegration of sensory reference lies in a remark by Theseus—“let us listen to the moon” (V. i. 237)—meaning the personification of the moon insisted upon by the primitive dramatic imaginations of Bottom and his fellow players, for whom abstractions and planetary bodies can be invoked only as characters.

The amateurish stage personification of abstractions and inanimate objects is, within the preceding dream itself, reversed in the equally naive symbolization of names. It is as if Bottom as dreamer, both braying ass and asinine man, intuitively senses such doubleness in the characters he meets. Introduced to Titania's servants, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed, he takes their proper names commonly, saying to the third for instance, “I promise you your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now” (III. i. 194-95). Cope realizes how this “double knowledge of the fairies on Bottom's part,” both of their visible persons and of their “nominal symbolic value,” carefully “echoes the double theory of the actor, but it also focuses the dream.”³ Before the dream Bottom thought that the way to minimize the audience's terror over his proposed portrayal of the lion was to roar like a “sucking dove” or a “nightingale” (I. ii. 83), but after the dream, where he himself was both animal and man at once, a lesson seems learned, quite indirectly, even by Snug, who is finally cast in the part of the lion and knows that the way around the power of his own verisimilitude is not the half measure of meekness but the full confession of dramatic doubleness. Though he seems a lion, he is at the same time only a man: “Then know that I, as Snug the joiner, am / A lion fell” (V. i. 223-24). On stage it is Snug and it is not Snug; the role fits loosely enough to be seen around. In the dream it was Bottom the ass and it was not, for it was Bottom the lothario.

By Theseus' single injunction, then—“let us listen to the moon,” when we know the moon to be an actor—the synesthetic thrashing about in other speeches seems dexterously vindicated as party to a comment on dramatic incarnation, where things are and are not, a comment which in turn even helps us to decipher, in its relevance to dramatic language, the seemingly nonsensical battery of doubletalk in that speech of Bottom's about the combined powers of eye, ear, hand, tongue, and heart together bested by his experience. The initial criss-cross of hearing eye and seeing ear has its anticipated pattern tripped up by the hand that has no touch associated with it, followed by the more puzzling and pungent crossover of conceiving tongue and reporting heart. As with so many Shakespearean malapropisms, Bottom's travesty of conception and phrasing on the very subject of expressive ineptitude may indeed proceed toward a latent aptness in the last two items. More is afoot here than mere stumbling, more than an eloquent example of the confusion he is too confused to say straight. He is, after all, soon to want his story told as part of the play he has rehearsed. He is speaking, then, not only in the kind of slapdash language he and the others will use in the “Pyramus and Thisby” play, but also, and by accident, about the nature of language in drama, especially in that brand of drama made up of (or indeed a metaphor for) reported dream. For we do know of truths spoken from the heart, as when the unconscious emotions take articulate but unvoiced shape in dreams, and we know of tongues giving conception, of poetry or song or dramatic verse bearing forth wonders not found in the world of ordinary discourse or ordinary life. Desire and fear are the language of dream, just as dramatic speech is of concocted or recounted dream on stage, where tongues can conceive and hearts, therefore, more directly report. Bottom's mangling of the text in Corinthians about eye, ear, and heart nevertheless bears witness in its travesty to a secular revelation about fantastic events and drama's prerogatives in giving them expression.

It is just this dramatic aptitude for the improbable which Bottom acknowledges when, after rejecting all other forms of shaping or sharing his experience, he hopes that an interpolation at the end of “Pyramus and Thisby” might do it justice: “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom's Dream,’ because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death” (IV. i. 217-22). Oddly, he says “a play” instead of “the play” though he clearly has only one in mind, as if any such drama, any amorous fiction, would be the fit context for his dream's retelling. He also says that he will sing it, not at the conclusion of the play exactly, but “at her death,” the death of Thisby following upon that of her doomed lover which effectively closes the play. Bottom seems to have no dramaturgical reservations about intruding autobiography into plot, annexing into drama a dream that interrupted its preparations, perhaps because he sees the evaporation of his affair with Titania as analogically interchangeable with the tragic termination of love in the play—hence the “gracious” logic, the metaphoric decorum, of his ballad as epilogue. But what about the famous non sequitur “It shall be called ‘Bottom's Dream,’ because it hath no bottom”? In some sense it has certainly been Bottom's dream of Bottom, a man's dream of himself both truer than ever to his nature and idealized beyond waking belief, of himself both as an ass incarnate and a prodigious and irresistible lover, with the whole thing in the other and most obvious sense a “bottomless,” unfathomable mystery.

The subsequent discussion with Peter Quince, bursting its seams with unarguable non sequiturs, should help us estimate the truest outlines of Shakespeare's puzzling play on “hath no bottom.” We must let Bottom's remarks take their distracted and self-contradictory time to fall out:

Bottom.

Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am not true Athenian. I will tell you everything, right as it fell out.

Quince.

Let us hear, sweet Bottom.

Bottom.

Not a word of me. All that I will tell you is, that the Duke hath dined. Get your apparel together … every man look o'er his part; for the short and the long is, our play is preferred … And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath, and I do not doubt but to hear them say it is a sweet comedy. No more words, Away! Go, away!

(IV. ii. 29-45)

Bottom has such a naively corporealizing imagination about drama that not only must moonshine be cast as a character named Moon, but the “breath” of dramatic poetry is itself understood as a physical presence to be judged either foul or sweet. The most troublesome aspect of this scene, however, may in fact betray a far less naive appreciation of drama's role in enacting life's daydreams. Bottom had originally vowed to have Quince give voice to his dream in balladry and then channel that reworked dream back into the play whose rehearsal was interrupted by it, but for which play the dream was both model and in fact the ideal rehearsal, both paradigm and practice. Now the ballad already seemingly forgotten, Bottom appears unaccountably to be saying that he will tell, but then again will not, all that befell him. It is psychologically possible, and aesthetically quite probable, that his run of rampant contradiction is mitigated by ambiguity and progression: “Yes, no, yes, no, well then yes, but not in so many words—the play's the thing.” Logical connections begin in this way to suggest and secure themselves, while questions remain. Does Bottom, for instance, propose an initial distinction between the formal-sounding “discourse” of wonders, which he does promise, and the crude, matter-of-fact telling which he rejects (since it would brand him as a pariah from the skeptical state of Theseus)? And if “discourse” is meant as something other than mere “telling,” what can it be but an acting out by proxy, in the story of “Pyramus and Thisby,” a love passing strange and too soon passed away—for it is only the fact of their play's preferment that Bottom is finally willing to report to his friends in so many words.

To take the full measure of the term “discourse” we must look ahead to the last couplet of Quince's prologue to “Pyramus and Thisby”: “Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain / At large discourse, while here they do remain” (V. i. 150-51). The term for dramatic dialogue and interaction has replaced Bottom's confessional verb of self-disclosure from “I am to discourse wonders.” A term related to “discourse,” and in the mouth of Bottom even more inclined to sound like highfalutin malapropism, is the word “exposition,” which Bottom does indeed misuse, for “disposition,” in the last spoken phrase of his sojourn with Titania: “I have an exposition of sleep come upon me” (IV. i. 42). First Bottom must sleep out his dream, so to speak, and then only upon waking will he seek a method by which to “expound” or discourse upon this dream by indirection, through the play the dream has distracted him from, a play in which his role as lover is as much a casting against type as was the part he played in the forest with Titania. And the brilliant slip “exposition” lies behind his own chosen verb later, in “Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream” (IV. ii. 209-10). An instance of linguistic play in Shakespeare—the tensile spread between the intended “disposition for” and the prophetic fumble, “exposition of”—here stretches across the chasm between life, where Bottom goes to sleep, and art, where he hopes to account for what he dreamed.

We are back with that as yet unfathomed puzzle of bottomless dreaming. The vacillation in Bottom's subsequent speech may hold the clue, when he no sooner promises his fellow thespians an exposition of his adventures than he recants on that vow. There is finally, in “Not a word of me,” no contradiction whatever of preceding statements, for once more, as with “disposition” / “exposition” a moment ago, the double designation of a pun or a malapropism straddles life and art. The glossed primary meaning, the archaic “Not a word from me,” had for Shakespeare its other meaning as well. We will not hear the actual adventures “of” Bottom (in the sense of “about” him), only “from” him, but then only from him as the fictional Pyramus, and so really not about or from Bottom at all. What we get is the other side of the coin from Bottom's earlier instructions to Quince about their prologue: “for the more better assurance, tell them that I Pyramus am not Pyramus but Bottom the weaver” (III. i. 20-22). Even the paradox of theatrical representation has two faces. Art apologizes for the lure of its own verisimilitude, only later to grant the power of fictions to lift us out of ourselves. “Not a word of Bottom in Bottom's dream, for I am not Bottom the weaver now but Pyramus the lover, and only as such can I disclose my dreams.”

When I hint in the preceding discussion that Bottom has learned some such insight about dramatic propriety and power from his experience in the forest, I mean this by way of a displacement not unlike the way in which the didactic content of dreams is visited upon us by indirection. The surrogate or symbolic selves that people our dreams as well as the actors who board our stages undergo the very experiences from which we as spectators benefit as if such experiences were ours. Bottom is there to teach rather than learn about dramatic law and license, and in this respect there are two things I have no intention of claiming here: either that Bottom knows whereof he speaks in a phrase like “exposition of sleep,” or that we can be necessarily expected to hear in performance the compressed ambiguity, for instance, of the line “Not a word of me.” Drama that is about its own connection to the subliminal and slippery precisions of dream is under no obligation to be obvious. My strong suspicion is that Shakespeare intended the two things he was scripting as one in “Not a word of me,” but that he managed to imbue this insider's insight into the overall fluctuations of Bottom's confused purpose without having to rely for its theatrical impact on anything so tenuous as a two-word syntactic pun. The impact is forcibly there in Bottom's protracted hesitation between exposition and dumb wonder. In support of his theory of drama's dreamlike doubleness, Cope quotes Ortega's epigrammatic formulation on the ambiguous status of dramatic incarnation as simultaneously subjective and objective: “Is the dream in us or are we in the dream?”⁴ The romantic dream Bottom seemed to participate in, even though it may have been in his own head all along, may now be objectified in a dramatic realm where Bottom, as actor, can remain comfortably and securely in it, freed from the abject subjectivity of its being only and deludingly in him. We do not have to realize later on in “Pyramus and Thisby” that Bottom's ballad may never have been written to recognize the play itself as a transposition—or exposition—of dream. When we first hear the ballad proposed, and have no reason to think we are not to hear it later recited, already we sense that the decorum of such a plan is one which recognizes the interpenetration of dream and drama. Even if the epilogue offered by Bottom to the Duke as a kind of encore after Thisby's death is intended as Bottom's planned autobiographical afterthought, still the ballad goes unsung, eloquent by its absence.

Only as Pyramus can Bottom tell of passionate desire and dreamed fulfillment and the inevitable desolation that love brings by coming and going. Our fantasies and fears, cast up into poetry, bodied forth in drama, are of our natures without being directly about us. Art dreams for us; drama enacts us by named proxy. Bottom has learned in short to respect the nature of aesthetic distance. When he planned to have Quince write a piece called “Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom,” he was intending to speak, perhaps, simply of the deep reaches of his fantasy, or even to suggest that his “dream” can only find its bottom on the boards, bounded and contained by dramatic presentation. But the ear insists as well on a capital B in “no bottom,” reminding us that plays like “Pyramus and Thisby,” and indeed A Midsummer Night's Dream around it, lift off and away from the self that inspires them. A Midsummer Night's Dream is an “exposition” of our best sleeps, including its author's, a fantasy given flesh, and like all of Shakespeare's great plays until possibly The Tempest, though of course Shakespeare dictates the action in a way Bottom never can, it is Shakespeare's dream because it has no Shakespeare. …

Notes

1. See especially James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in “Titus Andronicus,” “Love's Labour's Lost,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night's Dream,” and “Richard II” (Minneapolis, Minn., 1971), whose omnibus footnote on p. 4 cites the most important previous work on the self-referential theme. Quotations from Shakespeare are from the Signet Classic Shakespeare, general ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1963).

2. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore, Md., 1973), p. 224.

3. Cope, p. 224.

4. Cope, p. 7.