[In the following essay, Wyrick explores the symbolism associated with the ass motif in A Midsummer Night's Dream and examines how the word “ass” is used to create a complex code that is the key to many of the play's themes.]

One of the most ubiquitous epithets in Shakespearean drama is “ass.” Since it carries the primary significance of an ignorant fellow, a perverse fool, or a conceited dolt, the word can be counted upon to stimulate audience laughter.¹ The frequency of its appearance in Shakespeare's plays, however, makes one suspect that it is a word rich in thematic associations and in dramatic applications.² Far from functioning merely as a simple synonym for a stupid blunderer, the word “ass”—whether used as a simile, as a metaphor, or as a pun—has a protean ability to convey economically a number of connotations. These connotations arise causally from the speaker, from the situation, and from the larger verbal context in which the word operates. In similar fashion, the effects of the word radiate outward, sometimes revealing aspects of the speaker or of the person spoken to, sometimes focusing a parodic subplot, sometimes amplifying a theme. Although “ass” is sprinkled throughout the Shakespearean canon, it is most prevalent in the early comedies, especially in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream. An examination of the ass motif's appearance in these plays can illuminate Shakespeare's inventive transformation of this seemingly unassuming word into a complex verbal cipher.

I

Before turning to the specific Shakespearean texts, it is necessary to explore background material pertaining to the symbolic associations of the ass. For example, Biblical asses are generally benign, even exemplary; they are the progenitors of the “admirable ass” tradition. The most memorable ass in the Old Testament is Balaam's articulate animal (Numbers xxii). This ass was not only granted a sight of the angel of the Lord; she was also designated a communicatory channel for God. Her vision prevented her from following Balaam's commands, aroused her master's anger, which translated itself into unjustified blows, and precipitated divine reproach and Balaam's ultimate redemption from sin. Thus, Balaam's ass represents wisdom rather than stupidity. The story also conveys the idea of the ass as a victim of physical abuse, as a symbol of suffering—an interpretation darkened in the account of the ass's ignominious end in Jeremiah xxii.19.

The picture of an ass patiently bearing savage mistreatment as well as its occupational burdens leads to the image of the animal as a type of Christ, one reinforced by Christ's choice of the lowly ass as a vehicle for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem (see Matthew xxi.5; prefigured in Zechariah ix.9). Christ, then, is the cosmic ass, patiently and humbly bearing the world's burden of sin. A more tenuous identification between Christ and the ass is found in reports by Plutarch and Tacitus asserting that the Jews adored the ass because it discovered springs of water in the desert during the exodus; the ass, therefore, is also a type of Christ as the wellspring of life. Perhaps this tradition provoked the underground convention, mentioned by Tertullian and Cecilius Felix, of portraying Christ with an ass's head.³

In contrast to the implied identification of the ass with Christ, the Bible also sets forth the equivalence of the ass with the fool. The third verse of Proverbs xxvi, the chapter about fools and folly, states: “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back.” Not only are fools and asses juxtaposed in a manner which leads one to infer a metaphorical connection between them, but they are linked with references to instruments of restraint and of chastisement. Thus, the ass's connotations are broadened to include folly and punishment appropriate to folly, as well as Christological patience and punishment unduly received. The ass as a type of fool was destined to overpower the ass as a type of Christ—a tradition that re-emerged only sporadically in Western thought, often in strange forms such as the eccentric homologic catechism which compared the anatomy of an ass with the architecture of a cathedral—or the ridiculously parodic Asses' Feast, a medieval institution connected with the Feast of Fools in which an ass was led through the church, an Asses' Liturgy was sung by the clergy in a harsh bray, and a merry alcoholic eucharist was celebrated by all concerned.⁴

In the Renaissance, the ass as a symbol of stupidity and as a religious allegory combined in an alternative tradition, the asinus portans mysteria. Whitney's emblem, Non tibi, sed religioni, shows worshipers venerating a statue of Isis borne on the back of an ass, the animal being an image of vanity because it thinks the crowd is lauding it rather than the goddess.⁵ Nevertheless, the ass as an admirably patient, long-suffering beast—even if not specifically presented as an analogue of Christ—remained a continuing iconological undercurrent during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.⁶

One reason for the strength of the “foolish ass” tradition was the influx of classical elements. Aesop's fables demonstrate the stupidity of asses; but more important to Shakespeare is the ass-lore in Ovid. The eleventh book of the Metamorphoses recounts Apollo's “gift” of ass's ears to the tone-deaf Midas, who had the temerity to prefer Pan's rude pipings to Apollo's sweet strains. In Golding's translation of Ovid, “Apollo could not suffer well his [Midas'] foolish eares too keepe / Theyr humaine shape, but drew them wyde, and made them long and deepe”.⁷ Midas' asinine musical judgment—one shared by his Shakespearean counterpart, Bottom—evoked an emblematic transformation. This confluence of stupidity, bad taste in music, and asininity parallels the Greek proverbial question used by Boethius, as translated by Chaucer: “Artow like an asse to the harpe?”⁸ Boethius subsequently expands his identification of asshood to include general laziness, and he glosses this type of metamorphosis as an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual vice: “Yf he be slow, and astonyd, and lache, he lyveth as an ass. … ‘O feble and light is the hand of Circes the enchauntresse, that chaungeth the bodyes of folk into beestes, to regard and to comparysoun of mutacioun that is makid by vices!’”⁹ In the Renaissance, this theme is echoed in Whitney's emblem, Homines voluptatibus transformantur, which reads in part: “Some had the shape of … Asses … Which showes those foolishe sorte, whome wicked love doth thrall … and have no sense at all … Oh stoppe your eares, and shutte your eies, of Circes cuppe beware”.¹⁰ The idea of an ass as the embodiment of foolishness is given more direct expression by Cesare Ripa and Piero Valeriano; their emblems of Obstinacy and Ignorance show figures holding or porting asses' heads.¹¹

In the sixteenth century, the ass was not merely an allegory of stupidity, but was also connected specifically with the fool proper. Asses' ears wagged as a conventionalized feature of the fool's hood.¹² Similarly, Erasmus' Folie distributes asses' ears to fools and dissemblers. For example, Chaloner's 1549 translation of Moriae Encomium states:

So that not so muche as they can dissemble me [Dame Folie], who take vpon their most semblant of wysedome, and walke lyke Asses in Lyons skynne. That althoughe they counterfeite what they can, yet on some syde their longe eares pearyng foorth, dooe discouer them to come to Midas progenie. … Suche men therfore, that in deede are archdoltes, and woulde be taken yet for sages and philosophers, maie I not aptelie calle theim foolelosophers?¹³

Nevertheless, Erasmus conflates fools and asses in ways not solely derogatory. He also praises the humility and holiness of the Natural Fool, who is “nearest to the bluntness of brute beastes, and attempts nothyng beyonde mans degree” (p. 48). This variety of fool is loved by Christ, who “delited much in theyr simplicitee, euin lyke as those kindes of dumme beastes were most acceptable vnto hym, that were fardest remoued from all Foxelike wylinesse. And therefore chose he rathest to ryde on an asse …” (p. 117). By the end of the book, Christ himself is identified as this sort of holy fool.

It is, however, the “foolelosophers” rather than the sanctified asses who dominate the iconography of the period. Woodcuts spotlighting fools in ass-eared hoods decorate Barclay's 1509 translation of Brant's Das Narrenschiff; furthermore, these illustrations frequently show the fool in close proximity with the ass. The textual connections between fools and asses range from the emblematic (“assys erys for our folys a lyuray is,” to moral commentaries (“To infernall Fenn doth this pore Asse oppresse / And to an asse moste lyke he is doutless”) and obscene narratives:¹⁴

Under the Asse tayle thoughe it be no thynge pure
Yet many seke and grope for the vyle fatnes
Gatherynge togyther the fowle dunge and ordure
Such as they that for treasour and ryches
Whyle they ar yonge in theyre chefe lustynes
An agyd woman taketh to theyr wyfe
Lesynge theyr young, and shortynge so theyr lyfe.

This coarse congregation of asses, women, and the posterior parts leads to the last set of connotations associated with the word. Renaissance pronunciation allowed “ass” to serve as a paronomasia with “arse,” a pun frequently coupled with a similar play upon the word “tail.” Then as now, moreover, these words could refer directly to the genitals as well as generally to the rump.¹⁵ Thus, in another broadly bawdy sense, the word “ass” could stand for women as bearers of sexual burdens. These associations manifested themselves memorably in medieval punishments for prostitutes; in France, for example, whores were sentenced to ride naked upon asses, head to tail.¹⁶ Perhaps one reason for the appropriateness of the sinner's mount is the tradition of the ass as a particularly priapic animal.¹⁷

It is this strain of ass-lore which dictated the transformation of the erotically adventurous “hero” of Apuleius' The Golden Ass, a transformation which added the salacious spice of bestiality to Lucius' sexual encounters. Nevertheless, even Apuleius' “licentious ass” finally transcends his fleshly incarceration through the transforming power of love, one beautifully allegorized in the interpolated “Cupid and Psyche” episode. In the main narrative, after accepting Divine Wisdom in the guise of Isis, Lucius shifts his role to that of an actor in a different ass tradition—the asinus portans mysteria. In Adlington's 1566 edition of Apuleius, the high-minded interpretation of the tale is in the ascendant; the translator explains that the book is to be treated in the Ovide moralisé manner:

Verily under the wrap of this transformation is taxed the life of moral men, when as we suffer our minds so as to be drowned in the sensual lusts of the flesh and the beastly pleasure thereof … that we lose wholly the use of reason and virtue, which properly should be in a man, and play the parts of brute and savage beasts.¹⁸

Thus, even as a sexual cipher the ass is unstable; under his shaggy skin lurks a remarkable ability to shift symbolic significance. The “licentious ass,” the “foolish ass,” and the “admirable ass” inhabit one hide.

The ass is a braying oxymoron. It is self-evident that Shakespeare did not consult Proverbs, Boethius, Brant, or Adlington every time he decided to permit one of his characters to call someone an ass. It should be equally clear that Shakespeare had at his disposal a tantalizingly slippery word, the connotations of which ranged from the sacred to the scurrilous. It would have been uncharacteristic of the playwright's inventiveness had he not exploited the linguistic, thematic, and structural possibilities inherent in the word “ass.”

II

Although The Comedy of Errors generally is considered Shakespeare's first comedy, it demonstrates one of the author's most adroit manipulations of the ass motif. Both dialectical poles of the play, one of which arises from the potentially serious framing device and the other from the knock-about central plot of mistaken identity, are contained within the ass image. The concept unites them into a comic synthesis which keeps the spectator firmly aware of the prevailing comic vision. The play's first explicit mention of the word “ass” occurs in Act II, scene i, when Adriana is railing against Antipholus of Ephesus' tardiness and infidelity. Luciana, invoking traditional marital roles, attempts to restrain her sister's precipitous jealousy: “O know that he is the bridle of your will” (l. 13). Adriana, in a permutation of Proverbs xxvi.3, retorts: “[T]here's none but asses will be bridled so” (l. 14).¹⁹ To an audience used to interpreting the epithet “ass” as an indication of foolishness, Adriana's remark immediately cues a stock response of laughter, which heightens the sense of comic distance reinforced by the artificially patterned rhyming couplets of the dialogue.

But Adriana's implied ass simile is not limited to equating wives with fools. Whereas Luciana's subsequent speech refers to physical abuse (“Why, headstrong liberty is lashed with woe,” l. 15), a reward of the disobedient ass, Adriana twists the idea of master and beast of burden into a complaint about wives' sexual slavery to husbands (ll. 26, 34-36). Luciana keeps counseling patience, also playing on the word “bear” (“Till he come home again, I could forbear,” l. 31). The interchange is interrupted by Dromio of Ephesus' news of the strange behavior of the man he supposes to be his master and his account of the beatings received at his hands—beatings which Adriana threatens to continue (II.i.78).²⁰ The audience has just witnessed the encounter between Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus in the previous scene; now the physical abuse and the pregnant wording (e.g., Dromio of Ephesus: “Perchance you will not bear them patiently,” I.ii.86) present in the earlier scene take on added significance after having been filtered through the specific mention of “ass.” On one level, Shakespeare's use of “ass” in Act II, scene i urges the audience to maintain its emotional distance; on another, it distinguishes the rash and sexually troubled character of Adriana from the patient and sexually innocent character of Luciana; on a third, it helps establish the theme of patience, the virtue which will finally permit the comic resolution; on a fourth, it retroactively identifies Dromio of Ephesus with the long-suffering ass tradition and prepares for the comic metamorphosis of both Dromios into asses—a change which underscores the entire situational and imagistic core of the play, the illusion-producing qualities of mistaken identity.

The second scene of the first act, the first scene of the second act, and the second scene of the second act form a triptych picturing the initial mistaking of Antipholus of Syracuse. Its central panel, the one containing the play's first mention of the word “ass,” casts a symbolic shadow back upon the preceding panel, the one in which Dromio of Ephesus is treated like an ass. Correspondingly, the third panel presents Dromio of Syracuse beaten like a foolish beast of burden (II.ii.22-52). When the Syracusan Dromio and Antipholus encounter Adriana and Luciana in the first great comic crisis of mistaken identity, all four characters express their wonder about the effects of the metamorphic atmosphere which seems to be pervading their lives (Adriana: “I am not Adriana, nor thy wife,” l. 111; Antipholus of Syracuse: “In Ephesus I am but two hours old, / As strange unto your town as to your talk,” ll. 147-48; Luciana: “how the world is changed with you,” l. 151; Dromio of Syracuse: “This is the fairy land,” l. 188).²¹ At the end of the scene, these confused musings reach a crescendo centered around the familiar image of the ass:

DROMIO S.:
I am transformed, master, am I not?
ANTIPHOLUS S.:
I think thou art, in mind, and so am I.
DROMIO S.:
Nay master, both in mind and in my shape.
ANTIPHOLUS S.:
Thou hast thine own form.
DROMIO S.:
                    No, I am an ape.
LUCIANA.:
If thou art changed to aught, 'tis to an ass.
DROMIO S.:
'Tis true; she rides me, and I long for grass.
'Tis so, I am an ass; else it could never be
But I should know her as well as she knows me.
ADRIANA:
Come, come, no longer will I be a fool.,

(II.ii.194-203)

The immediate effect of this passage is to mitigate the mood of malignant metamorphosis. The stichomythia, the jingling couplets, and the bawdy suggestiveness inherent in Dromio of Syracuse's definition of his own asininity reestablish the comic spirit and reassure the audience that these transformations are risible and reversible. Furthermore, since the “she” refers to Luciana, Dromio's remark may prefigure Antipholus of Syracuse's infatuation; certainly, the tone of the slave's discourse provides a perfect anticipatory burlesque of his master's Petrarchan hyberbole—a rhapsody which does, however, contain similar sorts of sexual double entendres (III.i.29-51; see particularly the last four lines).

Dromio of Syracuse's flippant self-assessment also serves to differentiate him from his twin brother. The Syracusan slave presents himself as a Lylyan servant, saucy and ribald. His asininity springs from both the “foolish ass” and the “licentious ass” traditions. In contrast, Dromio of Ephesus is an “admirable ass”—a patient sufferer bearing unwarranted punishment. Shakespeare emphasizes the comparison by scene juxtaposition. Act III, scene i—the first panel of the second triptych, one which presents the initial mistaking of Antipholus of Ephesus—immediately takes up the ass motif:

ANTIPHOLUS E.:
I think thou art an ass.
DROMIO E.:
                    Marry, so it doth appear
By the wrongs I suffer and the blows I bear.
I should kick, being kicked; and, being at that pass,
You could keep it from my heels and beware of an ass.

(III.i.14-18)

Although both the stock response of laughter conjured up by the word “ass” and the odd four-beat but syllabically jammed couplets in which Dromio of Ephesus speaks brush a comic veneer over this interchange, the slave is not presented solely as a figure of mirth. Instead, like Balaam's animal, he is abused for trying to act in his irascible master's best interests. Shakespeare's intent to make comparable metamorphic but contrastable emblematic asses of the Dromios is further underscored when the Ephesian servant yells through the door to his brother: “If thou hadst been Dromio to-day in my place, / Thou wouldst have changed thy face for a name, or thy name for an ass” (ll. 46-47). Concurrently, the Ephesian Dromio's forbearing patience plays against his master's headstrong nature, setting the stage for Antipholus of Ephesus' rage when he later is barred from his own house.

“Ass” as a mediating metaphor bridges the two wooing scenes in Act III, scene ii. After Dromio of Syracuse asks whether his master knows him, Antipholus of Syracuse replies, “Thou art Dromio, thou art my man, thou art thyself” (III.ii.76-77), only to be answered, “I am an ass, I am a woman's man, and besides myself” (ll. 78-79). This structurally parallel interchange brings Antipholus of Syracuse from the ethereal cosmology with which he praises his love for Luciana (“My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim,” l. 64) to a bantering participation in the mundane geography which depicts Dromio of Syracuse's run-in with Luce (“she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her,” ll. 114-15). It also reaffirms the farcical bawdiness which marks the Dromios and re-establishes the metamorphic theme and its attendant Circean animal imagery (e.g., Dromio of Syracuse: “She had transformed me to a curtal dog, and made me turn i' the wheel,” ll. 144-45; Antipholus of Syracuse: “There's none but witches do inhabit here,” ll. 154).²² The scene ends as Angelo enters bearing the chain which brings about the comic catastrophe of Antipholus of Ephesus, who is hauled off to prison for nonpayment of debts in Act IV, scene i, the last panel of the triptych figuring the destruction of his public reputation.

The final triptych finds all participants wandering deeper and deeper in illusions. The seeming metamorphoses are complete. Adriana's impatience has reached its zenith and has allowed her mentally to transform her husband into a hideous apparition (IV.iii.17-22); Antipholus of Syracuse's fear that he is lost in a maze of sanity-annihilating sorcery has become conviction (IV.iii.37-39). Therefore, the slapstick buffeting of Dromio of Ephesus in the last panel of the triptych highlights the comic tone of the play at a point when the audience may have been tempted to forget it. Here, too, Shakespeare uses fast-paced, punning dialogue to lead up to his repetition of the word “ass,” buttressing the humor in a scene replete with grim potential. Nevertheless, Dromio of Ephesus' remarkable speech about his own asininity offers a glimpse into the serious underside of comedy—the real world in which suffering is not always relieved by time's revolution, by love's reconciliation, or by order's restoration.²³ After the incensed Antipholus of Ephesus says, “Thou art sensible in nothing but blows, / And so is an ass” (IV.iv.25-26), Dromio of Ephesus replies:

I am an ass indeed; you may prove it by my long ears. I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows. When I am cold, he heats me with beating; when I am warm, he cools me with beating. I am waked with it when I sleep, raised with it when I sit, driven out of doors with it when I go from home, welcomed home with it when I return; nay, I bear it on my shoulders, as a beggar wont her brat; and, I think, when he hath lamed me, I shall beg with it from door to door.

(IV.iv.27-36)

The Ecclesiastical cadence of the speech, as well as its sententious message, momentarily bestows upon Dromio of Ephesus a mantle of Christological humility and suffering. To be sure, this passage is neither long nor strong enough to permit one to view The Comedy of Errors as a religious allegory acted out by a troupe of Elizabethan vaudevillians; but it does invest the action with some of the tonal texture that characterizes the finest Shakespearean comedy and helps make this play more than a cleverly constructed set-piece.

Before an audience can really begin to interpret the action as a sort of Divina Commedia, the ridiculous Dr. Pinch exorcises the metamorphic demons and engages other characters in silly swashbuckling. The comic perspective is firm once again; the stage is set for the happy resolution.

This resolution not only clears up the mistaken identities of the Antipholi and the Dromios; it also brings to a close the frame story of Egeon and Aemilia. Shakespeare does not make explicit use of the ass motif in V.i, just as he had not in I.i. Nevertheless, the web of associations he has woven around the word “ass” in the play's tripartite central portion extends to the flanking scenes. The idea of long-suffering patience, symbolized by the burden-bearing ass “marked” by blows, is applied to Egeon by the Duke in I.i.140-41: “Hapless Egeon, whom the fates have marked / To bear the extremity of dire mishap!” Since this language resembles that used by Dromio of Ephesus in I.ii.82-86, one can assume that Egeon and the Ephesian Dromio are connected thematically and act as antitheses to rash and abusive characters like Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus. In the last scene of the comedy, the virtue of patience has prevailed, as Egeon is reabsorbed into his family and as Dromio of Ephesus is allowed the play's final harmonious words.

In addition, Adriana and Dromio of Syracuse's idea of women as metaphoric asses bearing sexual burdens is corrected in the play's first and last scenes. In I.i.46 Egeon explains that the female role in the cycle of sex and procreation is “pleasing punishment.” In V.i.344 Aemilia uses a gentle pun on the word “burden” to describe the birth of her sons; in V.i.404 she maintains that the real burden is the loss of loved ones, not the bearing of a husband's sexual and social will or the begetting of children. Finally, the theme of metamorphosis which has crystalized around the servants' figurative transformations into asses is explicitly stated by the Duke. In words which recall Whitney's emblem, he says: “I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup” (V.i.271). This declaration paves the way for the playworld's release from the bonds and burdens of confused identity. The spell of Circe is replaced by the loving knowledge of Aemilia, which restores the social ties rent asunder by asinine actions and foolish mistakes.

In The Comedy of Errors, the ass motif has performed a variety of services. By its sheer iteration, it unifies the play; by its primary appeal to laughter, it helps establish the comic perspective at crucial points in the action; by its varying connotations, it aids in character delineation; by its metaphorical operation, it acts as a paradigm of metamorphosis. In a broad sense, all characters are asses; in their unrelenting unawareness of each other's presence in Ephesus, they form an iconographic parade of ignorance assembled from the pages of Ripa and Valeriano. Ultimately, however, the same complex of associations that informs the asinus portans mysteria emblem is at work in The Comedy of Errors. The ass may be foolish and licentious, his mis-takings making him a target of laughter, but he has been chosen to carry the reconciling promise of wisdom.

III

The ass motif is not employed in such a complex manner in the next three comedies in the canon. It is primarily used as a verbal projectile in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (II.iii.33; V.ii.28) and Love's Labor's Lost (II.i.44; V.ii.617-20). In The Taming of the Shrew, it functions as an extended bawdy pun (II.i.200-220). It is A Midsummer Night's Dream, the enchanting culmination of Shakespeare's first phase of comic development, which displays the image in its most brilliant and comic form. Bully Bottom, foolishly resplendent in a real ass's head, reigns supreme—a walking, talking, ruminating visual metaphor.²⁴ He represents the apotheosis of asininity. His palpably translated presence synthesizes the “admirable ass,” the “foolish ass,” and the “licentious ass” traditions; his unselfconsciously ludicrous appearance forms an essential component of the play's comic machinery, emblematizes his own character and talents, and comments upon the play's interconnected themes of metamorphosis, imagination, and love.

The most obvious classical analogue for Bottom's metamorphosis is Lucius' transformation in Apuleius' The Golden Ass. Both “heroes” are given asinine characteristics by supernatural agencies. Furthermore, Apuleius' “Cupid and Psyche” story—in which Venus uses Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with a vile thing—is paralleled by one plot strand in A Midsummer Night's Dream—in which Oberon uses Puck to make Titania fall in love with a vile thing.²⁵ Neither plan works out as expected. Psyche becomes enamored with Cupid, and Titania's ethereal advances appear to be lost on the down-to-earth Bottom.²⁶ Nevertheless, an undercurrent of sexuality pulsates throughout the midsummer night “affair.” Even if one does not accept the Fairy Queen's loving transport as a debasing education in the subject of phallic dimensions and procreative fantasies or as a cruel descent into the “dark sphere of animal love-making,”²⁷ the Titania-Bottom episode seems to partake of the “Beauty and the Beast” archetype—a mythic pattern which subconsciously serves as a means of mastering sexual fear.²⁸ This interpretation adds to the sense of sexual uneasiness which does surface occasionally throughout the play in forms including Theseus' threats to Hermia of involuntary celibacy (I.i.65-78), Oberon and Titania's extra-marital liaisons (II.i.64-80), Hermia's refusal to lie near her love (II.ii.53-61), and Helena's lack of feminine self-confidence (II.ii.94-95). In addition, Bottom acts as a punishment for Titania's transgression against natural sexual cycles—her unwillingness to allow the changeling boy to leave the childhood zone of female influence and enter the adolescent zone of masculine influence. Bottom, for all his rustic practicality in the face of supernatural events, represents—at least in part—the “licentious ass” tradition.

Subliminal erotic perversity notwithstanding, the audience's predominant response to the dalliance between the ass and the Fairy Queen is one of amusement. In a general sense, it is comedy of the grotesque—a theatrical translation of the essentially dramatic and humorous tension found in medieval cathedrals where gargoyles crouch near saints and angels.²⁹ Since this order of comedy is built on strong antitheses, the overall juxtaposition of the dainty sprite and the “palpable gross” monster creates a comically incongruous spectacle embellished with equally incongruous flourishes—the homely song, the orders to the fairy attendants, the flowery garland decking the ass's nose. Shakespeare produces a double antithesis, however, by switching the expected attributes of the characters: Titania exhibits the amorous aggressiveness one would anticipate from a lusty beast; Bottom reacts with the reserve one would anticipate from a virtuous lady. In this manner, Shakespeare captures the audience's emotions by staging a comic tableau which carries with it set expectations, and he immediately releases these emotions by reversing the roles of the tableau's central figures—thereby allowing the audience to enjoy the ridiculous scenes from a safe distance. Thus, the episode—carefully placed in the middle of the play, divided in order to flank the central love confusion of the noble youths—functions as a comic filter through which the nocturnal adventures of the Athenian quartet should be viewed. In this playworld, love's metamorphoses are comic, not malevolent; Titania and Bottom's release from the spell of Cupid's flower prefigures the awakening of the four lovers into the daylight world of festive comic resolution.

In a more specific sense, the humor of the Titania-Bottom interlude arises from the ass's head proper. The word “ass” provoked a stock response of laughter and a host of connotations such as ignorance, folly, and doltishness. And if the word itself could elicit a chuckle, the apparition would produce guffaws. On an Elizabethan stage, Bottom would appear as an emblem incarnate, an actualized epithet. If Shakespeare had merely wanted to display a hybrid monster, he could have followed the Theseus legend by creating a Minotaurian Bottom complete with bull's head;³⁰ if he had merely wanted to present a picture of licentiousness, he could have given Bottom the attributes of a goat or an ape. The playwright must have had the “foolish ass” tradition in mind when he chose the animal with which to conflate Bottom.

Like Erasmus and Brant, Shakespeare uses the ass emblem to exemplify mankind's folly.³¹ Bottom's metamorphosis, which begins with a rustic carol and ends with a reference to tongs and bones, would also remind a playgoer of Ovid and Lyly's accounts of the musically unfortunate Midas, “first a golden foole, now a leaden ass.”³² More important, perhaps, is the appropriateness of the transformation to Bottom's personality. Throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream, he is a fool. His unhesitatingly literal approach to dramatic art and magical illusion demolishes the fragile fabrics of both.³³ His malapropisms mark a verbal consanguinity with Dogberry, another famous Shakespearean ass; both characters join the brotherhood of those unable to interpret the facts of their situations and oblivious to truths about themselves. Therefore, Bottom's ass's head—in a comic rendition of the more frightening Circean pattern—is a physical translation of a spirtual reality.

Yet Bottom does not come across as a simple foolish bumpkin. He is never a figure of derision—except, perhaps, to the playworld's Athenian audience, whose supercilious and punning jeers at his dramatic performance (V.i.151-52, 300-304) engender from the real world's audience a response sympathetic to the weaver. Bottom's enthusiasm, good humor, and indefatigable theatrical esprit not only command affection but also inspire a sort of respect.³⁴ Particularly when he utters his “Bottom's Dream” soliloquy, he becomes an “admirable ass.” His scrambled scripture and inarticulate wonder link him with Erasmus' sacred natural fool. Like Balaam's ass, Bottom appears as a divinely inspired oracle, “the anointed innocent singled out for a kind of grace not despite but because of his doltishness.”³⁵ When Bottom falteringly exclaims that “[t]he 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.i.208-11), he erects a comically impenetrable synaesthetic barrier against asinine exegesis. In the process, he is able to partake in “the bottome of Goddes secretes” referred to at the end of the Pauline passage which he so wisely and foolishly garbles.³⁶ In a spontaneously humble act of negative mysticism, he removes the “I” from the “I-Thou” equation by stating that “[i]t shall be called ‘Bottom's Dream,’ because it hath no bottom” (IV.i.212-13) and by recognizing his rightful role as a mouthpiece for—not as a focus of—mystery. Like Dromio of Ephesus' resonant speech on patient suffering, Bottom's account of his “most rare vision” (IV.i.203) briefly irradiates a comically human ass with an aureole of sanctity. He becomes an asinus portans mysteria.

This comically profound moment remains but a moment—a metaphysical flash that flares and expires before it can be apprehended. The references to play-acting framing Bottom's recounting of his dream keep the vision from seeping through the seams of the comic structure and flooding the play with theological significance. As was the case in The Comedy of Errors, religious associations contribute to the texture of A Midsummer Night's Dream without determining the play's formative pattern. The major themes of the play—love, metamorphosis, and art—do not have to be explained in theological terms. They do, however, intersect in the figure of the translated Bottom.

Bottom's connection with the themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream is not particularly subtle. But, of course, neither is the figure of Bottom in the ass's head. In general, his amatory interlude with Titania acts as the comic axis around which spin the love affairs of the other societal orders represented in the play—the giddy infatuations of the Athenian youths, the quarrel and reconciliation of the Fairy King and Queen, the order-establishing marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, and the burlesque coda of “Pyramus and Thisbe” which Bottom himself helps present. Bottom's parts in the play-within-the-play and in the set piece with Titania form a ridiculous extreme of humorous literal-mindedness to balance the extreme of enraptured illusion which motivates the intoxicated lovers.³⁷ The fact that as Titania's amoroso he is actually an ass and that as Pyramus he is called an ass reinforces the Shakespearean warning that love sees “not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind” (I.i.234-35). Titania's discovery of beauty in Bottom's hirsute head thus comically echoes the chameleon affections of Lysander and Demetrius as they perceive first Hermia, then Helena, as paragons of pulchritude. Love-madness turns men and women into Cupid's fools. It is left to the play's most patently “foolish ass” to draw the moral from the situation, that “reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (III.i.130-31).

Among other things, Bottom's ass's head is a blatantly literal rendition of the theme of metamorphosis which permeates the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is in essence Ovidian, set in a moon-drenched metamorphic woodland inhabited by shape-shifting, illusion-knitting agents and subjects.³⁸ Bottom is the tangible symbol of this metamorphic mist. As he tries to act all parts, to speak in all voices, Bottom casts himself as a seeker after metamorphosis.³⁹ Like the gold-hungry Midas, the transformation-hungry weaver gets his wish. Unlike Midas', however, Bottom's fulfillment of desire carries no dangerous consequences—he seems quite content to munch hay and to receive fairyland affection.

As an animated metaphor and as a malapropian character, Bottom represents verbal metamorphosis, the transposition of one word into another. This is part of the power of dramatic art, and imagination is the metamorphic practicer. As the Ovidian co-star of an Ovidian play-within-a-play following an Ovidian dream experience, Bottom creates his own dramatic tension by attacking his role in accordance with a consistently mimetic theory of theatrical realism.⁴⁰ Dream and drama meet but do not mix in Bottom; his imagination is asininely anti-poetic. Shakespeare playfully criticizes Bottom's literalization of art by using his own art to literalize the metaphoric and metamorphic dimensions of his central comic character.

The significance of Bottom qua ass to the totality of A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, cannot be separated into thematic equivalents or character-delineating functions. Perhaps one must return to the beginning and re-examine Bottom's actual appearance. He is half-man, half-ass, the visual embodiment of Puck's dictum, “what fools these mortals be” (III.ii.115). Accordingly, Bottom serves as a clear comic everyman—a mirror in which the playgoer can see the human condition. As a “licentious ass,” he parodies man's half-hidden fascination with the sexual substratum of love. As a “foolish ass,” he reflects man's ignorant folly—and its ability to metamorphose into occasional bursts of natural wisdom. As an “admirable ass,” he incorporates man's flights into the vatic mysteries of divine revelation and poetic inspiration. Yet his hybrid nature, one radically different from the fluid one exhibited by the other characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who flow from one form or illusion to another, is of signal importance in itself. It suggests the idea of dichotomy per se. In this connection, it symbolizes the primal pattern of the play—the dramatic recreation of the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic. Theseus' diurnal world represents Apollonian order, whereas Oberon and Puck's nocturnal realm represents Dionysian license.⁴¹ The fact that the ass is sacred to Dionysus and is anathema to Apollo further clarifies Bottom's place in this archetypal scheme.⁴² In sum, it was only through the bold and, on the surface, bald-faced use of the ass motif that Shakespeare could economically pack an associational and connotational macrocosm into a humorous microcosm while preserving the structure and the tone of such a comedy as A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In the later comedies, Shakespeare discovered other ways in which to present the complex of ideas which the ass motif conveyed in the early 1590s. Chief among these are the emergence of the wise fool, of well-motivated character change, of actualized physical and sexual evil, of a wider range of comic perspective devices, and of the possibility of spiritual transformation. But the early Shakespearean ass, with its ability to contain multitudes without losing its humorous appeal, remains a splendid comic construction.

Notes

1. This is the OED's first listing under “ass” as a term of reproach; the second listing involves “ass” as a vulgarization of the etymologically unrelated word “arse”—a variation of which, as will be shown below, Shakespeare was well aware.

2. According to Martin Spevack's computerized concordance, the word “ass” occurs eighty-eight times in Shakespeare's writings; see A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, IV (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuch-handlung, 1969), p. 357.

3. The information about Plutarch, Tacitus, Tertullian, and Cecilius Felix is found in E. P. Evans, Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture (London: 1896; rpt. Detroit: Gale Research, 1969), p. 270.

4. Evans, pp. 267-77. This macaronic liturgy refers to asses as burden-bearers, as chastised sufferers, and as types of Christ; yet one line reads “Asinus egregius.” One wonders, in reference to the Shakespearean ass, if Iago recalls this wording when he plans to make Othello “egregiously an ass” (II.i.303). The text cited throughout is William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1975).

5. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes and Other Devises, The English Experience, No. 161 (Leyden, 1586; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrvm Orbis Terrarvm; New York: Da Capo, 1969), p. 8. A modern critic connects this tradition with Apuleius' The Golden Ass and notes its conflation with Christ's ass into an image of Christian piety and humility. David Ormerod, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 45. See also J. J. M. Tobin, “Apuleius and Antony and Cleopatra Once More,” Studia Neophilologica, 51 (1979), 225-28. For Isis as Diana (and Titania and Bottom as Diana and Actaeon), see Leonard Barkan, “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 317-59. Barkan's study appeared after my article was completed.

6. For instance, Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew's De proprietatibus rerum explains that the poor villain, oppressed by the yoke of servitude, can draw consolation from the wretched condition of the ass; it is fair of disposition and shape while it is young, yet becomes “a melancholy beast, that is cold and dry, and therefore kindly, heavy, and slow and unlusty, dull and witless and forgetful. …” After being beaten with staves, the poor animal dies, his body flayed and his carcass left for carrion. This exemplum is cited in Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages, ed. Evelyn Antal and John Harthan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 354-58.

7. Publius Ovidius Naso, Shakespeare's Ovid, Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (n.p., 1904; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1961), p. 222. See also Whitney's emblem Peruersa iudicia, p. 218 (Fig. 2), which equates Midas' choice with bad judgment in general.

8. Geoffrey Chaucer, Boece, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (1933; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 323. Chaucer explained his conception of the proverb's significance when he used it in Troilus and Criseyde (quoted from Robinson edition). Pandarus asks Troilus:

   “What! slombrest ow as in a litargie?
   Or artow lik an asse to the harpe,
   That hereth sown whan men the strynges plye,
   But in his mynde of that no melodie
   May sinken hym to gladen, for that he
   So dul ys of his bestialite?”

   (I.730-35)

9. Chaucer, Boece, p. 363.

10. Whitney, p. 82.

11. Ormerod, p. 46, reports that Ripa explained: “La testa dell Asino mostra la medesima l'ignoranza”; similarly, he cites Valeriano's gloss (p. 52, note 28): “ces bons gens de prestres par la test d'Ane mise sur un tronc de corps humain, signifioyent l'homme ignorant … l'Asne est l'hieroglyphique d'ignorance.”

12. This tradition evidently dates to antiquity; there exists a terra cotta figure of a Roman mime wearing a close-fitting eared hood. Robert Hillis Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1958), p. 2.

13. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folie, trans. Sir Thomas Chaloner, ed. Clarence H. Miller, Early English Text Society Publications, Orig. Ser., No. 257 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 10. The two subsequent references to this work will appear in the text.

14. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans. Alexander Barclay (Edinburgh, 1874; rpt. New York: AMS, 1966), I, 181, 156-57, 248.

15. See E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974), pp. 41, 217; Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1955), pp. 67, 200. The simple pun occurs in King Lear (I.iv.152-54), where “ass/arse” is paired with the concept of fool. A similar constellation occurs in Act I, scene i of Cymbeline. Note the pictorial emphasis upon the ass's posteriors in Figure 5.

16. Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1973), p. 21. Also, note the position of the woman's head in relation to the ass's rump in Figure 4.

17. See Ezekiel xxiii.19; for the ass as an Egyptian, Greek, and Hindu symbol of lust, see Rowland, pp. 23-24.

18. William Adlington, trans., The Golden Ass, by Apuleius, ed. S. Gaselee (1915; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), p. xvi.

19. T. W. Baldwin (On the Compositional Genetics of The Comedy of Errors [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965], pp. 166-67) also notes the Biblical wording of this passage and connects it with homiletic literature concerning the state of matrimony. In addition, see Richard Henze, “The Comedy of Errors: A Freely Binding Chain,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 37.

20. The physical abuse stems in part from Plautus. The Menaechmi presents episodes in which the actors are beaten like beasts; the Amphitruo brims with thrashings, kicks, and blows. The only actual use of the word “ass,” however, occurs in the fourth act of the Menaechmi as the furious Citizen Menechmus calls the parasite an “Asse.” Here the word merely signifies an ignorant fool. See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 12-39, 40-49. Perhaps as he was working with classical sources Shakespeare recalled the title of another Plautine play, Asinaria, which is concerned with the ridicule of a foolish master by an outrageous slave. A more likely inspiration for the equation of servants with asses is Lyly's Mother Bombie, in which the impudent servant Dromio is called an ass by his master and by his fellow slaves. See John Lyly, Mother Bombie, in The Complete Writings of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, III (1902; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 173, 185.

21. It seems that Shakespeare changed the Menaechmi's Epidamnum to Ephesus in order to allude to the supernatural aura that pervaded the city in Acts xix. See Baldwin, pp. 51, 65-66; Harold Brooks, “Theme and Structure in The Comedy of Errors,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. J. R. Brown and B. Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961); rpt. in Shakespeare, The Comedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kenneth Muir (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 20. Furthermore, the change points to the passage in Ephesians which describes the duty one owes to proper societal relationships between master and servant, husband and wife. Bullough, p. 9.

22. The editor of the New Arden edition of the play also distinguishes the metamorphic theme and sees it operating as an indicator of psychological disturbance: “Each Dromio applies the term ‘ass’ to the beatings he is made to suffer, and to the way he is made to seem a fool; but the idea of being made a beast operates more generally in the play, reflecting the process of passion overcoming reason, as an animal rage, fear, or spite seizes on each of the main characters.” R. A. Foakes, ed., The Comedy of Errors: The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1962), p. xlv. Northrop Frye (A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965], pp. 106-7) believes that “[t]he structure of The Comedy of Errors is a metamorphic structure, a descent into illusion and an emergence into recognition.”

23. Frye, p. 106, calls the speech a view of “what the human world would look like to a conscious ass: an inferno of malignant and purposeless beating.” Ralph Berry (Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972], p. 34) agrees; he writes that this existential cri de coeur “is the sharply caught apprehension of what it must be like to be a servant in a world of mad masters, to be sane and yet in an impotent minority.”

24. Ifor Evans (The Language of Shakespeare's Plays [London: Methuen, 1966], p. 10), calling metaphor “the applied metaphysic of poetry,” states that its magnetic action “asserts the unity of human life.” Correspondingly, Bottom, a metaphoric character par excellence, is the focus of the unity of the play. Similarly, David Young (Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night's Dream [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966], p. 92) finds Bottom at the center of the play's concentric circles of action. Bottom may even be a visual pun, if Partridge, p. 78, is correct in thinking that “bottom” could signify the human posteriors to an Elizabethan audience. Colman, p. 28, disagrees, however, and the OED gives 1794 as the date of its first example of this particular usage.

25. Sister M. Generosa, “Apuleius and A Midsummer Night's Dream: Analogue or Source, Which?” Studies in Philology, 42 (1945), 200.

26. See John A. Allen, “Bottom and Titania,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 107.

27. Melvin Goldstein, “Identity Crisis in A Midsummer Nightmare: Comedy as Terror in Disguise,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 60 (1973), 175; Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 218.

28. Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales [New York: Knopf, 1976], pp. 306-9), stresses the positive aspects of the archetype. In contrast, C. L. Barber (Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959], p. 155) states that Bottom and Titania portray “fancy against fact, not beauty and the beast.”

29. See Willard Farnham, The Shakespearean Grotesque: Its Genesis and Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 12, 32, for a discussion of the comedy of the grotesque; Farnham does not analyze Bottom in these terms.

30. Ormerod, p. 40, presents the idea that Shakespeare deliberately transformed the Theseus and the Minotaur myth, substituting a symbol of funny foolishness for one of bestial passion and a maze-like woods for the Cretan Labyrinth.

31. Thelma N. Greenfield, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Praise Of Folly,” Comparative Literature, 20 (1968), 239.

32. Lyly, Midas (IV.i), in The Complete Works of John Lyly, p. 144.

33. Many critics have made this point. See Barber, p. 148; Young, p. 103. Also applicable is Reginald Scot's marginal note to his account in The Discoverie of Witchcraft of the young man changed into an ass by a witch (quoted in Bullough, pp. 401-3): “A strange metamorphosis of body, but not of mind.”

34. Greenfield, p. 240, states rather broadly that men feel a sympathetic camaraderie with asses and, therefore, with Bottom.

35. James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 56.

36. Ronald F. Miller (“A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of Things,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 26 [1975], 265-66) draws this parallel between the name and function of the weaver and the Tyndale translation of I Cor. ii.6-10. See also Andrew D. Weiner (“‘Multiformitie Uniforme’: A Midsummer Night's Dream,” ELH, 38 [1971], 347), and J. Dennis Huston (“Bottom Waking: Shakespeare's ‘Most Rare Vision,’” Studies in English Literature, 13 [1973], 212-14). Thomas B. Stroup (“Bottom's Name and His Epiphany,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 [1978], 79-82) agrees that this speech is a short but profound epiphany experienced by a wise fool; however, Robert F. Willson, Jr. (“God's Secrets and Bottom's Name: A Reply,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 [1979], 407-8) warns against transforming Bottom's vision into a morality play.

37. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 84.

38. See Barber, p. 133; Walter F. Staton, Jr. (“Ovidian Elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 [1962-63], 166-68); and Madeleine Doran (Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954], p. 293).

39. See Young, p. 157.

40. Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), p. 222. Cope explores dream, imagination, and theatre in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as does James L. Calderwood (“A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Illusion of Drama,” Modern Language Quarterly, 26 [1965], 507), who writes that the play is “part of Shakespeare's continuing exploration of the nature, function, and value of art.”

41. See Neil D. Isaacs and Jack E. Reese, “Dithyramb and Paean in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” English Studies, 55 (1974), 351-57. The authors' thesis seems to be based largely on Barber.

42. Helen Adolf (“The Ass and the Harp,” Speculum, 25 [1950], 50-54) gives the classical ass analogues and briefly places Bottom in the tradition, but stresses that he becomes part of a vast “naturally cosmic” order as well.