Changeling Bottom: Speech prefixes, acting, and character in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Abstract

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

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 performing 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 (4–5).

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 61–72). 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 56–57). 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 xxviii–xxxiv). On the connection between Greg and McKerrow, see Werstine 150–54, 157–60, 167–69.

11. On the theory of authorial revision in Midsummer, first put forth by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson, (77–100) see Turner 46–47.

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 13–14, 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 79–82; Wilson 407–8; 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 (118–19).

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