How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (7 page)

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind
.

Throughout this play, Shakespeare appears to be suggesting that the experience of love is like the experience of a dream—they are both irrational and changeable. The change can be caused by the juice of a magic flower. Or when we’re not in a magic forest, love can change for any number of reasons. In one of the most beautiful exchanges in the play, just after
Hermia’s father has forbidden her to marry Lysander, the two lovers bewail their fate.
Ay me
, cries Lysander,

For aught
[all]
that I could ever read
,

Could ever hear by tale or history
,

The course of true love never did run smooth
.

The lovers then remind each other of the many ways that love can be thwarted: Lovers can be from different social classes (O
cross! Too high to be enthralled to low
.); they can be from different age groups (O
spite! Too old to be engaged to young
.); their relatives might not like each other (O
hell, to choose love by another’s eyes!
); or—more profoundly—their love can be beset by
war, death, or sickness
,

Making it momentary as a sound
,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream
,

Brief as the lightning in the collied
[coal-black]
night,…

And, ere
[before]
a man hath power to say “Behold!”

The jaws of darkness do devour it up
.

So quick bright things come to confusion
.

Short as any dream
. Shakespeare does not mince words. For the lovers in this play, love is a dream, a midsummer night’s dream, a dream that can change as quickly as lightning in the coal-black night.

Passage 3
Bottom’s Dream

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 to expound this dream.… 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
.

(
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
Act IV, Scene 1, lines 214–26)

O
ur third passage from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is spoken by a tradesman, an ordinary man of Athens named Nick Bottom who has just awakened from a dream. In his dream, two strange things happened: He had the head of a donkey, and a beautiful fairy queen fell in love with him.

In fact, these two things were not just a dream; they really did happen to Bottom, and we see them happen earlier in the play. We’ll discuss Bottom’s part in the plot in more detail in a moment, but here’s what you need to know right now: First, Puck comes across Bottom and his friends in the woods (they are there to rehearse a play); and then Puck, to be mischievous, puts a donkey’s head on Bottom’s shoulders. A few minutes later, Titania wakes up with the juice of the magic flower in her eyes (remember:
Oberon put it there to get his revenge); and Titania falls in love with this monster who is a man from the neck down and a donkey from the neck up. So when Bottom wakes up later with the ass-head removed, he thinks he had a dream: a “most rare vision.”

Quotation Pages

At this point, for ease of reading, I’ll stop printing the Quotation Pages as part of the text. However, you and your children should have the proper Quotation Pages next to you as you memorize this and the other passages in this book, and you should download them from
howtoteachyourchildrenshakespeare.com
.

Bottom’s Dream

I have had a most rare vision
.

I am always struck by the beauty of the phrase
a most rare vision
. Repeat it to your children and tell them to think about the words. If your children like to act, this is an ideal passage to practice their skills. Remind them that Bottom is just waking up from a deep sleep and has just had a pleasant but confusing dream.

You will also notice from the way the speech is printed at the beginning of the chapter that it is not poetry, but rather prose. We’ll talk about what that means in the next chapter.

I have had a dream

past the wit of man

to say what dream it was
.

In this sentence, I’m especially fond of the word
wit. The wit of man
. As used in this sentence, the word
wit
means not only “understanding” or “knowledge”; it also has the connotation of “cleverness.” The phrase
the wit of man
seems to me the perfect choice of words from the perspective of a tradesman who would like to appear wise.

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
[explain]
this dream
.

Man is but an ass
. Shakespeare constantly uses puns throughout his plays. In this case,
ass
means both (1) a donkey and (2) a foolish person. (In Shakespeare’s day, it did not apparently mean a part of the body. I have checked all the glossaries and spoken to several Shakespeare experts, and they all agree that “ass” did not mean what we today would call a backside. And yet the name Bottom implies otherwise and I’ll go to my grave believing that the word had three connotations in Shakespeare’s day.) Now comes the juiciest part of the passage.

James Cagney and Anita Louise in the 1935 film directed by Max Reinhardt
(photo credit 8.1)

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
.

Obviously, Bottom is getting mixed up: An eye cannot hear, and an ear cannot see. A hand cannot taste, a tongue cannot think, and a heart cannot talk. While Bottom is getting the words mixed up in part because he’s groggy, he is also trying to be profound. We know this because Bottom’s words echo a passage in the Bible that he is trying to quote. In 1 Corinthians (2:9–10), Saint Paul says:

The eye hath not seen, & the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.… For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.

My children have always loved Bottom’s speech, and we came up with an easy way to learn it—by using hand gestures. If you do this with your children, no matter what age they are, it will help them enormously in learning the passage.

In our house, the hand gestures became a game, with all of us competing to see who could say the passage fastest. The kids won, of course, and after ten minutes we all knew the passage cold.

The final two sentences of the passage are straightforward and declarative.

I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream
.

Peter Quince is one of Bottom’s friends. (A quince is also a pear-shaped fruit.)

It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom
.

Here Shakespeare is punning again. Bottom is the character’s name; and the dream is bottomless, which suggests that it is deep and profound. Bottom is once again echoing 1 Corinthians: “For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”

For Shakespeare, Bottom’s dream is deep. It is a dream about imagination and the possibilities of mankind. In this dream, a simple tradesman is the object of a queen’s adoration. He accepts the role and becomes her consort for a night. And remember, Bottom is the only mortal in the entire play who ever sees any of the fairies. He gets to see worlds that no other mortal in the play gets to see. His dream has no bottom indeed.

Review the speech one last time with your children, and then we can put it into context.

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 to expound this dream.… 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
.

Bottom’s Story

Bottom is at the center of the third plotline of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and his story is simple. He and his friends, with the colorful names Peter Quince, Francis Flute, Tom Snout, Snug, and Robin Starveling, decide to put on a play called
Pyramus and Thisbe
during the wedding celebrations of the Duke of Athens. The six friends are Athenian craftsmen (a carpenter, a weaver, a bellows mender, etc.) and are known in the world of Shakespeare as the “rude Mechanicals” (or humble workmen), a name that Puck gives them. We meet them in the second scene of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
when their leader, Peter Quince, is passing out the parts for the play. They will need to rehearse, of course, and they decide to meet the following night in the Wood near Athens—yes, that’s right, the same
woods to which the lovers are fleeing, which is also the woods where the fairies live.

One of the great charms of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is watching these honest, unaffected men trying to put on a play.
Pyramus and Thisbe
is a melodrama that involves a knight, the knight’s lady who is played by a man, a talking wall that separates the two lovers, and a death scene that almost never ends. The plot of this play-within-a-play closely resembles that of
Romeo and Juliet
, and Shakespeare takes enormous joy in poking gentle fun at amateur actors putting on a play.

FLUTE

(
as Thisbe, discovering Pyramus dead on the ground
)

Asleep, my love?

What, dead, my dove?

O Pyramus, arise!