Nick Bottom
Nick Bottom is a character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream who provides comic relief throughout the play.
He decides to have some fun with them, carrying out part of Oberon's orders in the process, and when Bottom exits the stage, he transforms his head into a donkey's.
She has been enchanted by a love potion, which will cause her to fall in love with the first living thing that she sees when she wakes (no matter who, or what it is), made from the juice of a rare flower, once hit by Cupid's arrow, that her husband, Oberon, King of the Fairies, spread on her eyes in an act of jealous rage.
After being confronted with the reality that her romantic interlude with the transformed Bottom was not just a dream, she is disgusted with the very image of him and also seems very suspicious of how "these things came to pass."
Theseus ends up choosing Pyramus and Thisbe as the performance for his amusement, now also the wedding day of the young Athenian lovers.
Bottom's discussion of his dream is considered by Ann Thompson to have emulated two passages from Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess.
[1] Critics have commented on the profound religious implications of Bottom's speech on his awakening without the ass's head in act 4 of A Midsummer Night's Dream: "[.
(1 Corinthians 1.21–25) This passage's description of the sceptical reception Christ was given by his Greek audience appears to be alluded to in Bottom's performance.
Just as Christ's preaching is regarded as "foolishness", Bottom's audience perceives his acting (as well as the entirety of the play he is a part of) as completely without value, except for the humor they can find in the actors' hopelessly flawed rendering of their subject matter.
Doloff writes that this allusion is especially likely because, in both texts, the sceptical audience of the "foolish" material is composed of Greeks, as the spectators of Bottom et al. are Theseus, the duke of Athens, and his court.
[2] The origin of Bottom's farewell to Peter Quince in Act I, scene 2 has become the topic of some disagreement among Shakespeare scholars.
Godshalk further cites the work of George Steevens, who was able to find two vaguely parallel examples in seventeenth-century drama.
He further cites Jean Froissart's account of the Battle of Crecy, which supports the military origin of Bottom's line: "When the Genoese felt the arrows piercing through their heads, arms, and breasts, many of them cast down their crossbows, and cut their strings, and resumed discomfited.
"[8] Actors who have played the role on film include Paul Rogers, James Cagney and Kevin Kline.
German composer Felix Mendelssohn musically referenced Bottom in his overture inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the strings mimicking an ass's bray on two occasions in the piece.
Later German composer Hans Werner Henze has used Bottom twice as an inspiration: in the second sonata which comprises his Royal Winter Music and in his Eighth Symphony.
