# Characters of Shakespear's Plays/The Midsummer Night's Dream

THE
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.
Bottom the Weaver is a character that has not had justice done him. He is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows-mender, Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed! It has been observed that Shakespear's characters are constructed upon deep physiological principles; and there is something in this play which looks very like it. Bottom the Weaver, who takes the lead of
"This crew of patches, rude mechanicals, That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,"
Titania's exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which is remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the rhymes, is as follows:—
"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman. Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes, Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries; The honey-bags steel from the humble bees, And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes, ​To have my love to bed, and to arise: And pluck the wings from painted butterflies, To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes; Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies."
The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more distinct than the poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the conversation between Theseus and Hippolita.
"Theseus. Go, one of you, find out the forester, For now our observation is perform'd; And since we have the vaward of the day, My love shall hear the music of my hounds. Uncouple in the western valley, go, Dispatch, I say, and find the forester. We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain's top, And mark the musical confusion Of hounds and echo in conjunction. Hippolita. I was with Hercules and Cadmus once, When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear With hounds of Sparta; never did I hear Such gallant chiding. For besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. Theseus. My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, So flew'd, so sanded, and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; Crook-knee'd and dew-lap'd, like Thessalian bulls, Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells, Each under each. A cry more tuneable Was never halloo'd to, nor cheer'd with horn, In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly: Judge when you hear."—
It had been suggested to us, that the Midsummer Night's Dream would do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of his great talents. He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to play the lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion like "the most fearful wild-fowl living." The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it was thought, would hit the galleries. The young ladies in love would interest the side-boxes; and Robin Goodfellow and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school. There would be two courts, an empire within an empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants, and with all their finery. What an opportunity for processions, for the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears! What a fluttering of urchins' painted wings; what a delightful profusion of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them!
Alas, the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of ​Mr. Liston, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of things. The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.— Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective: every thing there is in the fore-ground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom's head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage, it is an ass's head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine. ​Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at mid-day, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the Midsummer Night's Dream be represented without injury at Covent-garden or at Drury-lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing.