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Of all the characters in this play, Bottom descends by far the most into the realities of common experience, and is therefore much the most accessible to the grasp of prosaic and critical fingers.  It has been thought that the Poet meant him as a satire on the envies and jealousies of the greenroom, as they had fallen under his keen yet kindly eye.  But, surely, the qualities uppermost in Bottom the Weaver had forced themselves on his notice long before he entered the greenroom.  It is indeed curious to observe the solicitude of this protean actor and critic, that all the parts of the forthcoming play may have the benefit of his execution; how great is his concern lest, if he be tied to one, the others may be “overdone or come tardy off”; and how he would fain engross them all to himself, to the end of course that all may succeed, to the honour of the stage and the pleasure of the spectators.  But Bottom’s metamorphosis is the most potent drawer-out of his genius.  The sense of his new head-dress stirs up all the manhood within him, and lifts his character into ludicrous greatness at once.  Hitherto the seeming to be a man has made him content to be little better than an ass; but no sooner is he conscious of seeming an ass than he tries his best to be a man; while all his efforts that way only go to approve the fitness of his present seeming to his former being.

Schlegel happily remarks, that “the droll wonder of Bottom’s metamorphosis is merely the translation of a metaphor in its literal sense.”  The turning of a figure of speech thus into visible form is a thing only to be thought of or imagined; so that probably no attempt to paint or represent it to the senses can ever succeed.  We can bear—­at least we often have to bear—­that a man should seem an ass to the mind’s eye; but that he should seem such to the eye of the body is rather too much, save as it is done in those fable-pictures which have long been among the playthings of the nursery.  So a child, for instance, takes great pleasure in fancying the stick he is riding to be a horse, when he would be frightened out of his wits, were the stick to quicken and expand into an actual horse.  In like manner we often delight in indulging fancies and giving names, when we should be shocked were our fancies to harden into facts:  we enjoy visions in our sleep, that would only disgust or terrify us, should we awake and find them solidified into things.  The effect of Bottom’s transformation can hardly be much otherwise, if set forth in visible, animated shape.  Delightful to think of, it is scarce tolerable to look upon:  exquisitely true in idea, it has no truth, or even verisimilitude, when reduced to fact; so that, however gladly imagination receives it, sense and understanding revolt at it.

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