“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
--Oberon in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A few years ago, lying in bed reading Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I had a flash of insight: Bottom, one of the Clowns, is the most human character. Ever since, I have believed that my insight came from a comment in the introduction to my copy of Shakespeare’s drama, but pulling the book out recently to see if I could explore this line of thought further, I found that no such comment exists. It must have been a genuine insight of my own. So, in order to pull off this blog, I embarked on a review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Nick Bottom is one of the hapless Joes who have undertaken to perform a play before Theseus and Hippolyta, duke and duchess of Athens. Bottom approaches the task with gusto, desiring to play multiple parts himself so that he can show off his thespian skills. When the actors meet in the forest at night to practice, the mischievous fairy Puck transforms him so that he has the head of a donkey. Under the influence of love juice, Titania, Queen of the Fairies, falls in love with him, but he is more interested in eating oats than in her affection. Later, he awakens back in human form, remembering what has happened as a lovely vision. A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends with the nobility of Athens poking fun at, and touched by, Bottom and his ridiculous troupe as they perform their play.
It is Bottom’s humanity as Clown that originally interested me, although he is the most fully human character in the play in other ways too numerous and complex to go into here. All his lofty aspirations are thwarted and he ends up looking the fool. There is much of the human situation in this. We would do great works, but we are imperfect creatures and all too often our fine intentions end up an embarrassing shambles.
For all his clownishness, however, Bottom holds an exalted place in Shakespeare’s play. Not only is he the only character to cross the line between the mundane world and the Faerie Realm, there to share the queen’s bed, but upon returning to the world of Bottom the Weaver, he has an epiphany that he expresses in a celebrated passage:
“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. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—But man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. 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.”
The footnotes tell me that the last sentence is a corruption of Corinthians 2:9-10, but what strikes me most is how Bottom touches upon what he is—an ass and a fool. And yet, when he returns to Athens and runs into his buddies, he refuses to expound upon his dream, thereby refusing to play the fool. His experience in the Faerie World turning from human to ass has actuated a change from ass to something higher in the real world. This capacity to span worlds both mundane and numinous, and to rise by reflection, is it not distinctly human?
The other characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are more archetypal, each one a narrower representation of the human spirit. Theseus is a wise, benevolent, yet firm ruler, whereas Hippolyta is more given to emotion and romantic fancy. These two are mirrored by Oberon and Titania in the Faerie Realm. Puck is pure playfulness, and the other characters are generally nondescript, although their antics are quite amusing. Bottom alone shows that he has more dimensions than one.
Around the same time as my insight regarding Bottom, I realized that the character of Gaius Baltar in the new Battlestar Galactica television series is also a clown, and he too is the richest character in the series.
Baltar is a famous scientist and inveterate playboy on planet Caprica. He becomes infatuated with a Cylon—a type of robot who looks human—and gives her defense codes, which the Cylons then use to launch a nuclear strike that nearly sends the human race into extinction. He joins a ragtag fleet of survivors under the protection of the battlestar Galactica that then flees across space in search of a new home on planet Earth. Along the way, he is continually thrust to positions of responsibility even as he bears the secret of his guilt.
That may not sound very funny—and indeed Baltar’s comedy is mixed with much tragedy—but Battlestar Galactica reserves what little outright humor it has for scenes involving Baltar. A great deal of this humor involves him talking to, sometimes making out with, a vision of his now deceased Cylon lover that appears only to him, thus making him look crazy to others. Perhaps the funniest scene of the whole series is when a Cylon who looks exactly like his dead lover, but isn't, appears. He can't understand why she is acting like she isn't who he thinks she is and angrily pursues her into the latrine. Of course, someone walks in as he is standing before a closed stall door, shaking his fist and shouting, “No more Mr. Nice Gaius!”
That is all slapstick, but like Bottom, Baltar’s clownishness strikes a truly human figure. His lofty goals fall to ruin, he expresses a manic range of human emotions, crosses boundaries between worlds spiritual and profane, and experiences epiphanies only to fall victim to fate or lapse into his old bad habits. Battlestar Galactica is not short on rich characters, but none display this richness of human character and experience, except perhaps Starbuck. And none is a Clown whose sticky situations, funny to everyone but himself, are so representative of the human condition.
Like Bottom at his art or Baltar in his constant turmoil, we would do something great, but our efforts too often end in disarray and ridicule. Yet there is majesty in our striving and richness in the breadth of our souls.
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