I have much to say on behalf of Bottom, Shakespeare’s most engaging character before Falstaff. Bottom, as the play’s text comically makes clear, has considerably less sexual interest in Titania than she does in him, or than many recent critics and directors have in her. Shakespeare, here and elsewhere, is bawdy but not prurient; Bottom is amicably innocent, and not very bawdy. … What we do have is a gentle, mild, good-natured Bottom, who is rather more inclined to the company of the elves – Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed – than to the madly infatuated Titania. (pages 148-49)
Like Dogberry after him, Bottom is an ancestor of Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop, and uses certain words without knowing what they signify. Though he is sometimes inaccurate at the circumference, he is always sound at the core, which is what Bottom the Weaver’s name means, the center of the skein upon which the weaver’s wool is wound. There are folkloric magical associations attendant upon weaving, and Puck’s choice of Bottom for enchantment is therefore not as arbitrary as first it seems. Whether or not Bottom (very briefly) becomes the carnal lover of the Fairy Queen, Shakespeare leaves ambiguous or elliptical, probably because it is unimportant compared with Bottom’s uniqueness in the Dream: he alone sees and converses with fairy folk. The childlike fourfold of Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb, and Mustardseed are as charmed by Bottom as he is by them. … Bottom the natural man is also the transcendental Bottom, who is just as happily at home with Cobweb and Peaseblossom as he is with Snug and Peter Quince. For him there is no musical discord or confusion in the overlapping realms of the Dream. It is absurd to condescend to Bottom: he is at once a sublime clown and a great visionary. (pages 150-51)