Bottom is a weaver and the most confident of the amateur actors preparing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play for the Duke’s wedding. He enters the play volunteering to play every part—Pyramus, Thisbe, even the lion—speaking in a rush of theatrical ambition and verbal confidence that far exceeds his actual skill. His famous declaration, “I will roar, that I will make the duke say ‘Let him roar again,’” captures his unshakeable self-assurance. He’s a man of no formal education trying to speak like a learned person, mixing up words and producing malapropisms that reveal his earnest but clumsy efforts to sound important. Yet there’s something oddly endearing about his enthusiasm and his inability to recognize how badly he’s doing.
When Puck transforms his head into an ass’s, Bottom is the only character who doesn’t notice the change. He remains cheerful and self-possessed, singing in the forest while Titania, enchanted by the love-juice, falls madly in love with him. He treats his fairy attendants (Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed) with unconscious courtesy, managing them like a man used to giving orders to people he considers beneath him—yet without real malice. His conversation with the fairies is comic precisely because Bottom never for a moment suspects that anything unusual has happened to him. When Titania declares her love, he accepts it as his due, attributing it to reason rather than magic: “Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that: and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.” He’s simultaneously foolish and wise, speaking accidentally profound truths while remaining oblivious to his own transformation.
After the spell is broken and Bottom wakes alone in the forest, he has no memory of his night as an ass-headed beloved of the fairy queen. Instead, he insists that he’s had a dream so strange and overwhelming that no human can explain it. He decides to commission Peter Quince to write it as a ballad called “Bottom’s Dream”—and significantly, he wants to perform it himself, in the play, before the Duke. The moment captures Bottom’s essential nature: he’s not humbled by his experience, not even fully aware of what happened, but he wants to turn it into art, into performance, into something that will impress an audience. He’s the play’s wisest fool because, unlike the other characters, he never questions his own worth or his right to be heard. His confidence is impervious to evidence.
