Abstract

Act 4, scene 1 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with the amorous dialogue between Titania and her newly beloved Nick Bottom. In a show of immoderate attention to one of the "hempen home-spuns,"1 Titania's affectionate imperatives add to the scene's dramatic irony: "Come, sit thee down upon this flow'ry bed / While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, / And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, / And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy". Titania's pursuit of Bottom is so excessive that the love scene becomes sadly comical: not only has the queen of the fairy world been tricked into falling in love with one of the "rude mechanicals" but he is one whose head, as we know, has...