EGL 204-4 Due
Why a wife?
In watching the wonderful play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” performed as a movie, one is struck by how faithful the director/screenwriter Michael Hoffman is in 1999 to the original play as written by William Shakespeare in approximately 1596. This is why the few areas where he meddled with the sub-plot, adding the character of Nick Bottom’s wife for example, are so egregious. There was no need to add this brief and incomplete portrait. In fact, it detracts from the rest of the interaction with Bottom in numerous ways, and it is never resolved at the end.
Kevin Kline is wonderful as Nick Bottom. His performance in Hoffman’s movie is, “the embodiment of amiability” (Roger Ebert). “Kline, a Shakespearean veteran, has that flourish, that golden touch. In his glorious way of overdoing it -- turning the very notion of acting into farce -- he embodies a supreme comic madness that is audacious yet embracing. One can hardly wait to see what surprise he'll spring next” (Peter Stack). He “brings an element of pathos and regret to the buffoonery normally associated with Bottom. Bottom isn't on hand just to provide comic relief, and Kline understands this” (James Berardinelli).
However, no matter how wonderful Klein is, and I agree with all of the quoted reviewers and the many others who love him in this part, I also agree with David Edelstein when he says, “For reasons only Hoffman understands, he has saddled Nick Bottom, one of Shakespeare's most delightfully shameless extroverts, with a nagging wife and added bits in which the braggart is poignantly humiliated by children. Idiocy!”
The lesser evil is the humiliation by local children. This is not in the original anywhere. The ring of onlookers is suggested by Quince’s request that they meet to rehearse in the woods “for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogged with company, and our devices known” (1287). But there is nothing in Shakespeare’s character’s words, nor in his stage directions, that indicates that the mechanicals were beset by irksome urchins at their initial meeting.
Perhaps to Hoffman they symbolize the real world with which Bottom and the mechanicals seem not to interact too successfully. Or they might be stand-ins for the other side of childhood, the one not so innocent and sweet as that portrayed by Bottom. In either case, they are a distraction and an annoyance and should be cut.
As if he thought the public humiliation at the hands of the youthful brigands was not sufficient a departure from Shakespeare’s intention, Hoffman then decided that Bottom the weaver, the embodiment of innocence, needed a wife; and what a wife! Not someone who might understand the naïve dreamer, but a scolding, witch-like creature with wild hair and angry eyes who publicly calls her husband “a useless dreamer” before the audience even has a chance to meet him for the first time.
“The beauty of Kline's Bottom is its childlike
straightforwardness and simplicity” (Edelstein). This image is severely
undermined by the unnecessary and unbelievable wife. While Klein is utterly believable
throughout, and especially so “as he
bashfully parries the passionate advances of Titania” (Ebert), he would be more
credible as a single, perhaps even virginal, young man. As the husband of a
shrewish and unattractive wife, an audience member could be forgiven for
wondering why he “tactfully humors [the beautiful Titania’s] mad infatuation”
(Ebert), rather than hurling himself into an opportunity for some good clean
fun with a gorgeous fairy. After all, he knows this can’t be real, so why not,
given the home life the audience is encouraged to imagine, enter into the
liaison as a tentative young lover exploring the possibilities of passion with
humor and fun. By putting the audience in the mood to ask this question,
Hoffman destabilizes the picture of Bottom he (and Shakespeare) are creating
elsewhere in the story.
Stephanie Zachaerek disagrees; she says Hoffman gives Bottom a disapproving wife “to suggest that for all Bottom's cheek and bravado, there's also something a little beaten down about him. The change doesn't make much sense at first (the wife has no lines), and it seems like a bald contrivance. But Kline ultimately makes the alteration work. When he awakes from his ‘dream’ of being loved by Titania, his face registers both the memory of redolent bliss and a creeping, unavoidable sadness -- recognition that his experience has already been half-erased just by waking.”
While I agree with her initial assessment, that it was a directorial error, and her theory that if it is salvageable, Klein is the one to do it, I disagree with her about the wife. She does have lines, at least one, even though it is screamed, unanswered, at the general populace and she has no discernable interaction with her husband. I also disagree with Zachaerek’s judgment on the end result of the addition of the wife character. All that sad-eyed staring out the window of his deserted apartment is far too mature for the Bottom the audience knows. He appears to be thinking deep thoughts, not Bottom’s forte – at least not intentionally.
And where is his wife, or any evidence of her in the apartment we are taken on a virtual tour of? If Hoffman thought it was so important to invent and then show the audience Bottom’s wife prior to the magic in the woods, it stands to reason that there should be some interaction with her when he returns to his real life. She is screaming for him like the proverbial fisherman’s wife when the audience first meets her and the mechanicals, and she does not find him prior to the adventure in the woods and the performance at the Duke’s wedding. By the time he is back at their apartment she must be mad with vexation.
As for Bottom, he has won a prize; he would be eager to show her his worth. Even if the audience expects her to reward him only with scorn, it would be in character for him to be proud of himself and naively wish to share his joy, and the prize money, with her. He goes home and looks through the apartment, seeking her out. But she is not there. This is a serious flaw in the director’s thinking. It reminds the audience that the addition of the wife was an unnecessary distraction, and one that is not tied up neatly like all the other threads in the cloth of the play. “At moments like that, you can almost see the ass's head materialize on the director” (Edelstein).”
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.” An Introduction to Literature. Ed. Sylvan,
Barnet et al. 13th ed.
Ebert, Roger. “William
Shakespear’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The
Berardinelli, James. “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Reelviews.
Edelstein, David. “Lord, What
Fools: Try as it Might, an Ineptly Directed New Film Can’t Ruin A Midsummer
Night’s Dream” Slate.
Zacharek, Stephanie.
“Disenchanted
Stack, Peter. “Dream'
Interpretation: Stellar cast adds comic madness to lush, over-the-top
'Midsummer.'” The San Francisco
Chronicle.