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Changeling Bottom: Speech prefixes, acting, and character in A Midsummer Night's Dream

While Nick Bottom, in exception to the current scholarly consensus about early modern “character”, continues to be described in terms that suggest a fixed identity, his speech prefixes tell another story. Called “Bottom” in speech prefixes since the eighteenth century, in the speech prefixes of the earliest printed texts Bottom is identified by three different names: Bottom, Pyramus, and Clown. Bottom's three names outline a tension between professional/trade, professional/theatrical, and class roles. As he negotiates among these roles and names, Bottom becomes not a stable “character” but a figure in whom changefulness and permanence are at odds: a “changeling Proteus”, in Joseph Roach's formulation, an actor.