Holy Words and Low Folly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This essay offers a re-interpretation of the Dream’s central religious allusion, the echo of 1 Corinthians 2.9-10 in Bottom’s ‘vision’ speech. It is argued that the speech’s signification must be understood as contextualized by the utilization made of holy reference throughout the Dream. To this end the text highlights a number of religious allusions (some previously unremarked), and demonstrates the nature of these appropriations as offering dislocation to the references’ sacred indication.

Bottom’s speech itself is approached via Stuart Sillar’s suggestion that the lines indicate a possible allusion to Chaloner’s translation of Erasmus’s Moriæ Encomium. I show how a more expanded understanding of the relationship between these two texts would work to elaborate the Dream’s thematic concern with the elevation of the ignorant and the inversion of authority. More significantly, I suggest that these allusions work to transpose the appropriated vision of mystical revelation into that of a vision realized through the aesthetic processes of a theatre of dissimulation.