Bottom (Nick)

the weaver. A man who fancies he can do everything, and do it better than anyone else. Shakespeare has drawn him as profoundly ignorant, brawny, mock heroic, and with an overflow of self-conceit. He is in õne part of Midsummer Night’s Dream represented with an ass’s head, and Titania, queen of the fairies, under a spell, caresses him as an Adoʹnis.

⁂ The name is very appropriate, as the word bottom means a ball of thread used in weaving, etc. Thus in Clark’s Heraldry we read, “The coat of Badland is argent, three bottoms in fess gules, the thread or.”

“When Goldsmith, jealous of the attention which a dancing monkey attracted, said, ‘I can do that,ʹ he was but playing Bottom.”—R. G. White.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.