Conor's Saxophone Lesson

Conor took the saxophone into school for a lesson for the first time today. There are three other children learning but they are all in the year above. He is much more keen to demo what he has learned than with his guitar lessons.

Dad did another deep dive into one of Orla's English Literature assignments today. Assignment 5, on Act 1 Scene 2 of A Mid Summer Night's Dream. The question was "How does Shakespeare introduce Bottom and the other Mechanicals in this scene". Orla only got 59% which seemed extremely harsh. 

Orla's Answer
The character Nick Bottom and the rest of the Mechanicals are first introduced in Act 1 Scene 2. They are a group of theatre amateur performers preparing a theatre production for the wedding night of Theseus, and in this scene, they are being assigned their roles. The play they will be performing is supposed to be serious, but the way Shakespeare introduces these characters assures the audience the play will be anything but.

The first thing the audience may is the contrast between the Mechanicals and the characters in the Athenean court in the previous scene. In the previous scene, the tone is dire - Hermia must choose between giving up her love and death - and the conflict is intended to be taken seriously. By contrast, in this scene the tone is light-hearted and comedic, and the most dire conflict is what roles these characters will play in their performance, and the foolish humour of the Mechanicals communicates even this conflict is not meant to be taken seriously. Another contrast is the style - the upper class Atheneans mainly speak in verse and incorporate imagery and metaphor into their speech to demonstrate their power and influence, while the lower-class Mechanicals do not speak in verse, which further elevates their comedy. as their speech is more conversational.

The Mechanicals are also introduced as being likeable, especially to a Shakespearean audience. They are immediately introduced as being lower class workmen, with labouring jobs such as a "weaver" or a "bellows mender”, which would be instantly recognisable and perhaps relatable to a Shakespearean audience. Another factor that makes them likeable is their comedy, which is mainly derived from their incompetence and lack of understanding of how incompetent they are - for example, Bottom’s confidence that he will "move storms” and "ask some tears in the true performing” of his role, which is immediately followed b y a starkly simple poem compared to the previous verse of the Athenean court.

The Mechanicals, and especially Bottom, are also introduced through the establishment of their characters. Bottom is first introduced as a foolish character through his name, and then through his severe overconfidence in his own abilities as an actor. His lack of understanding of his own incompetence means he does not hesitate to throw himself into overly dramatic speeches filled with incorrect references - all of which makes him an incredibly funny character. Bottom’s character contrasts well with Quince's, who speaks without dramatics and does not indulge Bottom's constant attempts to be the centre of attention.

Overall, the way Shakespeare introduces Bottom and the Mechanicals is the effective in communicating their characters and roles in the rest of the play. The Mechanicals fill a role we would now refer to as “comic-relief" - characters intended for comedy, that act as a contrast to the more serious main plot. Their positions as actors also allow Shakespeare to comment on the themes of plays-within-plays and dreams vs. reality.

Specimen Answer
This scene, which takes place towards the end of Act One, gives the audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream its first sight of the Mechanicals – a group of craftsmen and tradesmen who will provide the play with much of its genuinely comic action, as they rehearse and perform the play within the play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. Two of them, Bottom and Peter Quince, dominate the scene, establishing their domination (in very different ways) of the remaining Mechanicals scenes. The scene establishes not only the personalities of these characters, but also the relationships between them which Shakespeare will develop as the play goes on. This is largely achieved through the language of the dialogue, together with the implied stagecraft of the scene. 
The most important of the Mechanicals – in his own eyes, as well as in terms of the play – is Bottom, and this scene establishes him as a larger-than-life personality whose self-confidence is far greater than his talent or ability. This is demonstrated at the very beginning of the scene, as Bottom tells Peter Quince – nominally his superior in the Mechanicals – how to find out whether the company has arrived: ‘You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip’. In this sentence, Bottom reveals both his arrogance, implying that Quince can’t work out for himself that he should ‘call them’, and his ignorance, as he uses ‘generally’ as a synonym for ‘man by man’, when it actually means the . Bottom’s confidence consistently outstrips his ability with language, as is shown slightly later in the scene when he uses the word ‘merry’ to describe ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, which Quince has just said is ‘lamentable’ and contains a ‘most cruel death’. 

Bottom is clearly also someone who throws his weight around and wants to be the centre of attention at all times. Shakespeare gives him much more to say than any other character in this scene (and in later ones), both in terms of the number of speeches and their length. The largest speech in the scene, by far, comes in the exact centre of the scene – always a sign of importance. In it, Bottom advertises his brilliance as an actor, playing both a lover, like Pyramus, and ‘a tyrant’ – clearly his preferred option. Bottom’s description of his own acting is loud and full of hyperbole: he ‘will move storms’ and make the ’audience look to their eyes’, because it ‘will ask some tears’. The pathetic fallacy linking storms to crying is typical of Bottom, as is his outbreak into truly terrible poetry. The short lines, insistent alliteration and emphatic rhymes of ‘The raging rocks’ turn the ‘lofty’ sentiments of a tragic hero into nonsense, while the garbled references to classical figures such as Hercules (‘Ercles’) and Phoebus (‘Phibbus’) suggest someone with pretensions to a grammar-school education but no real understanding of it. 

The other Mechanicals are sketched much more briefly. Peter Quince, although supposedly in charge of proceedings, has far fewer lines than Bottom, many of which are also very short. This suggests a diffidence which is likely to make him an ineffectual leader, although he does show admirable firmness when Bottom (yet again) tries to take over Flute’s part as well as his own: ‘No, no; you must’ is strong language by Quince’s standards and it forces Bottom to stand aside with no further argument, and a decidedly laconic ‘Well, proceed’. The remaining four are only named, with the exception of Francis Flute. He is shown to be young – humorously so, when he chooses to announce that he has ‘a beard coming’, rather than one that is already there. The combination of this detail with his name seems to imply that he has the high ‘fluting’ voice of a boy, and is perhaps only just going through puberty, even though he already has a trade and is earning money. Quince’s instruction to him to ‘speak as small as you will’ also seems to imply that Flute’s voice sounds like that all the time, while Flute’s plea to ‘let me not play a woman’ might suggest that he is already often mistaken for one. 
Perhaps the most telling aspect of Shakespeare’s characterisation of these men, however, is the listing of their trades. In the days before machines were familiar parts of everyday life, the term ‘mechanicals’ referred to workmen or labourers – people who earned money using their hands, rather than their brains or their high position in society. The vast majority of plays at this time – including most of Shakespeare’s – ignored such people completely or treated them as simple clowns. Even if Bottom et al are figures of fun for most of the play, they are also treated as individuals, each of whom has a different skill – whether it be weaving, carpentry, joinery, bellows-mending, tailoring or tinkering – and each of whom is clearly sufficiently skilled at it to earn the kind of wage which would allow them to take time off to rehearse and perform a play. As Peter Quince gives the men names and states their trade, the audience is given a rare glimpse into a world which they will know little about: the world of the 16th century trained artisan.