Chapter Ninety-Two Bottoms

Have you ever noticed how poets borrow not just from each other but from themselves? Upstart crows are thieves no less than magpies. But sometimes it's their own shed plumage that they steal.

In this my 92nd box I have a note concerning an interesting item of self-borrowing I once discovered in the works of Mr Shakespeare. BORROWING is perhaps not quite the word for it. Nor is REMEMBERING, though we'd better not forget that Memory was the mother of all the Muses. Anyway, can I please point out that there is something small in Titus Andronicus which might have 'suggested' something big in A Midsummer Night's Dream? I mean that the very name of Bottom and the line

It shall be called Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom came to Shakespeare because of the line in Titus:

Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom?

Reader, it is obvious that here we are over the border of biography. I can neither prove nor can you disprove my case. Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, or much of it. Shakespeare wrote the whole of the Dream, there is no reason to doubt. That is all that a biographer can say. The rest is poetry.

The common reader or playgoer is misled by the fact that such plays as Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night's Dream have apparently nothing in common. But to the poet's mind such differences are irrelevant. What the two works have in common is him.

Sir, poets frequently, if not always, borrow from other poets. Pickleherring is here to remind you, madam, to what extent they do, and must, borrow from themselves.

My wife Jane had a particularly handsome bottom. It was her finest feature. I saw a man in Covent Garden once take off his hat to it as she passed by.

On the other hand, the late Mr Shakespeare's bottom was nothing to write home about. But then I must confess it did not interest me. In fact it was one of those things about him which I think I found boring. There were some few such, as I have admitted.

A thing you may not know is that he once slipped when about to throne himself upon a piss-pot, and marked himself severely on the arse. (Madam, I do apologise for the inclusion of such base matter, but then without it my anatomy of Shakespeare would be incomplete.) The great man thus had this anal stigmata, as it were, in the form of a crucifixion on his bottom.

So are our heroes somewhat less than gods, though they may carry emblems of divinity in the most unlikely places on their persons.

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