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8o
FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES
then, until finally
Bottom expresses his intention to go
and relate the matter to his friend Quince and get him
to write a ballad of the dream.
Me-thought I was, and me-thought
I had.
Thus we hear Bottom cogitating, but what he was,
and what he had, that he cannot remember. In other
words, he cannot hit upon the rhyme to the words he
utters. That rhyme would have told him what he
wanted to know:
Me-thought I was ... an ass (says the rhyme).
Me-thought I had ... an ass's head (says the rhyme).
We would, in the same sense hinted atj by the poet,
term such a rhyme "that hath no bottom," a bottom
less rhyme. For, does not Bottom, after having
decided to ask his friend Quince to write a ballad, say,
at the close of the scene :
It shall be called Bottomes Dream, because it hath
no bottome.
The play on the words " Zettel" (Bottom!) and
" anzetteln," chosen by Schlegel, does but poor justice
to the original.
The ballad has no bottom, nor has
the rhyme, for the time :
being such is the idea
conveyed by the English words.
And now, before concluding our discourse upon the
predilection for rhyme evinced by
the author of
Shakespeare, we have still to consider the strangest
sort of rhyme contained in those plays, namely, that in
which the actual
rhyme is substituted by
a word that
does not rhyme. We might
call it a vexing-rhyme.
A clear instance of a vexing-rhyme
is contained in
the comedies, but the tragedies furnish a still better
example.