Midsummer Night's Dream
In the play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 
subordinate
agents pre-occupy the mind, by reason of their great potency and surpassingly beautiful creation; or by the engrossing demand that others make on our attention, on account of their fine dramatic nature and verisimilitude, with side-shaking broad humour. Really and truly, Demetrius and Lysander, Hermia and Helena, with their love-crosses and perplexities, constitute the chief agents in the drama. Their way of life is the plot"
disturbed, it is true, by the madcap sprite Puck, whose mischievous agency is so admirably employed to distort the course of their true love; and, with a two-handed scheme to befool poor little Titania, becomes not only the important movement in the machinery, but, in fact, we scarcely think of any other in conjunction with him; he and his fellow-minims of the moon's watery beams are the great (though little) people of the drama. Bottom and his companions are the cap and bells; and the classic stateliness of Theseus and Hypolita, with their sedate and lofty nuptialities, formas Schlegel happily observes a splendid frame to picture (96).
It was a happy thought of the poet, in introducing the play within the play, got up by the Athenian mechanicals, in honour of Duke Theseus's marriage, to make a travesty of the old tragic legend of Pyramus and Thisbe, and thereby turning it, as it were, into a farce upon the serious and pathetic scenes that occur between the lovers in the pieceDemetrius and Helena, and Lysander and Hermia.
But what a rich set of fellows those mechanicals are! and how individual are their several characteristics! Bully Bottom, the epitome of all the conceited donkeys that ever strutted and straddled on this stage of the world. In his own imagination equal to the performance of anything separately, and of all things collectively; the meddler, the director, the dictator. He is for dictating every movement, and directing everybody when he is not helping himself. He is a choice arabesque impersonation of that colouring of conceit which, by the half-malice of the world, has been said to tinge the disposition of actors, as invariably as the rouge does their cheeks (97).
The character of Bottom is well worthy of a close analysis, to notice in how extraordinary a manner Shakespeare has carried out all the concurring qualities to compound a thoroughly conceited man. Conceited people, moreover, being upon such amiable terms with themselves, they are ordinarily good-natured, if not good-tempered. And so with Bottom; whether he carry an amendment, or not, with his companions he is always placable; and if foiled, away he starts for some other pointnothing disturbs his equanimity. When Puck has transformed him into the ass, and his companions all scour away from him, exclaiming, Bless thee, Bottom! thou art translated! (III. i. 118-19) Snout comes in, and, in amazement, exclaims:
(III. i. 114-17)
His temper and self-possession never desert him: I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me, and fright me if they could: but I will not stir from this place, do what they can. I will walk up and down here, and I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid (III. i. 120-24).
Combined with his amusing and harmless quality of conceit, the worthy Bottom displays no inconsiderable store of imagination in his intercourse with the little people of the fairy world. How pleasantly he falls in with their several natures and qualities; dismissing them one by one with a gracious speech, like a prince at his levee: I shall desire of you more acquaintance, good master Cobweb. If I cut my finger I shall make bold with you (III. i. 182-84).
However one never loses the cock-a-whoop vein in Bottom's character. He patronises his brother-mechanics; he patronises the fairies: he even patronises himself: If I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have enough to serve mine own turn (III. i. 149-51).
Then, there is Snug, the joiner, who can board and lodge only one idea at a time, and that tardily. He begs to have the lion's part written out, because he is slow of study; and is amazingly comforted by the intelligence, that he may do it extempore; for it is nothing but roaring (I. ii. 68-9).
To him succeeds Starveling, the tailor, a melancholy man, and who questions the feasibility and the propriety of everything proposed. Being timid, he thinks the lion's part had better be omitted altogether: Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion? I fear it, I promise you (III. i. 27-8).
If, as some writers have asserted, Shakespeare was a profound practical metaphysician, it is scarcely too much to conclude that all this dove-tailing of contingencies, requisite to perfectionate these several characters, was all foreseen and provided in his mind, and not the result of mere accident. By an intuitive power, that always confounds us when we examine its effects, I believe that whenever Shakespeare adopted any distinctive class of character, his mind's eye took in at a glance all the concomitant minutiae of features requisite to complete its characteristic identity. As from a watch-tower, he comprehended the whole course of human action,its springs, its motives, its consequences; and he has laid down for us a trigonometrical chart of it. I believe that he did nothing without anxious premeditation; and that they who really study not simply read him, must come to the same conclusion. (102-03)
Source: Charles Cowden Clarke, Midsummer Night's Dream, in his Shakespeare-Characters: Chiefly Those Subordinate, 1863, pp. 93-110.