Bottom's tangeld web: Texts and textiles in A 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (Shakespeare)

The weaving motifs in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream refle ct a literary process in which the playwright fabricates a complex theatric al plot resembling in its multiple layers a spider's web. Both characters a nd theatrical complications give structure to the play creating a dreamy un iverse where the author of texts plays alongside Bottom the weaver as well as the magicians Oberon, Titania and Puck whose magic weaves wedding plans. Allusions to Ovid's myth of the mulberry tree reveal an additional economi c sub-plot, notably the dilemma of English weavers encountering foreign com petition as a result of increased production of silkworms. These different webs of intrigue entwine text and textile in Shakespeare's rhetoric, semant ically combining weaving and wedding and transforming classical mythology i nto an expression of Elizabethan economic change.