A mustard seed

Monsieur Mustardseed

A fragment

In the woods outside Athens it was the middle of the night, but no one was really asleep.

On a bed of flowers lay Nick Bottom, a weaver by trade, with a donkey’s head on his shoulders. He didn’t know it himself. All he knew was that his friends had run off screaming, and that the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was now lying beside him, stroking his long ears.

‘My love,’ whispered Titania, queen of the fairies. ‘What would you like? Music? Something to eat?’

‘I could fancy a bottle of hay,’ said Bottom.

She laughed and called her fairies. Peaseblossom. Cobweb. Moth. And the smallest of them all, hardly bigger than a seed: Mustardseed.

Bottom looked at the little fairy kindly. ‘Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well. That same cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house. I promise you, your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now.’

‘What’s your will?’ asked Mustardseed.

‘Nothing, good monsieur, but to help me scratch. I am such a tender ass: if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.’

What Bottom didn’t know was that Queen Titania was under a spell. That she was quarrelling with the king. And that because of that quarrel the rivers were bursting their banks and the corn was rotting in the fields, while the farmers in the villages had no idea why.

When the sun came up, the spell was over. Titania was gone. Bottom woke alone in the grass, with his own head back on his own shoulders. He scratched behind his ear, surprised at how small it was.

‘I have had a most rare vision,’ he said aloud, to no one. ‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.’ He shook his head. ‘Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.’

After William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), Acts 2 to 4.

About this story

The source

This fragment retells parts of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written around 1595–1596 and first printed in 1600. Mustardseed is one of Titania’s four fairies, along with Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Moth. He appears in Act 3, Scene 1, and in Act 4, Scene 1. What Bottom says to him is almost word for word Shakespeare.

Origin and culture

The play is set in Athens and the wood outside it, over a single summer night. Four young lovers get lost, a group of craftsmen rehearse a play for the Duke’s wedding, and Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen Titania are quarrelling over a little boy. Oberon has Titania enchanted with the juice of a flower, so that she falls in love with the first creature she sees: Bottom, whom the mischievous Puck has just given a donkey’s head. In Act 2, Scene 1, Titania describes what their quarrel is doing to the human world: rivers burst their banks, the corn rots in the field before it ripens, the seasons fall into confusion. People suffer from something they cannot see.

The mustard seed

Bottom’s words to Mustardseed are a joke the audience of the day understood at once: in England, beef was eaten with mustard. So the ‘cowardly, giant-like ox-beef’ has devoured many of the little fairy’s relatives, and that family has often made Bottom’s eyes water, as mustard does. His famous dream speech at the end is a wink too: in it Bottom garbles a passage from Paul (1 Corinthians 2:9) about what no eye has seen and no ear has heard. The smallest fairy, the biggest fool, and a dream no one can explain.

The mustard seed travels

The mustard seed turns up in many traditions as the smallest thing there is. In the Talmud, ‘the size of a mustard seed’ is the measure of the smallest conceivable amount. And in the Qur’an it stands for the smallest deed that is still weighed: ‘even if it be the weight of a mustard seed, We will bring it forth’ (Surah 21:47, see also 31:16). Perhaps that comes closest to the question in the column: whether everything we do is somehow kept on record.

Further reading

Pick a seed

You can't tell what's inside. That's exactly the point.