The word ‘ace’ appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline and is oddly tied to Bottom and Cloten as farcical figures who lose their head. Bottom's bravura performance as Pyramus receives a punning response from the audience, who move from Bottom's 'die' through 'dice' to 'ace' and 'ass':
301 Now am I dead,
302 Now am I fled;
303 My soul is in the sky.
304 Tongue, lose thy light,
305 Moon, take thy flight, [Exit Moonshine.]
306 Now die, die, die, die, die. [Dies.]
Dem.
307 No die, but an ace, for him; for he is but one.
Lys.
308 Less than an ace, man; for he is dead, he is
309 nothing.
The.
310 With the help of a surgeon he might yet
311 recover, and yet prove an ass. (MND 5.1.301-311)
The same pun is the point of the word's other occurrence, when a lord ironically praises Cloten for being "cool" in the face of losing at dice:
1 Your lordship is the most patient man in
2 loss, the most coldest that ever turn’d up ace.
(Cym.2.3.1-2)
The lord's rhetorical irony may also be an instance of Shakespeare's dramatic irony: Cloten will end up very cold indeed, his headless trunk ends up as the play's main prop when Innogen mistakes it for the body of her husband.
Innogen mistaking the headless body of Cloten for that of her husband may be a ghoulish variant for Titania's infatuation, which Puck gleefully summarizes as "My mistress with a monster is in love" (MND 3.2.6). When Oberon decides that things have gone far enough, he tells Puck: "Robin, take off his head" (MND 4.1.80). Does "ace" establish a link between the metaphorical and literal beheadings of Bottom and Cloten? (Matthew Sullivan)
18 September 1999
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