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All Site ContentMidsummer Night's DreamAct 4Scene 1
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“hath no bottom”
Double Meaning
Act 4,
Scene 1
Lines 202-219

An explanation of the phrase “it hath no bottom” in Act 4, Scene 1 of myShakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Bottom

My next is, “most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho. Peter Quince?
Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling?
God's my life! Stolen hence, and left me asleep? I have
had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit
of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he
go about to expound this dream. Methought I was —
there is no man can tell what methought I was and
methought I had — but man is but a patched fool if he
will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man
hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's
hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his
heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter
Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called
“Bottom's Dream,” because it hath no bottom, and I will
sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke.
Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing
it at her death.
[Exit Bottom]

1) because it has no foundation, no basis in reality.

2) because it's unfathomable, so philosophically deep it can't be understood.