Pay attention to word choice--how is the author shaping your judgement by the words he/she chooses

I finished Alive by Piers Paul Read. If you haven't read it yet, I would highly recommend it. I am now tackling A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.

I feel awkward analyzing Shakespeare's word choice. First of all, it's really hard to tell what he's saying. Second of all, in my copy of the book, the editor sometimes says something to the effect of "we're not really sure what he meant by this, he could have meant this, or he could have meant this totally opposite thing." What the kindly editors have provided me with, however, is the fact that Shakespeare sometimes has the character of Nick Bottom use a totally wrong word. I feel that he does this to inform the audience of Nick Bottom's personality. He thinks he is a really interesting and knowledgeable person and that everyone loves hearing him talk. He tries to use intelligent sounding words and fails miserably. Someone in Shakespeare's time would definitely have caught his misuse of words immediately, whereas someone in my position with very little experience reading Shakespeare has to read the passage, go to the other page with the editor's notes to try to figure out what we just read, and then be told that Bottom used incorrect wordage. The effect is somewhat lost. Of course, I still realize what the audience is supposed to note, but I don't get the "oh haha, look at Bottom, he doesn't know how to talk" effect.