This book explores how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, it argues that Shakespeare systematically exploits early modern physiological, religious, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to reshape conventions of dramatic genre, and to experiment with dream-inspired plots.
The book discusses the significance of dreams and sleep in early modern culture, and explores the dramatic opportunities that this offered to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It also offers new insights into how Shakespeare adapted earlier literary models of dreams and sleep – including those found in classical drama, in medieval dream visions, and in native English dramatic traditions.
Author(s): Claude Fretz
Series: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 268
City: London
Tags: Shakespeare, dreams, sleep, genre, comedy, tragedy, early modern drama, Renaissance, romance, tragicomedy, theatre, English literature
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Introduction
Dreams in Shakespeare’s Time
The Chapters
Works Cited
2 ‘Following Darkness Like a Dream’: Dreams, Sleep, and Dark Comedy
Shakespeare’s Adaptation of Classical and Native English Models
‘The Best Dreame | That Ever I Had in My Life’: Dreaming Beyond Comedy in The Taming of the Shrew
‘If We Shadows Have Offended’: Theatre as a (Midsummer Night’s) Dream
‘I Wooed Thee with My Sword’: Dreams, Sexuality, and the Rejection of Comedic Closure
‘What Fools These Mortals Be’: Dreamatising Alternative Perspectives
Works Cited
3 ‘God’s Secret Judgement’? Dreams in Tragedy
Dreams and Tragedy Before Shakespeare
‘A Hell of Ugly Devils’: Dreams, Fears, and Guilty Consciences in Richard III9
‘Plots Have I Laid Inductious’: Manipulating Dreams in Richard III and Julius Caesar
Dreams and the ‘Heat-Oppressed Brain’ in Macbeth
Dreaming Towards a New Tragedy
Works Cited
4 ‘Great Nature’s Second Course’: Sleep and Sleeplessness in Tragedy
‘The Beds i’th’ East Are Soft’: Immoderate Sleep in Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
‘As Much Onus as Honos’: Sleep and the Tragedy of Kingship
‘Sweet Recreation Barred’: Insomnia as Tragedy
‘Sleeping or waking, ha?’: Mad and Sleepless Lear25
‘O’erwatched’: Brutus’s Sleeplessness in Julius Caesar36
Works Cited
5 ‘Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’? Shakespeare’s Late Genre
‘The Rarest dream | That e’er Dull Sleep Did Mock Sad Fools Withal’: Shakespeare’s Adaptation of Tragedy and Oneiros in Pericles
‘Ne’er Was Dream | So Like a Waking’: Dreaming Beyond the Tragic (-Comic) in The Winter’s Tale
‘The Dream’s Here Still’: Dreams, Sleep, and the Usurpation of Tragic Waking Reality in Cymbeline
‘’Tis Far Off; | And Rather Like a Dream’: The Tempest as Ultimate Dream-Play?
Works Cited
6 Epilogue
Works Cited
Index
