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Nearly All Studies on Dreams Use the Theatre As a Source of Metaphor

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Nearly All Studies on Dreams Use the Theatre As a Source of Metaphor Prof. Dr. Theresia Birkenhauer Wartburgstr. 2 10823 Berlin Tel: (030) 782 32 92 [email protected] Representation of Dreams, Representation of Theatre Introduction The following reflections were triggered by an interesting observation: Nearly all studies on dreams use the theatre as a source of metaphor. Dreams are often referred to as “theatre of the soul” or “the stage of the imagination”. There is also a term called “dramaturgy of the narration of dreams”. Why this imagery? The question is rarely asked – probably because of an, at first glance, indisputable evidence: both dreams and the theatre articulate themselves in images and scenic tableaus. Both are determined by visuality. However, this does not necessarily work both ways. If we read about the history of dreams in art and literature, the theatre is certainly mentioned, but in a strangely reduced way. One may ask for the motif of dreams in dramatic texts, or the dramaturgical function of dreams and dream narrations, but the theatre performance itself is rarely seen in connection with the way dreams articulate themselves. This is where my question sets in. I am interested in the relation between the mediality of the theatre and the form of dreams. I am interested in the relation between theatrical modes of representation and those of dreams. Since I can only present a short outline here, I have chosen a few rather familiar plays. [Calderon] In Calderon’s drama Life Is A Dream (1625), the analogy between theatre and dream is based on the ontological positing of the theatre itself. “Theatrum mundi “– the whole world is a stage and the theatre but the monadic mirror of this world. If we concentrate on the dramatic action, the reference to the dream seems primarily educational. Immediately after his son Segismundo is born, King Basil locks him up in a tower, because his wife had dreamed in pregnancy she would give birth to a “monster” that would kill her. As the son grows up, he is eventually let out of the tower and exposed to reality for 24 hours, in order to test his reigning abilities. The experiment fails: having lived in social isolation all his life, the son acts aggressively, only to be locked up once more. To comfort him, he is told his experience outside the tower was nothing but a dream – an explanation the son takes very seriously. For the supposed dream has been true happiness to Segismund. He concludes that life itself must be a dream – a fleeting and unstable happiness. This is why, even in one’s sleep, one must honour God and act honourably in one’s dreams. This insight makes the son wiser than his father who was merely worrying about his loss of power. Seen from this perspective, the play can be regarded as the depiction of a self- disciplining process. Segismund becomes a modern subject subordinating himself to the internalized rules of reason. But the crucial conclusion - life is a dream - becomes obvious only by way of the scenic design of theatrical reality. It is the stage design that makes the abstract conclusion of the story line sensuously understandable for the audience. We see Segismund who has become a brute locked up in his cage. What is he? A king? An animal? A “monster”? The other characters are equally difficult to define: Rosaura, the female main character, appears as a valiant stranger, a desired chambermaid, a combative liberator. She appears in different costumes, as a man, as a woman and, finally, as a masculine woman – and only in the end she is let known that she is also a daughter (of a mother who was dishonoured, just like her). The same is true for Clotaldo, who is not only a faithful servant to the king and his son, but also an unfaithful lover and a secret father. Which identities – gender, origin, social affiliation – are reliable? Which roles are deliberately chosen by the individual and which superimposed by others? Although the play takes place on just one reality level (no dream is actually ever shown), it is the simultaneity of heterogeneous realities, deceiving confusion and the delusory inability to decide that reveal the logic by which life itself should be regarded as a dream. This logic can only be grasped by the theatrical modes of representation. The dream logic of life corresponds to the specific mediality of the theatre. [Shakespeare] But it is not Calderon’s Life Is A Dream but Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream that first comes to mind when theatre and dreams are mentioned. This is probably due to Max Reinhardt’s famous productions of 1905 and 1913, which use all the potential of theatrical means of representation. In their visual possibilities, they suggest the analogy to the fantastic of dreams. (The film gives an impression of this.) Visual opulence, an abundance of playful fantasy, virtuoso acting – it is these attributes that make Hugo von Hofmannsthal describe the stage as a “dream image”– alluding to Max Reinhardt’s productions. But Shakespeare’s play also makes the relationship between dreams and theatre tangible in various other ways. The title claiming this relation should not necessarily be regarded nominalistically - as if A Midsummer Night's Dream were actually shown on stage. It can also be interpreted as a question the audience is asked. At the end, there is actually a reference in this direction, as Puck suggests to the audience to regard everything they have just seen as a dream: "And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream."(V, 416-17) But what is it that the audience have just seen? Four different plots, intricately blending into each other: The preparations for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding are interrupted by the amorous woes of four youths from Athens who flee to the forest. There is also a group of craftsmen (“mechanics”), who are rehearsing for a performance of the tragedy “Pyramus and Thisbe” at the wedding. Both groups are subject to a magic practical joke the jealous Fairy King Oberon has his elf, Puck, play on them, in order to disgrace Titania. This construction unites several spatially and temporally separate subjects: Greece, the Middle Ages and Elizabethan England; upper and lower rank – nobility and craftspeople; the city as the place of social order, and the forest as location for a delicate bewitchment. All the couples are mirrored by an other: the ducal couple in Athens finds its double in the Fairy King Oberon and Queen Titania, the sorrow of the couples from Athens is reflected by the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the “mechanics”. Regarding its fabula, the drama is structured like a comedy: The disturbances of the wedding preparations are happily resolved by the events in the Athens forest. But the theatre performance turns this formula upside down. Oberon’s magic elixir creates such transformations that the characters are dissolved and disfigured in their identities - because Puck confuses the couples. What they experience is much less magical but rather abysmal: Lovers begin to hate each other, unloved ones turn into objects of desire, fairy queens become fools: the characters recognize neither themselves nor the others, love’s desire results in brutality, desire isn’t protected by any conventions, the eroticism is bestial. In the end, each of the characters is lost in a fog "black as Acheron" (III,357). Is all this just a rite of passage? Is the forest a picture for the transformation of sexually confused youths? The fabula could be read that way. But what is easily discernible on the fabula level becomes more and more confusing for a theatre audience: the frame with the wedding preparations and the transformation due to a magic elixir; court and forest, day and night. The reason for this confusion is the mode of theatrical representation itself. For to the audience, both areas, the world of day and the sphere of nightly metamorphosis, are equally present during the performance. Because the nightly aberrations are just as present to the audience as the events at the court, the difference claimed by the dramatic fiction becomes blurred. This difficulty to differentiate is squared, if we assume that both ruling couples are played by the same two actors. The orderly Theseus is also a dominating Oberon, the chaste Hippolyta also a donkey-loving Titania. The characters are themselves and others at the same time. They are over-determined fusions of opposed characters, “hybridisms” in the sense of Freud. In the end, the strange occurrences in the forest are described as a dream by each of the characters, although nobody was dreaming and the monstrous metamorphoses were caused by sorcery. Just a dream is the explanation Oberon offers and which makes the events bearable. Is this actually a relief or rather a cause for concern? The answer certainly depends on how one qualifies dreams. The ambivalence of this explanation becomes obvious in the discussion taking place among the characters, immediately after the night sequence. Hippolyta seems disturbed by the strange reality of the dream narrations: "’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of." (V, 1) and doesn’t want to perceive them as purely fictional: "But all the story of night told over, … More witnesseth than fancy images." (V, 23,25) Theseus, however, qualifies the dream as an unreal chimera: "More strange than true. I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains." (V, 2-5). The dispute about the status of dreams is not resolved in the play, but passed on to the audience at the end by way of a play-within-the-play construction.
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