Dream and Vision in Shakespeare’s Plays 259

DREAM AND VISION IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

David Bevington

Shakespeare seems to use dreams and visions in two ways, broadly speaking: one as a motif for refl ecting meta-theatrically on the nature of drama itself as dreamlike, magical, and more than slightly mad, and the other as prognostication and unheeded warning. Th ese two uses are strikingly unlike each other. I will explore the idea that the diff er- ences are largely generic, and that Shakespeare is drawn more to the meta-theatrical use of dreams in his comedies and in romantic trage- dies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Th e Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra, whereas the more som- ber signifi cation of dreams as otherworldly warning is more appropri- ate to English history plays and to a historically based tragedy like Julius Caesar. Th en, I will suggest, we see Shakespeare returning with renewed fascination to the meta-theatrical interpretation of dreams and visions in his late romances. Much of the dreaming in A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes the form of nightmare for the young lovers who fl ee from Athens into the woods and are stranded there in the dark of night. We see that Shakespeare likes to write comedy in which the complications are unusually fraught with danger. Hermia repeatedly speaks of seeking out death; see, for example, 2.2.162. Th e young men would indeed come to fatal blows if Puck were not on hand to mislead them with his mimicking voices in the dark, keeping them safely apart. Puck talks of the forest as a place of ghosts and “Damnèd spirits” who, as suicides, have been buried at “crossways and fl oods,” presumably with stakes driven through their hearts (3.2.381-5). Shakespeare likes the frisson of impending disaster, perhaps because it makes the resolution of dan- ger all the sweeter. Moreover, Shakespeare psychologizes the night- mares of the four lovers in a way that adds personal depth and meaning to their unsettling experience. Hermia’s being deserted by Lysander (when the love juice mistakenly causes him to fall in love with Helena) prompts a nightmare in which she supposes that a crawling serpent has eaten her heart away while Lysander “sat smiling at his cruel prey” 260 David Bevington

(2.2.151-6).1 Th is dream seems not very diffi cult to interpret: it is not a prognostication, but a fantasied projection of her feelings of vulner- ability. Helena too suff ers from self-injuring fantasies: when the two young men grovel at her feet in competition for her love, she can only suppose that they are mocking her. Perhaps her undergoing this pain- ful misery brings self-awareness at last, for when she and the other three awaken in the morning, all appears to be well. Th eir tribulations seem to them only a scary dream from which they awaken into better self-understanding. “Are you sure / Th at we are awake?” Demetrius asks the others. “It seems to me / Th at yet we sleep, we dream” (4.1.191- 3). What has happened to them seems so unreal that they have diffi - culty distinguishing dream from daytime, as we all do when we awaken from a dream. At the same time, the dreamwork appears to be healing. Th e young lovers are matured emotionally by having been exposed to a frightening picture of their own perverse instincts for self-destruc- tion. Helena especially seems aware of how fragile and precious is the happiness she has found upon awakening: “I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own” (190-1). Th e story of Queen Titania’s dreamlike (and perhaps nightmarish) encounter with Bottom the weaver follows a similar parabolic curve of exposition, complication, and resolution, but here the story is one in which the battle of the sexes is settled in favor of the male. Titania has had the best of reasons for holding out against Oberon’s insistent demand that he have the changeling boy. Th is boy was the child of a mortal woman who served as a votaress in Titania’s order; the two were very close. Titania beautifully describes their loving relationship as one that was based on sharing the secrets of pregnancy and child- birth (2.1.121-37). Th ese bonds are so sacred that Titania will not give up the boy, now that the mother has died. Does Oberon insist on hav- ing the boy because he feels jealous? As a male, he is excluded from the mysterious rites of womanhood that Titania and the boy’s mother have shared. Is he motivated too by a characteristically male impulse to control female unruliness, to put down a rebellion where he claims to be master? Th e parallels here to the conquest of Queen Hippolyta by Duke Th eseus are suggestive. Men get to rule the roost.

1 See Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York, 1966). Quotations throughout are from David Bevington, ed., Th e Complete Works of Shake- speare, 6th ed. (New York, 2009).