Claude Fretz

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. The book appeals to academics, students, teachers, and practitioners in the fields of literature, drama, and cultural history, as well as to general readers interested in Shakespeare’s works and their cultural context.

This special issue of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (Volume 17, Issue 2,  2024) sheds fresh light on cultural and literary manifestations of dream narrations, based upon an explicitly interdisciplinary framework. It explores how dream narratives can be tools for different kinds of solution and dissolution, including self-discovery, social critique, and artistic expression. By rethinking questions of the participation of dreams in social, political, racial, and nationalist narratives, the collection presents itself as a contribution to our understanding of the roles of dreams within the social, spatial, and cultural imaginaries of different communities.

The article comprises three case studies examining Shakespearean productions across varied geographical and methodological arenas, aiming to review and identify promising avenues for new directions in performance research. Through analyses of political adaptations in Greece, cultural hybridity in Malaysian productions, and practice-based research models (involving rehearsal studies) deployed at the Folger Theatre (USA), this article explores the mechanisms by which Shakespeare’s works blend into different historical, political, and cultural contexts. In doing so, it advocates for a departure from the conventional emphasis on textual or performative authenticity in Shakespeare studies. By documenting how diverse values, practices, and experiences shape creative processes, it reveals these endeavours as dynamic networks of cultural-creative collaboration. Ultimately, this study transcends traditional geographical and methodological limitations, urging readers to recognise and celebrate the ever-evolving presence of Shakespeare in diverse cultures and media.

This article explores how Shakespeare combines dreams and animal symbolism to foreground the characterological driving forces of his plots. The article comprises two case studies. Firstly, it investigates Stanley's dream of a boar in Richard III, showing that Shakespeare draws on the boar's various cultural meanings to construct an image of Richard III that is consistent with revisionist Tudor myths, but that Shakespeare also adapts and reshapes these cultural references for the purpose of character representation. Secondly, the article explores Cleopatra's dream of a dolphin-like Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, arguing that the dream image of the dolphin captures Antony's mercurial character and highlights the tragic distance between Cleopatra's celebration of his delphine character and the steadier character types that the play's social and political reality demands.

This article investigates Shakespeare’s use of animal dreams – dreams of or by animals – in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It argues that the Ovidian model of human-animal transformation, in which animal states and animal imagery describe, amplify, or symbolise aspects of human character, is fundamental to understanding Shakespeare’s use of animal dreams in this play. The article further contends that Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream successfully adapted Ovidian animal symbolism for early modern culture by filtering it through religious and demonological references. The article falls into four parts. Firstly, it investigates the representation of animals, dreams, and animal dreams in classical culture and particularly in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The article then goes on to investigate Hermia’s dream of a serpent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, combining close reading with examinations of early modern dream books and with cultural historical insights into the representation of serpents in Christian iconography. Then, the article proceeds to a discussion of Bottom’s oneiric transformation into an ass, drawing on classical source texts, demonological treatises, and early modern animal symbolism. The article concludes with a (re-) consideration of the dramatic functions of Shakespeare’s Ovidian animal dreams in the context of the moral and aesthetic imperatives of Renaissance culture.

Eprint available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KBIXVQUPBPIKY8YAYNN7/full?target=10.1080/17450918.2022.2073385

Focusing on a case study of William Davenant's Macbeth (c.1664), this article sets out to explore how and why Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare's plays succeeded in performance in their own time (especially in the 1660s and 1670s) and how they might be revived for audiences today. To achieve this, the article combines theater history and literary criticism with practice-based performance scholarship. Firstly, it draws on reviews and reports from the Restoration to examine how and why rewriting and adaptation were necessary to ensure the survival of Shakespeare's plays after the end of the English Civil War. In the same segment, the article also examines how the emphasis on musical and visual spectacle and the use of heavily revised playtexts were received by seventeenth-century playgoers. The article then uses observations and conclusions made during a rare professional production of Davenant's Macbeth at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC (2018) to investigate how Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare can inform modern theater practice. The conflicts and obstacles that were encountered in this production, and the possibilities and solutions that were discovered, can offer lessons as well as strategies for performing Restoration Shakespeare both now and in the future. By considering the creative choices made during the Folger's production and investigating how these were received by reviewers and audiences, the article suggests a selective and adaptive approach to using Restoration Shakespeare in modern theater practice: namely, one that exploits the performance potential of the musical spectacle and of the new characters that were added by Restoration adapters but treats with caution the revisions of Shakespeare's plots and language.

This paper argues that the multisensory and synesthetic dream experiences depicted in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) and Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) transcend the commonplace concern with the typology of dreams by instead exploring the raw and sensorially embodied experience of dreaming. The paper further shows how and why the depiction of dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili points to a (hitherto neglected) direct or indirect influence of Colonna on Shakespeare. The chapter begins by showing how dreams were in early modern England viewed primarily as sensory phenomena. This is also seen in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the characters’ romantically (or erotically) fulfilling dream worlds are made up, above all, of multisensory and synesthetic perceptions. But the chapter suggests that Shakespeare’s representation of dreams as multisensory realisations of love, rather than simply reflecting the early modern cultural understanding of dreams, may owe much to the influence of Colonna’s dream romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In addition to topographical similarities, borrowings of imagery, and comparable uses of dream frames, Shakespeare’s and Colonna’s shared interest in the raw and sensorially embodied experience of dreaming bespeaks a connection between their dream worlds.

While the topics of time, space (including geography), and dreams in Shakespeare’s works have been examined individually by critics of different theoretical persuasions, this paper moves beyond these studies by linking some of Shakespeare’s dizzying conceptions of time and space directly to his interest in dreams. The paper shows that, in the plays of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Taming of the Shrew (c.1591), King Lear, and Cymbeline (1610), Shakespeare uses dreams and their topsy-turvy temporal and spatial logic to create moments of comic or tragic confusion for his characters.

Whereas most scholarly work on Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare's works has focused on textual changes, on the plays' political contexts, or on their musical settings, this article uses the example of the "Masque of Devils" in the 1674 Enchanted Island to show how Thomas Shadwell and his collaborators hybridized dramatic genre through spectacle. Furthermore, it argues that the integration of semi-operatic spectacle and generic innovation in the "Masque of Devils" was not purely a Restoration invention, but something that Dryden, Davenant, and Shadwell—with their aesthetic nous and political awareness—developed from Shakespeare's original Tempest. Rather than being a Restoration addition to the play, Shadwell's "Masque of Devils"—like Dryden and Davenant's shorter equivalent masque in the 1667 version (published in 1670)—is in fact a subtle iteration of a moment in 3.3 of Shakespeare's play, where Ariel appears as a harpy, accompanied by thunder and lightning. 3.3 marks one of the most generically indeterminate episodes in The Tempest, because even though it belongs to a play that the 1623 folio identifies as a comedy, it relies heavily on devices derived from tragedy. This article sets out to explore how Shadwell and his collaborators used a combination of spectacle and textual as well as musical revision to expand the original play’s tragic-comic dynamics. Uniquely, the article does not just draw on textual analysis, but also considers how genre hybridization manifests itself in performance. To achieve that, it takes into account likely staging conditions in the Restoration playhouses, before drawing on contemporary performance-as-research as a means of deepening our understanding of the generic category of “dramatick opera” and of the Restoration-era processes of revision that culminated in Shadwell’s Enchanted Island. The article’s final section incorporates observations made during a practice-based workshop on Shadwell’s 1674 adaptation of The Tempest that was held on 10–13 July 2017 at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor space based on Restoration-era drawings of an unknown playhouse, possibly by John Webb. By examining the connections, rather than the textual differences, between The Tempest and The Enchanted Island, this article also challenges the misperception that the Civil War and the subsequent resumption of theatrical activity marked a somehow radical break with pre-war dramatic activity. Despite the fact that a successful Restoration production of Shakespeare usually entailed substantial rewriting—Shakespeare was viewed as raw material that needed to be refined in terms of both language and dramaturgy—Restoration theatre in many ways marks a continuation of creative developments around spectacle, musicality, and genre that had begun in the Jacobean and Caroline eras.

This article argues that dreams are an important and deliberate part of Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy in Richard III. Shakespeare, when composing this play, exploited the uncertainty in his time about whether dreams were natural or supernatural phenomena in order to deploy dream devices as a form of commentary on the material as well as spiritual implications of his characters’ actions. As a result, dreams ultimately sharpen the play’s focus on human agency by amplifying the characters’ ambitions, crimes and guilty consciences.

Drawing on the early modern physiological understanding of sleeplessness and hallucinations, this article examines how Shakespeare’s dramatic representations of insomnia and waking dreams support his tragedies’ iconic emphasis on bodily and mental suffering. To that end, I consider Brutus’s insomnia and the nightly appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Julius Caesar, as well as King Lear’s sleeplessness and his ontological uncertainty about whether his misfortune may be a dream. Whereas Brutus’s vision of Caesar’s ghost is often interpreted as a supernatural visitation, I argue that it can equally be read as a physiological hallucination caused by Brutus’s sleeplessness. Meanwhile I propose that King Lear’s sleeplessness and the metaphorical description of his waking reality as a dream form part of Shakespeare’s design of Lear’s tragedy as one that is primarily concerned with the character’s experience of suffering. In King Lear, I also show how ideas of sleeping and dreaming introduce tragicomic elements which, however, ultimately give further magnitude to the sense of pain and injustice.

My thesis investigates the functions of dreams and sleep within Shakespeare’s wider design of comedy and tragedy. Methodologically, it combines its focus on genre with a strong historicist component in order to reconstruct the early modern understanding of dreams and sleep that influenced Shakespeare’s approach to this material. Comparing Shakespeare’s representations of dreams and sleep with those in classical culture, from which dramatic genre, dream theory, sleep theory, and the deployment of dreams within comic and tragic structures originally derive, I argue that Shakespeare uses devices of dreams and sleep to support his deviation from those classical conventions of comedy and tragedy that he found incompatible with his aspiration towards a fuller, darker, and more complex representation of human nature, behaviour, and character. To that effect, I discuss how dreams and sleep in Shakespeare’s comedies introduce tensions that are neither resolved nor absorbed by the respective ...

Drawing on the early modern physiological understanding of sleeplessness and hallucinations, this article examines how Shakespeare’s dramatic representations of insomnia and waking dreams support his tragedies’ iconic emphasis on bodily and mental suffering. To that end, I consider Brutus’s insomnia and the nightly appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Julius Caesar, as well as King Lear’s sleeplessness and his ontological uncertainty about whether his misfortune may be a dream. Whereas Brutus’s vision of Caesar’s ghost is often interpreted as a supernatural visitation, I argue that it can equally be read as a physiological hallucination caused by Brutus’s sleeplessness. Meanwhile I propose that King Lear’s sleeplessness and the metaphorical description of his waking reality as a dream form part of Shakespeare’s design of Lear’s tragedy as one that is primarily concerned with the character’s experience of suffering. In King Lear, I also show how ideas of sleeping and dreaming introduce tragicomic elements which, however, ultimately give further magnitude to the sense of pain and injustice.

Whereas most scholarly work on Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare's works has focused on textual changes, on the plays' political contexts, or on their musical settings, this article uses the example of the "Masque of Devils" in the 1674 Enchanted Island to show how Thomas Shadwell and his collaborators hybridized dramatic genre through spectacle. Furthermore, it argues that the integration of semi-operatic spectacle and generic innovation in the "Masque of Devils" was not purely a Restoration invention, but something that Dryden, Davenant, and Shadwell—with their aesthetic nous and political awareness—developed from Shakespeare's original Tempest. Rather than being a Restoration addition to the play, Shadwell's "Masque of Devils"—like Dryden and Davenant's shorter equivalent masque in the 1667 version (published in 1670)—is in fact a subtle iteration of a moment in 3.3 of Shakespeare's play, where Ariel appears as a harpy, accompanied by thunder and lightning. 3.3 marks one of the most generically indeterminate episodes in The Tempest, because even though it belongs to a play that the 1623 folio identifies as a comedy, it relies heavily on devices derived from tragedy. This article sets out to explore how Shadwell and his collaborators used a combination of spectacle and textual as well as musical revision to expand the original play’s tragic-comic dynamics. Uniquely, the article does not just draw on textual analysis, but also considers how genre hybridization manifests itself in performance. To achieve that, it takes into account likely staging conditions in the Restoration playhouses, before drawing on contemporary performance-as-research as a means of deepening our understanding of the generic category of “dramatick opera” and of the Restoration-era processes of revision that culminated in Shadwell’s Enchanted Island. The article’s final section incorporates observations made during a practice-based workshop on Shadwell’s 1674 adaptation of The Tempest that was held on 10–13 July 2017 at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor space based on Restoration-era drawings of an unknown playhouse, possibly by John Webb. By examining the connections, rather than the textual differences, between The Tempest and The Enchanted Island, this article also challenges the misperception that the Civil War and the subsequent resumption of theatrical activity marked a somehow radical break with pre-war dramatic activity. Despite the fact that a successful Restoration production of Shakespeare usually entailed substantial rewriting—Shakespeare was viewed as raw material that needed to be refined in terms of both language and dramaturgy—Restoration theatre in many ways marks a continuation of creative developments around spectacle, musicality, and genre that had begun in the Jacobean and Caroline eras.