Sex and the Self : Simon Forman, Subjectivity and Erotic Dreams in Early Modern England

Pangs of Love and Longing: Configurations of Desire in Premodern Literature Edited by Anders Cullhed, Carin Franzén, Anders Hallengren and Mats Malm SEX AND THE SELF: SIMON FORMAN, SUBJECTIVITY AND EROTIC DREAMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND PER SIVEFORS It is hardly an exaggeration to say that one of the most frequently discussed dream accounts from the Elizabethan era is the astrologer and doctor Simon Forman’s dream about Queen Elizabeth, recorded in 1597 and telling how Forman walks around with the monarch, saves her from a group of arguing men, makes some sexual jokes to her and, finally, is on more than close terms with her: [I] dreamt that I was with the Queen, and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready. She and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning. At last we came over a great close where were many people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily to her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm and did put her away; and told her the fellow was frantic. So we went from him and I led her by the arm still, and then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. I told her she should do me a favour to let me wait on her, and she said I should. Then said I, ‘I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coat out of the dirt’. And so we talked merrily; then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. When we were alone, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.1 Forman may have been a marginal figure to the Elizabethan establishment, even though he certainly was socially ambitious and had dealings with various members of the political elite in his capacity as a doctor and astrologer. His life and writings—including horoscopes, case books, and 282 Sex and the Self an autobiography, none of which was published in his lifetime with the exception of a brief text on longitude—have attracted an increasing amount of scholarly interest in recent years, not least because of Forman’s complex relation to science at the time and the fact that he seems to have been what in modern-day terminology would be called a sex addict.2 The dream cited above, which was part of Forman’s case books and hence only intended for himself, has been excavated by critics and historians for its political implications or for its connections to literary texts, most notably Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.3 From the 1980s onwards, then, political allegory or intertextual relations have been the critical cornerstones for the analyses of this dream account. What has perhaps been less examined is the ways in which Forman’s dream deals with issues of subjectivity—what constitutes the individual, what sustains him/her, what defines his/her relation to the world, and so on. Perhaps this is all the more surprising since terms like “subjectivity” have been ever at the focus of attention in criticism at least since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1980, which insisted that the subject in the Renaissance was a “manipulable, artful process”. However, the present discussion takes another approach to subjectivity than the “submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self” identified as a New Historicist cornerstone by Greenblatt himself.4 Instead of focusing on Forman’s fashioning of identity in relation to hegemonic power (the Queen), the present discussion will revolve around questions such as: to what extent is sexuality perceived as an integral part of the male self as depicted by Forman? And, more generally, to what extent do erotic dreams in early modern culture deal with issues of selfhood, in the sense of revealing things about the human self rather than about the future or about the outside world? From this context of subjectivity I will focus on the centrality of sexual experience and the insistence with which sexuality is represented as the focal point of Forman’s narrative. Crucially, the present article argues that Forman’s dream establishes the narrator’s individual sexuality as a pattern against which both the women and the other men of the dream are contrasted. In that sense, the dream can even be said to anticipate a Freudian understanding of dreams as wish-fulfilment, of which sexuality constitutes an integral aspect.5 Although my discussion will not engage with psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework or even claim that Forman’s dream can be read strictly in terms of “repression”, my point is that the dream, although based on a belief in predicting the future, bespeaks an interest in the subjective and individual significance of its contents. From this perspective—a “psychologizing” perspective that simultaneously emphasizes Per Sivefors 283 and makes problematic the individual’s own significance to the process of dreaming—male sexual identity becomes a focal point of the brief narrative rather than a springboard for prophecy or divination. In that sense, Forman’s dream points forward in time: towards an understanding according to which dreams, and their sexual contents, reveal something about the dreamer’s own mind, but also towards the problems in representing such a mind in writing. While thus contextualizing Forman’s dream from the point of view of dream interpretation, the present essay also considers the way in which the dreaming self is made problematic in Forman’s account. Particularly, the dream casts Forman in the positions of both interpreter and interpreted, thus by its very introspection creating a divided self. This is, as I will argue, a point of departure from early dream theory in the direction of more “modern” understandings of selfhood. Needless to say, a claim of this kind will require some contextualization of early modern dream theories, partly because dreams were not usually considered to be sources of self-knowledge (although this did begin to change especially in the seventeenth century), partly because dreams that would appear distinctly erotic at least to twenty-first century, postFreudian readers did not necessarily do so to sixteenth-century ones. Early modern dream theories can be basically said to waver between belief in prophetic content and a wholesale rejection of such belief—in other words, the idea that dreams were (possibly) divinely inspired or the idea that dreams were just the residue of mental activity in the daytime and hence did not have a predictive value.6 In either case, sexuality was rarely at the focus even where we would perhaps be quick to see erotic symbolism or suppressed desire. This difference can be seen especially if we trace the idea of dreams as prophetic or predictive of the future—a direction that seems the more relevant since, as will be discussed, Forman’s dream clearly implies a predictive value. In theoretical works such as Thomas Hill’s The Most Pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreames, even dreams that appear to have a manifest sexual meaning are instead seen in more general terms: “to dreame that hee seeyth a harlotte, or commoneth wyth her, signifieth deception or variances.”7 Thus, dream interpretation may occasionally take sexual themes as its starting-point, but such themes are usually taken to a more general level. This conforms with classical works on the topic such as Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica, in which, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, sexual content in dreams is almost always expressed on the level of signifier rather than signified.8 Sexuality in other words seems only to be significant to early dream interpreters to the extent that it points outside itself.9 284 Sex and the Self From such a context, Forman’s dream appears both typical and atypical. It is typical because Forman assumes that this and other of his dreams have a prophetic content and can tell him something about the future— generally speaking, not with respect to sexuality. In this he resembles so many other believers in the objective, predictive value of dream prophecies at the time. To Forman, dreams did have a prophetic value. At the same time, as Rowse remarks, Forman “had some idea of the subjective elements in their causation, their connotation and what they meant to him”.10 In fact, Forman’s entire point of view is subjective rather than strictly speaking objective: by contrast to Hill’s extensive set of interpretive solutions, Forman is exclusively concerned with his own experience and what it means to him. This is a clear difference from both Hill and Artemidorus (as well as other works on dream divination), because neither of them mentions having any dreams of his own.11 In this sense, Forman’s dream bears more resemblance, for example, to the mathematician Girolamo Cardano’s extensive recording of his own dreams in the 1570s, all of which are written down because, according to the author, they tell something about himself even while their prophetic element is never denied.12 Subsequently, in the course of the seventeenth century, dreaming— as Mary Baine Campbell puts it—“loses its epistemological prestige like a leaking balloon”, and the focus of recorded dreams increasingly becomes that of one’s inner life, “sensation, worry, pleasure, guilt”, rather than implications of angelic messages or general predictions of the future.13 As previously suggested, then, Forman’s sexual encounter with the Queen could be said to straddle the past and the future of dream interpretation: it suggests both prophetic values and a more “psychologizing” sensibility. Thus, taken at face value Forman’s account seems to hint at the later development of Freudian dream interpretation in its implied idea that “dreams are fulfilled wishes”, and because sex in this dream does seem to be at the focus of interest.14 However, it could be argued that, like Artemidorus but unlike Freud, Forman’s objective in recording his dream is not the sexual content per se—he is not interested in what the dream tells him about repressed sexual desires but in its wider moral significance. At the same time, this conclusion is to some extent belied by the narrative structure of the dream. The episode leads up to the narrator’s sexual encounter and hence suggests that sex is at the thematic focus of the narrative. In that sense, the encounter is also an individual, private experience shared exclusively with the woman figure, who is in turn represented as blending physically and gradually together with the speaker: he grasps her clothes, she leans upon him and finally, safely out of sight, she kisses him. One Per Sivefors 285 might say the episode is indeed “climactic” even in a blatantly sexual sense. The question is whether this build-up establishes a sense of stable masculine power and dominance. Indeed, the last sentences of the dream account—the Queen leaning on the narrator and actively taking the sexual initiative of kissing him—has been interpreted as a potentially uneasy sign of female dominance. In a brief paper on Forman and male identity, Allison Harl argues that the end of Forman’s dream reverses the traditional roles of active male and passive female, thus creating a sense of unease: “Forman’s erotic vision has ultimately cast Elizabeth in the role of the aggressive pursuer and himself in the role of the passive pursued.”15 True, the figure of the Queen combines characteristics of passiveness and dominance; being after all a Queen she is, as Levin says, “both subordinate and in power”.16 It would be mistaken, however, to underestimate the potential for the dream to fulfil a specifically male fantasy: that of being alone with the desired and powerful woman. Forman’s experience presents precisely such a wish-fulfilment, illustrating as it does the only allowed sexual position as a pun—“to wait upon you and not under you”—that expresses male dominance, which is in turn boosted by the woman’s complicity (“she said I should”). If this sense of male dominance is developed gradually in the narrative, then the final sexual encounter with the Queen is obviously a central aspect of it. However, an analysis that focuses solely on the image of the Queen would risk ignoring the significance of the men present in the dream. As Alexandra Shepard insists, masculinity in the early modern period cannot be understood solely “as a product of relations between men and women”; masculinity also implies distinctions between different categories of men in terms of their different degree of social privilege.17 Notably, therefore, a specific trait of Forman’s representation of masculinity is that it is established in relation to other men. The entire dream can be said to represent successful competition with other males as a crucial element. Indeed, the dream is built up as an individualizing of experience, a series of confrontations between the speaker and the crowd at the “great close”, the speaker and the two quarrelsome men, the speaker and the man with the beard, and, the other men finally overcome, the state of bliss alone with the desired woman. In that particular sense, Forman’s dream can then be said to represent a gradual journey towards masculine individuation, with competitors gradually cancelled out as the narrative progresses. In this context, it is notable that in its representation of male sexuality the dream establishes a set of firm dichotomies between the desirable and the repulsive, between the normal and the abnormal. The dream thematizes 286 Sex and the Self the distinction between the “dirt” of the lanes and the purity of the Queen’s smock—it even emphasizes that the smock is “very clean and fair” and repeats the word “white” twice. Of course, whiteness symbolizes virginity and as such, Forman’s obsession speaks volumes about the apprehensions of Elizabethan men about the ageing and childless Virgin Queen on the throne.18 As suggested previously, sex is central to this distinction between the fair and the dirty; in fact, the dream represents sex as the very means through which the distinction is achieved (“that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coat out of the dirt”). Moreover, the red-bearded man, who also makes sexual advances on the Queen, is defined as “frantic”, so taken as a whole, the dream can be said to separate normality, whiteness, purity and the successful sexuality of the single narrator from madness, dirt and the vaguely defined crowd (who do not succeed in any advances). The process of individuation is therefore also one of normalization: the two men “at hard words” and the red-bearded weaver “distract of his wits” represent the other end of the scale from Forman, that is, madness and lack of control. Needless to say, this process is also one of power relations and ambition—few other dreams from the time could be said to better illustrate the commonplace that “sex is power”.19 As Levin shows, dreams of monarchs were common enough throughout the early modern period, but few of them show so clearly the desire to strive upwards both by physical proximity to the monarch and by competing—successfully—with other men.20 Indeed, Forman’s tendency towards self-assertion also has strong reverberations on the level of social ambition, which is a more than notable aspect of his life and something that has been discussed especially with respect to Forman’s position vis-à-vis the scientific and scholarly establishment at the time.21 Forman’s own concern with his social and professional status shines through everywhere in his writings; in his one published work, The Groundes of the Longitude (1591), he asserts his own scientific competence in almost Shylock-like terms, suggesting a strong desire to acquit himself of any accusations of “abnormality” and to be acknowledged for his achievement: “Am I a monster degenerated from kind, or am I not a creature, made and formed by his diuine wil, and borne into the world, and do liue to shew forth and speake of his glorie and power as well as others[?]”.22 In the dream of Elizabeth, the desire to climb the social ladder is of course also present. Rowse even suggests that the redbearded man bears a resemblance to the Earl of Essex, who obviously was on a collision course with the real-life Queen Elizabeth at the time when Forman wrote down his dream.23 In that sense, then, the sexual struggle of Per Sivefors 287 the dream also spells social struggle, and the desire projected in the text intimately links social rank and sexuality. On a textual level, Forman’s dream account could even be said to embody this power struggle in terms of competition for narrative control. Not only does the bearded man resemble the real-life courtier who was Forman’s obvious social superior; he is also a “weaver”, or “textor”, and it is therefore only by rescuing the Queen from the man’s advances that Forman is able to control both situation and text. If so, the “very clean and fair” white smock of the Queen almost becomes a metaphorical empty sheet on which Forman’s wish-fulfilment is inscribed. Virginity—to come back to my previously made point—is embodied both in the untouched woman and on the unwritten paper that represents her. Indeed, the episode even emphasizes the narrator’s urgent desire to keep the smock from being soiled on either side, both “behind” and “before”, and only after having kept both these sides free from interference does the narrator achieve full control, ending on a gratifying “me” that finally enacts the satisfaction of Forman’s desire for unrivalled love. In that sense, then, Forman’s dream can be said to embody a male sexual and textual subject. Like all dreams, Forman’s is a “text” in the sense that it is necessarily embodied in, and only possible to reach through language.24 However, the urgency with which the text embodies the desires and wishes of Forman himself, and the centrality allowed to the sexual experience, invests the dream with a persuasive force of its own. Forman’s tendency to implicate himself in his writing is strongly present in everything he produced; as Traister puts it, “he turned himself into text, recording what his body did and what his brain absorbed, both from encounters with the texts of other men and from his own experience”.25 Again, the sense of competition with “other men” is notable, but Forman’s “experience” in his dream of Queen Elizabeth also posits sexual encounter as a fundamental aspect of his constitution of his self in writing. But this constitution also poses the problem of unifying the different layers of Forman’s self-representation: in his dream account he is both the writing investigator and the written object of investigation. Forman arguably was aware of this problematic—or to return to the quotation from Rowse, he had “some idea of the subjective elements” in the causation of dreams. Indeed, Forman also wrote an autobiography which contains several dream accounts but is in the third person, as if implying a wish to keep interpreter and interpreted neatly apart.26 This explicit separation is not carried out in Forman’s dream of the Queen, which is distinguished by an ambiguity of the self that was also to become a characteristic of psychoanalysis: retelling a dream and analysing its significance inevitably impli- 288 Sex and the Self cates the interpreter in the interpreted even if the dream is someone else’s.27 In that sense, Forman’s dream, which casts himself both as interpreter and interpreted, can be said to record the process of constructing a self rather than being an “objective” study of an already-established self. In the end, then, the power achieved by the male subject in the dream is forever presented as ambivalent, in the sense that the subject seems divided between the positions of observer and observed. The male subject of the dream appears to be not quite in control as it is after all itself controlled by an observing interpreter, and vice versa the observing interpreter is not quite a detached, controlling self, as it seems implicated in the very events it records. Thus, the quest for power in Forman’s dream appears to have its limits precisely because of the introspective turn of dream interpretation that I discussed at the opening of this chapter: if the dream says something about you, then your very interpretation of it also signals a division of that same self. In this sense, as the present essay has argued, while Forman’s dream represents a traditional project of investing dreams with predictive value it also anticipates an “individualizing” tendency in dream interpretation. This tendency is crucially reinforced by an emphasis on sexuality as a defining characteristic—indeed, in the insoluble entwining of sexuality with social ambition and the quest for control also on the narrative level. Yet, by its very introspective direction Forman’s self is represented as problematic. It is precisely this complex set of relations—in terms of sexuality, social ambition and narrative aspects—that makes his dream of the Queen significant not just to the history of dream theory, but to the origins of present-day notions of subjectivity and selfhood. Notes 1 Transcribed in A. L. Rowse, Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer (New York: Charles Scribner, 1974), 20. 2 The most exhaustive recent studies on Forman are Barbara Howard Traister, Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For more specific discussions of Forman’s dream, see the works listed in the next note. 3 See especially Louis Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983): 61–94; also, Helen Hackett, “Dream-visions of Elizabeth I,” in Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan and S. J. Wiseman (New York: Routledge, 2008), 54–55 and Carole Levin, Dreaming the Per Sivefors 289 English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 150–52. 4 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 9. 5 For Freud’s view of dreams, see for example Sigmund Freud, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensens’s Gradiva,” in Writings on Art and Literature, edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3–6, and, of course, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), passim. 6 For reasons of space and relevance I will not bring up the second, more Aristotelian tradition of seeing dreams as basically residual. A brief discussion of it can be found in my “‘All this tractate is but a dream’: The Ethics of Dream Narration in Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night,” in Textual Ethos Studies, or Locating Ethics, edited by Anna Fahraeus and AnnKatrin Jonsson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), esp. 163–64. 7 Thomas Hill, The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames (London, 1576), sig. E8v. 8 See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1997), 26. Artemidorus’s text was published in English in 1606 and reprinted at least three times in the seventeenth century (1644, 1656, and 1690). 9 Peter Burke appears to take this view at face value when he speculates that “in the early modern period repression was more concerned with political and religious temptations and less with sexual ones than is the case today”; see Peter Burke, “The Cultural History of Dreams,” in Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 42. If anything, the aspects Burke lists are intimately linked with each other—something that the present discussion will also show to some extent. 10 Rowse, Sex and Society, 20. 11 For this point, see Peter Holland, “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Renaissance,” in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, edited by Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 141. 12 See Jerome Cardan, The Book of My Life (De Vita Propria Liber), trans. Jean Stoner (New York: Dover, 1960), 156–62. 13 Mary Baine Campbell, “Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneiric Transport in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan and S. J. Wiseman (New York: Routledge, 2008), 27. This tendency towards a more rationalist, selfanalytical perspective is indeed general in dream analysis in the seventeenth century; see Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance, 44–49. 14 Freud, “Delusion and Dreams,” 4. 15 Allison L. Harl, “Passive, Pursued and Powerful: Construction of the Male Self in Renaissance Autobiography,” Discoveries 22.2 (2005), accessed August 3 2012, http://www.scrc.us.com/discoveries/passive-pursued-and-powerful-constructionof-the-male-self-in-renaissance-autobiography/. 290 Sex and the Self 16 Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance, 151. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5. 18 Rowse, Sex and Society, 20–21. 19 For the idea that the dream represents a “will to power,” see Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 65. 20 For royal dreams in the period, see Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance, 127–58. 21 For Forman’s practice as a doctor and the attempts at suppressing his practice, see Kassell, Medicine and Magic, 75–122, and Traister, Notorious Astrological Physician, 81–96. Traister even suggests that Forman’s tendency towards selfassertion, conflict, and, ultimately, isolation extended beyond the merely professional sphere to his entire existence; see Notorious Astrological Physician, 145–72. 22 Simon Forman, The Groundes of the Longitude: With an Admonition to all those that are Incredulous and beleeue not the Trueth of the same (London, 1591), sig. A3r. 23 Rowse, Sex and Society, 21. Levin offers some further support for this hypothesis; see Dreaming the English Renaissance, 151. 24 For this point, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 16. 25 Traister, Notorious Astrological Physician, xii. 26 Transcribed in Rowse, Sex and Society, 267–78. 27 As Linda Anderson shows, Freud himself was aware of this problematic and never managed to resolve it: “in order to tell his patient’s story and interpret it, Freud is forced to tell a story of his own, one which necessarily implicates him as narrator/author.” See Linda Anderson, Autobiography, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 59. 17 Bibliography Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2011. Burke, Peter. “The Cultural History of Dreams.” In Varieties of Cultural History, by Peter Burke, 23–42. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Campbell, Mary Baine. “Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneiric Transport in Seventeenth-Century Europe.” In Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman, 15–30. New York: Routledge, 2008. Cardan, Jerome [Girolamo Cardano]. The Book of My Life (De Vita Propria Liber). Translated by Jean Stoner. New York: Dover, 1960. Forman, Simon. The Groundes of the Longitude: With an Admonition to all those that are Incredulous and beleeue not the Trueth of the same. London, 1591. Per Sivefors 291 Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1997. —. “Delusions and Dreams in Jensens’s Gradiva.” In Writings on Art and Literature, edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, 3–86. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. Hackett, Helen. “Dream-visions of Elizabeth I.” In Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman, 45–66. New York: Routledge, 2008. Harl, Allison L. “Passive, Pursued and Powerful: Construction of the Male Self in Renaissance Autobiography” Discoveries 22.2 (2005). Accessed 3 August 2012. http://www.scrc.us.com/discoveries/passivepursued-and-powerful-construction-of-the-male-self-in-renaissanceautobiography/. Hill, Thomas. The most pleasaunt arte of the interpretation of dreames. London, 1576. Holland, Peter. “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Renaissance.” In Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, edited by Peter Brown, 125–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kassell, Lauren. Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Levin, Carole. Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Montrose, Louis. “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.” Representations 1 (1983): 61–94. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Rowse, A. L. Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer. New York: Charles Scribner, 1974. Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sivefors, Per. “‘All this tractate is but a dream’: The Ethics of Dream Narration in Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night.” In Textual Ethos Studies, or Locating Ethics, edited by Anna Fahraeus and AnnKatrin Jonsson. 161–74. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 292 Sex and the Self Traister, Barbara Howard. Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.