Journal article
Shakespearean Dreamplay
English literary renaissance, Vol.11(1), pp.44-69
01/01/1981
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1981.tb00803.x
Abstract
Beginning with the assumption that the nature of theatrical spectacle as spatial and temporal form suggests the closeness of drama to dream, each mode of presentation given to cryptic verbal elisions and symbolic compressions, this essay concentrates on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale for those climactic moments where the plays raise themselves self-reflexively to the recognition of their own dream analogues and paradigms. Bottom's inability to account for his "dream" with Titania through any means but rushing headlong into his role as Pyramus the theatrical lover, along with his illogical and revelatory slips of the tongue in the speeches that bridge his transition from weaver to actor, offers a garbled but decodable allegory of dream displacement as theatrical premise. The famous statue scene in The Winter's Tale, highlighted by metaphors of dream wonder and waking faith, also proceeds by the logic of dream transference. The climax ofthat late romance seems to acknowledge itself as a theatrical incarnation of the unconscious even as it transcends its celebratory metaplay to comment on the genuine miracles of diurnal reality rather than of self-regarding dramaturgy which it is meant also, and most largely, to embody.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Shakespearean Dreamplay
- Creators
- GARRETT Stewart
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- English literary renaissance, Vol.11(1), pp.44-69
- Publisher
- Department of English, University of Massachusetts
- DOI
- 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1981.tb00803.x
- ISSN
- 0013-8312
- eISSN
- 1475-6757
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/1981
- Academic Unit
- Cinematic Arts; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984397928702771
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