Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres

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 book’s radical approach to Shakespeare’s genres is integral to our understanding of the playwright’s dramaturgy, and therefore represents a major scholarly contribution.” (Darren Freebury-Jones, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 72 (1-2), 2021)

“Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres, Claude Fretz has ended our wait for such a volume, and in so doing has made a powerful contribution not only to this subfield but also to scholarship on early modern English literature and culture in general. … Marjorie Garber did, Fretz achieves coverage by working topically across and within individual genres.” (Jennifer Lewin, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75 (3), 2022)

“The greatest strength of this study is the dialogue into which it enters with the Shakespearean texts. Certainly, Fretz speaks about the plays and their dreamscapes from a well-read historical perspective that allows him to illuminate the webs of meaning in which his primary texts are entangled. … its readers have gained a sense of the generic substance and significance of Shakespeare’s dreams, and of his sleepers, dreamers and insomniacs. And Caliban cries to dream again.” (Joachim Frenk, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 156, 2020)

“A deft, rigorous and thrilling analysis of dreams and sleep in Shakespeare’s drama, informed by a unique interdisciplinary focus on dream theory, medical history, classical theatre, medieval literature, early modern dramatic traditions, anthropological enquiry, folklore and genre studies. This book is a veritable cabinet of wonders which opens up early modern cultures of dreaming in new and exciting ways, enriched by Fretz’s exploration of the manner in which Shakespeare sometimes subtly, sometimes radically, reframes dream motifs in order to challenge generic conventions and test the limits of dramatic possibility. This marvellous study both refreshes and redefines its field.” (Chris Laoutaris, Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, and author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe)

“This thoughtful and well-written book explores the deep connection between Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds and his use of images of dreams and sleep. It makes especially good use of the dream interpretation books of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and connects Shakespeare’s work to much other Renaissance drama, including a fine discussion of John Lyly’s Endymion. Much of the value of the book is the way the author examines and analyzes the classical influences on Shakespeare’s work. Fretz’s knowledge of classical literature is remarkable.” (Carole Levin, Willa Cather Professor of History and Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Claude Fretz is Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and Associate Fellow of the research centre ‘European Dream-Cultures’ at Saarland University, Germany. He obtained his PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He has published on Shakespeare, representations of dreams and sleep in early modern literature, and Restoration drama.