Dreaming Drama and Dramatising Dreams: Towards a Reading of Sexuality in Cymbeline

Abstract

Shakespeare’s is a drama of dreams. The plays deal with fantasies like those of Twelfth Night. Having been proposed to by a beautiful widow whom he has just met, Sebastian expresses his ecstasy in terms of illusion: ‘What relish is in this? How runs the stream?/Or I am mad, or else this is a dream./Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep;/If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!’ (IV. i. 59–62). Elsewhere in the same play, Viola (who is dressed as a boy) hopes that Olivia has not fallen for her: ‘Poor lady, she were better love a dream’ (II. ii. 24) and even the profoundly prosaic Malvolio has fantasies, as Toby tells Maria, ‘thou hast put him in such a dream that when the image of it leaves him he must run mad’ (II. v. 173).