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‘Following Darkness Like a Dream’: Dreams, Sleep, and Dark Comedy

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Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres

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Abstract

Chapter 1 discusses dreams and sleep in the comedies of Lyly’s Endymion, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It argues that, in these three plays, devices of dreams and sleep defy comedic closure by introducing darker themes that are neither resolved nor absorbed by the plays’ endings. The chapter examines how Shakespeare created a darker form of comedy in part by adapting literary traditions of fictitious dreams (mainly Plautine) and dream visions (mainly Chaucerian), and by engaging with early modern notions of dreams as satanic or demonic deceptions, as resurgences of waking thoughts, and as expressions of desires, fears, and emotions.

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  1. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Antrim, UK

    Claude Fretz

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Fretz, C. (2020). ‘Following Darkness Like a Dream’: Dreams, Sleep, and Dark Comedy. In: Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13519-5_2

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