Dreams in Shakespeare | Joseph Westlund (essay date 1993)
Joseph Westlund (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Self and Self-validation in a Stage Character: A Shakespearean Use of Dream," in The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language, edited by Carol Schreier Rupprecht, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 200-16.
[In the following essay, Westlund studies the psychological changes precipitated by Posthumus's dream in Cymbeline.]
Near the end of Shakespeare's Cymbeline the play's central character, Posthumus, has a dream that critics and directors often treat as exterior—as a vision of Jupiter—rather than as the depiction of an interior event.1 Nevertheless, the appearance of Jupiter and the ghosts of Posthumus's family is the theatrical representation of an interior event within the character who lies sleeping before us on the stage. As such, the dream allows us to speculate about how Shakespeare conceives of the function of dreaming and how he prepares...
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