Dreams in Shakespeare | Kay Stockholder (essay date 1987)
Kay Stockholder (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: "Macbeth'. A Dream of Love," in American Imago, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 85-105.
[In the following essay, Stockholder discusses the dream-like mingling of sexuality and violence in Macbeth.]
Plato in the Republic reflected uneasily that even a good man might dream that he slept with his mother, and Freud tried to reassure the audience to his Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis when he reminded them that there was someone in the real world actually doing the horrible things of which they merely dreamed.1 The combination of the involuntary nature of our dreams and their emotional power can remain a source of worry even though most of us exempt from moral judgment the expressions of desires in the willess realm of dreaming. However, any action that ensues from a state of mind that seems on the borderline between waking and dreaming, any engulfing or...
[The entire page is 8169 words long]
Navigate
