Dreams in Shakespeare | Marjorie B. Garber (essay date 1974)
Marjorie B. Garber (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: "A Dagger of the Mind: Dream and 'Conscience' in the Tragedies," in Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 88-138.
[In the following excerpt, Garber analyzes the blurring of dream and reality in the tragedies Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra.]
Conscience is but a word that cowards use.
Richard III V.iii.310
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
Hamlet III.i.83
Richard III. . . is Shakespeare's first truly psychological play. The long, self-revelatory soliloquies, the apparitions, and the narrated dreams all create a reality both inside and outside Richard, wedding the subjective condition of consciousness to the objective conditions of London and Bosworth Field. The...
[The entire page is 11656 words long]
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