SOURCE: “Dream and Plot,” in William Shakespeare's Richard III, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 5-14.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Garber examines the way the dream sequences in Richard III serve as metaphors for the play's larger action and analyzes the role of omens and apparitions in constructing the world of the play.]

The great popularity of the dream as a dramatic device among the Elizabethans is surely due at least in part to its versatility as a mode of presentation. Both structurally and psychologically the prophetic dream was useful to the playwright; it foreshadowed events of plot, providing the audience with needed information, and at the same time it imparted to the world of the play a vivid atmosphere of mystery and foreboding. Thus the Senecan ghost stalked the boards to applause for decades, while the cryptic dumb show, itself a survival of earlier forms, remained as a ghostly harbinger of events to come.

Even in his earliest plays, Shakespeare began to extend and develop these prophetic glimpses, so that they became ways of presenting the process of the mind at work in memory, emotion, and imagination. What was essentially a predictive device of plot thus became, at the same time, a significant aspect of meaning. Dream episodes, in short, began to work within the plays as metaphors for the larger action, functioning at once as a form of presentation and as a concept presented. This is clearly the case with the dramatic action of Richard III. From Queen Margaret's curse to Clarence's monitory dream and the haunting nightmare of Bosworth Field, omen and apparition define and delimit the play's world.

The consciousness of dreaming which is to dominate the play throughout makes its first striking appearance in Richard's opening soliloquy:

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other.

(1.1.32-35)

Dreams here appear in what will become a familiar context for the early plays, clearly analogous to “plots,” “prophecies,” and “libels” as elements of the malign irrational. Richard has deftly contrived to manipulate circumstance by preying upon the vulnerability of the superstitious king. Encountering his brother Clarence on his way to the Tower, he is told what he already knows: the king, says Clarence,

                                        harkens after prophecies and dreams,
And from the crossbow plucks the letter G,
And says a wizard told him that by G
His issue disinherited should be;
And, for my name of George begins with G,
It follows in his thought that I am he.

(1.1.54-59)

The poetry here halts and stammers, a mirror of the simplicity and confusion which make Clarence such an easy target. He considers himself a reasonable man, and, confronted by unreason, he is both impotent and outraged. Yet such an absolute rejection of the irrational is a fatal misjudgment in the world of Richard III, and Clarence's skepticism becomes a means to his destruction, just as later his determined denial of the truth of his own dream will lead directly to his death.

Here, in the first scene of the play, a sharp contrast is already apparent between the poles of dream and reason. Significantly, Richard, the Machiavel, defines himself as a realist, in contrast to the foolish Clarence and the lascivious Edward; he intends to control his fate and the fate of others through an exercise of reason. Yet the very first evidence of his supposed control, the false prophecy of “G,” is truer than he knows: not George but Gloucester will disinherit Edward's sons. Clarence's passive skepticism about the irrational is but an image of Richard's more active scorn, and Richard's vulnerability to the powers of the imagination at Bosworth is prefigured by Clarence's prophetic dream of death.

The basic pattern of dream as prophecy is exemplified in simplest form by the dream of Lord Stanley as it is reported to Hastings in act 3:

He dreamt the boar had rased off his helm.
.....Therefore he sends to know your lordship's pleasure,
If you will presently take horse with him
And with all speed post with him to the north
To shun the danger that his soul divines.

(3.2.11,15-18)

But Hastings, like Clarence, reacts with instinctive disbelief:

Tell him his fears are shallow, without instance;
And for his dreams, I wonder he's so simple
To trust the mock'ry of unquiet slumbers.

(3.2.25-27)

In the dream and its reception we have the fundamental design of early Shakespearean dream: the monitory dream which is true, but not believed. Stanley dreams that Richard—the boar—will cut off their heads, and Hastings rejects this suggestion absolutely. He reasons, further, that to react to it will have the undesirable effect of making the prophecy come true, since if it is known that they distrust him, Richard will give them reasons for distrust.

To fly the boar before the boar pursues
Were to incense the boar to follow us
And make pursuit where he did mean no chase.

(3.2.28-30)

This is a politic and sophisticated conclusion; it is also a false one, and it places Hastings in the revealing category of those who scoff at omens. He is in fact a prisoner of his own reason. “A marvelous case it is,” remarks Holinshed, with customary exactitude, “to hear either the warning that he should have voided or the tokens that he could not void.” It is only hours later, when he hears himself condemned, that he at last grasps the enormity of his mistake.

For I, too fond, might have prevented this.
Stanley did dream the boar did rase our helms,
And I did scorn it and disdain to fly.
Three times today my footcloth horse did stumble,
And started when he looked upon the Tower,
As loath to bear me to the slaughterhouse.

(3.4.80-85)

This belated account of an earlier omen, equally disregarded, establishes even more clearly Hasting's distrust of the entire realm of the irrational. It is only in the developing context of supernatural warnings that he, too late, can interpret the sign correctly.

For his part, Richard follows the same course with Hastings as he did with Clarence and Edward: he pretends to have discovered “devilish plots / Of damnèd witchcraft” (3.4.59-60), ostensible reasons for his own deformity, and condemns Hastings to death for his cautious skepticism. Once again, he employs witchcraft as a device, something to be used rather than believed in. Apparently, then, he and Hastings occupy positions at opposite ends of the rationalist scale: Hastings the victim, warned by true omens he chooses to ignore; Richard the victor, creating false signs and prophecies through which he controls the superstitious and the skeptical alike. Yet they are more alike than they seem at first. When Richard himself becomes the dreamer, the recipient of omens and supernatural warnings, his rationalist posture is susceptible to the same immediate collapse; the terrifying world of dream overwhelms him, as it has overwhelmed Clarence and Hastings, at the critical moment of his ill-starred defense on Bosworth Field.

The double dream at Bosworth is an apparition dream, related to the risen spirits in 2 Henry VI and Macbeth as well as to the ghosts of Hamlet and Julius Caesar. Richard and Richmond, encamped at opposite ends of the field, are each in turn visited by a series of ghosts representing Richard's victims: Edward Prince of Wales, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Gray and Vaughan, Hastings, the two young princes, Anne, and Buckingham. As each spirit pauses he speaks to Richard like a voice of conscience within the soul: “Dream on thy cousins smothered in the Tower” (5.3.152); “Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death” (l. 172). And then, in a formal counterpoint, each turns to Richmond and wishes him well. The whole scene is symmetrically arranged, the contrast of sleeping and waking, despair and hopefulness, emphasized by the rigidity of the form. For Richard, “guiltily awake” (l. 147), this is the fulfillment of the last term of Margaret's curse:

The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv'st,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!

(1.3.221-26)

Richard's sleeplessness, like Macbeth's, is the mark of a troubled condition of soul, the outward sign of an inward sin. Margaret in her self-chosen role as “prophetess” (1.3.300) has called it down upon him, adding yet another to the series of omens which culminate in dream.

The terror which this dream evokes in Richard's mind is explicitly shown in his frightened soliloquy (“Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am” [5.3.185]), and even more in his subsequent conversation with Ratcliff. “O Ratcliff,” he exclaims, “I have dreamed a fearful dream!” This is a very different man from the bloodless Machiavellian who plants the seeds of Clarence's execution in his brother's brain. His cry is now the Shakespearean equivalent of Faustus's last speech:

King Richard: O Ratcliff; I fear, I fear!
Ratcliff: Nay, good my lord, be not afraid of shadows.
King Richard: By the apostle Paul, shadows tonight
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.

(5.3.215-19)

In his fear he hits the point precisely: the “shadows,” because they arise from the symbol-making unconscious, are more threatening than the substance. The Richard who can say “Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I” (5.3.184) must create his own omens if they are to strike him with terror. Consciousness is the one enemy he can neither trick nor silence. From the controller of dreams he has become the controlled, the victim of his own horrible imaginings.

The Bosworth dream, like the predictive dream of Stanley, serves a structural purpose as well as a psychological one. The apparitions of murdered friends and kinsmen recall to the onlooker all the atrocities that have gone before, the perfidies of 3 Henry VI as well as the events of the present play. The device is dramatically useful because of the complexity of the historical events involved; many in the audience will probably not remember whose corpse is being mourned at the play's beginning, nor what relation the Lady Anne bears to the Lancastrian monarchy. Points of history are thus clarified at the same time that a psychologically convincing “replay” takes place in Richard's mind. The direct inverse of the prophetic dream, this recapitulation simultaneously furthers the ends of psychological observation, historical summation, and structural unity, so that the sequence of dreams and omens which are the formal controlling agents of Richard III are all embodied in the last revelation at Bosworth.

As useful a device as this final dream proves to be, it carries with it several inherent drawbacks. The apparatus of the serial ghosts is cumbersome and formal, analogous to (and probably derived from) the older pageantry of Deadly Sins and Heavenly Virtues. Holinshed, again a useful touchstone, describes the assemblage merely as “divers images like terrible devils” and rejects any supernatural interpretation: “But I think this was no dream but a punction and prick of his sinful conscience.” His eagerness to moralize causes him to miss a more significant point: the very equivalence of dream with “the punction and prick of conscience” goes deep into the structural and psychological roots of the play. But Holinshed's devils are simply punishment figures of a generalized and abstract sort; by replacing them with the pageant of Richard's victims seeking retributive justice, Shakespeare transforms the entire significance of the last dream. He will use such a formal array only once more, in the series of apparitions which address Macbeth on the heath. There, again, the ghostly figures will become part of the king's private and terrible mythology of symbols, at the same time that they recall the ominous, monitory procession of deadly sins common to Tudor drama.

But the interior world of dream in Richard III was to undergo yet another alteration and expansion, quitting the specific formalism of the Bosworth dream for a freer and richer exploration of the subconscious. Just as Richard's apparent control of “prophecies, libels, and dreams” was abruptly replaced by subjugation to internal terrors, so, in Clarence's dream, imagination and the creative unconscious begin to replace the mechanism of witchcraft and omen as the proper architects of dream. Clarence's prophetic dream falls into three structurally distinct parts, each of which is important to the pattern of dream use in the play. The first part (1.4.9-20) recounts his supposed sea journey with Gloucester, their reminiscences of the wars, and Gloucester's accidental fall:

                                                            As we paced along
Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,
Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in falling
Struck me (that thought to stay him) overboard
Into the tumbling billows of the main.

(1.4.16-20)

There is both psychological and symbolic truth in this passage. What Freud called the “dream-work,” the process by which the latent dream thoughts are transformed into the manifest dream content, has rendered Clarence's latent suspicion of Richard, a suspicion he finds emotionally unbearable, into more reassuring terms. The subconscious thought “Gloucester wants to murder me,” rejected by the conscious, here appears in the disguised form “Gloucester will kill me by accident, though he doesn't want to.” Outwardly, of course, this prediction falls into the category of monitory dreams, the “tumbling billows of the main” anticipating the butt of malmsey in which Clarence is to be ingloriously drowned. We may, if we choose, regard it solely as another ignored or misunderstood omen, a class for which there is precedent in Shakespeare's works and in those of his contemporaries. But the passage, like the play, offers more than one possibility. While it fits into the pattern of unheeded warnings, it also begins to become an intrinsic part of the mind of the speaker, communicating to us something even he himself does not know.

Gloucester “stumbles” metaphorically in seeking the crown. This information is conveyed more directly in his own words; his soliloquies are psychological revelations, his disappointments and ambitions shown in psychological terms. He is a wholly new kind of character in Shakespeare, and we are able to follow the workings of his mind in a wholly new way. When he thinks aloud at the close of 3 Henry VI, “Clarence, beware. Thou keep'st me from the light” (5.6.84), he gives to us the same warning which is given in Clarence's dream. And though we enter Clarence's consciousness only once, in the dream itself, it is clear that some part of him suspects what we know to be a certainty: Richard's design on his life. To read the accident passage as merely another foreshadowing is to ignore the remarkably acute psychology with which the poet approaches the unique occasion of the dream. Through the dream device he permits us to enter Clarence's consciousness for a moment, in the same way we have entered Richard's. This is why the dream appears so different in style and imagery from anything else in the play. The latent suspicion Clarence harbors is authentically presented in masked form by his subconscious mind. And what is most interesting is that the process of masking here takes the form of metaphor.

The mention of the “tumbling billows” meantime precipitates the dream into its second phase, the lyrical description of a world undersea. The chief characteristic of this vision—for that is what it really appears to be—is a striking contrast of mortality and eternity, the obscenely decaying body and the insensate but highly valued jewels which endure unchanged.

A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatt'red in the bottom of the sea.

(1.4.25-28)

The ambiguity in “unvalued” is key to the whole. To Clarence in the extremity of his fear the jewels, though priceless, are without value as compared to human life. “Some lay in dead men's skulls,” he continues,

                                                                                                    and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt'red by.

(1.4.29-33)

What is chiefly remarkable about this image is its sheer physicality, the fascinated horror of a man contemplating his own imminent death. When the same image next appears in Shakespeare, it will have been curiously purified of passion:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:
          Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
          Into something rich and strange.

(Tempest, 1.2.401-4)

In Ariel's song mortality has become immortality, the eyes not replaced by pearls but transformed into them. The difference between this view and Clarence's suggests the direction in which vision and dream will develop in the plays. In Richard III, however, the undersea passage is nightmare to the dreamer, though its language is touched with a strange and haunting lyricism.

The passage which succeeds it, by contrast, is vividly dramatic, working through dialogue rather than through images. Two spirits appear to Clarence and confront him with his crimes, much as Richard's victims do on Bosworth Field. The tradition here evoked is that of the underworld visit of classical epic, the dead man greeted by the shades of those he knew on earth.

I passed, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that sour ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.

(1.4.45-47)

Here is yet another sea journey, parallel to the channel crossing of the dream's first section. This generally unnoticed parallel is significant, for it again utilizes authentic dream logic to clarify the total meaning of the dream. In the first sea journey, as we have seen, Clarence overtly ascribes the cause of his fall to accident, though he betrays a latent distrust of his brother Richard. Here, in the second journey, he pictures his destination as hell, and supplies vivid reasons—in the forms of Warwick and Edward, prince of Wales—why he deserves damnation. The displaced figure of the stumbling Richard is strongly related to Clarence's assessment of his own guilt: he has perjured himself (i.e., dissembled about his allegiance) and slain the heir to the throne. But Richard, too, is a perjurer and will become a murderer; he has had Clarence falsely imprisoned and has then pretended ignorance and concern over the event; he will later have him killed because he stands in the line of succession. Clarence thus displaces his unacceptable distrust of Richard, by transferring his just suspicions to analogous episodes in his own life. Simultaneously he punishes himself for having these suspicions by turning them against himself. The ghosts of Warwick and Edward thus possess a multiple significance for the dream's meaning, establishing even further the psychological accuracy of its form.

The more direct significance of these figures is of course historical recapitulation, as it will be in the Bosworth dream. The magnificent tongue twister of a line,

                                                            “What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?”

(1.4.50-51)

is meant to recall the elaborate chain of events by which, in 3 Henry VI, Clarence first pledges his support to Warwick and then deserts him. On that occasion Warwick rebukes him as a “passing traitor, perjured and unjust” (5.1.106), and the charge is repeated by the prince of Wales: “Thou perjur'd George,” he taunts (5.5.34), and when Clarence joins with his brothers to stab the prince to death, he does so in a spirit of resentment as well as anger, retorting, “there's for twitting me with perjury” (l.40). The accusations made by the ghosts in his dream are thus authentic reminders of Clarence's history. The prince's ghost resembles the accusatory apparitions of Bosworth, but is much more closely assimilated into the consciousness of the dreamer:

A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood, and he shrieked out aloud,
“Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
Seize on him, Furies, take him unto torment!”

(1.4.53-57)

This is no ceremonial intoning, but rather a visionary visitation. The prince is not identified by name, but is only presented in fragmented detail, as if hastily glimpsed—“a shadow like an angel,” “bright hair,” “blood.” We are inside the mind of Clarence, and we see the ghost through his eyes. In keeping with the play's general design, the ghosts of Clarence's mental landscape appear only secondhand, as related through his dream. It is Richard's consciousness with which we are continually in contact, and only Richard's ghosts make actual appearances on stage.

Yet there is something extremely important about the relationship of Clarence's vision of Warwick and Edward to the actual ghosts of act 5. Clarence's dream internalizes the ghosts, portrays them directly as elements of imagination. Gone is the cumbersome apparatus of the Bosworth dream, and gone likewise is the aura of artificiality created by the mechanical pattern of omen and fulfillment. Dream here is an agency of liberation, a means of freeing prophecy from device and relating it to psychological intuition. Imagery bears a bigger part, and association is legitimately employed to make images into symbols. The materials of Clarence's dream are still embryonic, and its technique stands in marked contrast to that of the rest of Richard III. But it is the first real anticipation of a new use of dream, to be refined and expanded in the later plays.