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 word "conscience" echoes repeatedly throughout the play: Margaret rails at Richard "the worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul" (I.iii.221); one of Clarence's murderers, though he acknowledges "certain dregs of conscience" (I.iv. 122-23) in himself, concludes that conscience is a thing he'll "not meddle with," since it "makes a man a coward" (136-37). Richard himself, badly shaken by the parade of apparitions at Bosworth Field, for a moment concedes that

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

[V.iii. 194-96]

But the play is really a systematic rejection of conscience, the tragic record of a failed self-knowledge. Richard's last defiant assertion, that "conscience is but a word that cowards use," is a denial of that interior reality, a desperate attempt to obliterate from mind all the reflective events of the play. We have been preparing for this rejection since the play's first moments: the refusal by Clarence to heed the warning of his own dream, Hastings's disregard of omen, the apparent emptiness of Margaret's curse—all of these are failed recognitions, moments when the realm of self-conscious awareness tries and fails to assert its primacy. It is appropriate that all of these moments are part of that complex of supernatural occurrences, omens, ghosts, and warnings, which we have come to associate with the world of dream. The dream world is able to exercise a controlling power beyond that of any of the play's characters, although none of them acknowledge its sovereignty. The undervaluing of conscience becomes, for the play as a whole, a sign of a larger misunderstanding. For, like those of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the characters of Richard III are affected by the subconscious and the dream state without ever fully realizing it. We see the play largely through Richard's persona, as a simultaneous portrait of his history and his soul; but he himself refuses to accept the correlation of the two spheres, and his final flaw is lack of self-knowledge.

"Conscience" in Richard III is predominantly a moral term, having its modern meaning of "sense of duty" or "remorse." When Richard associates conscience with cowardice, he is talking about feelings of guilt and responsibility, essentially societal values internalized into a moral system. But "conscience" in Shakespeare's time also carried the primary meaning of "consciousness." Hamlet's "conscience does make cowards of us all" is a tacit recognition of the primacy of "consciousness" in the human spirit; "conscience" in his phrase contains both of its root meanings and yet goes beyond them, to express the essential condition of man. To Richard, only cowards capitulate to conscience; by the time of Hamlet, though Richard's meaning is retained, "conscience" in the sense of "consciousness" has reversed the terms; and cowardice, if one equates it with a sensitivity to the subjectiveness of human experience, is finally the condition which draws us all together. That man should be in this state, confronting rather than avoiding the problem of his own consciousness, is a prelude to the tragic experience. And in the great tragedies from Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare develops the theme of consciousness to a point where the world of one man's imagination, the psychological dream state, takes over the landscape and the characters of the drama.

The relationship between subjective and objective experience, the thing thought and the thing done, is a constant concern in Shakespeare's plays from the earliest histories to the last romances. Of all the plays, Hamlet perhaps best illustrates the problem of subjectifying experience, the reduction of "what happens" to "what is thought," the temporary, often playful, yet always significant exchange of the fictive for the "real." This is a reversal we have considered at some length in relation to A Midsummer Night's Dream; in Hamlet the means of exchange is subtly different, because it has its root in Hamlet's own conscience. Dream here, as in the other great tragedies of the middle period, is most nearly equivalent to consciousness, the world subjectively glimpsed through the lens of imagination. At one pole this encompasses all that is terrifying, irrational, inexplicable: the ghost of old Hamlet, the Macbeth witches, the storm on the heath in King Lear. At the other, equally true, are the redemptive moments, grounded in common experience uncommonly viewed: Cleopatra's dream vision of Antony, the awakening of Lear. Literal, encapsulated dreams of the sort of Clarence's dream have almost entirely disappeared: the only traditionally "told" dream in all these plays is the supposed dream of Cassio, and significantly it is not really a dream at all, but rather a fiction crafted and controlled by Iago. This replacement of the episodic dream by the dream state is a dramaturgical advance, permitting a steady flow of plot and language without the interruption of artificially impacted flashbacks or recapitulations. At the same time, however, refinement in dramatic construction is paralleled by refinement in thematic development, as the dream state more and more encompasses the entire world of the play. The theme of consciousness, which unites the inner world of private vision with the outer world of visible reality, deliberately blurs distinctions between the factually "real" and the purportedly "imagined," so that the audience, as much as the protagonist, is forced to make wholly subjective choices among equally possible truths.

The familiar supernatural background of shaded omen and sign is established for Hamlet by the remarkable opening scene. The time is midnight, midway between dusk and dawn, and the night so dark that the sentries cannot see. That they tensely mistake one another for intruders is our first symbolic indication of a danger which lurks within Denmark, rather than without. Almost immediately the subject of the ghost is introduced, together with the crucial question "Is it real?"

Marcellus: What, has this thing appeared again tonight?
Barnardo: I have seen nothing.
Marcellus: Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us;
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That, if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.
Horatio: Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.

[1.i.21-30]

The terrifying vagueness of "this thing" immediately intensifies the mood of mystery: the ghost is unclassifiable uncontrollable, and therefore frightening. Barnardo replies with the factual "I have seen nothing," which is meant to convey the fact that the ghost has not yet appeared. Yet our experience of the word "nothing" and its potential for ambiguity should alert us here; behind Barnardo's assertion is the covert meaning "I have seen a ghost; I have seen something made of 'nothing.'" Barnardo, of course, does not intend this meaning; the poet's adroit manipulation of language preserves verisimilitude on the literal level while permitting the audience a glimpse of deeper symbolic significance. It is a pattern we have seen before, and it here once more reinforces the important fact that dream goes beyond reason into the subjective realm of poetry. Having lightly but unmistakably established this theme, the scene moves away from it with superb economy. Horatio, rational man in his most attractive guise, is also present on the ramparts, and Marcellus makes it clear that he finds the idea of the ghost incredible. According to him it is "fantasy," meaning not creation but delusion, a phantom vision induced by an atmosphere of terror. For a moment we are drawn to agree with him, as we are meant to; the reassuring finality of "tush, tush" is a prosaic and welcome assertion of the boundary between the actual and the fantastic. But the well-bred control which is later to caution against considering "too curiously" is almost immediately demonstrated as the limited gift it is, as the appearance of the ghost on the platform abruptly negates all Horatio's scholarly assumptions.

Each of these independent figures represents an aspect of the mind of Hamlet; it is part of Shakespeare's astonishing craftsmanship that he should be able to present characters and settings simultaneously as subjective interior perceptions and objective exterior realities. In its treatment of the dream state Hamlet may therefore be viewed as an internal landscape projected by the protagonist, a shadowy world inhabited by figures inseparable from the "conscience" of Hamlet himself. Thus the ghost can be interpreted both as superego and as old Hamlet, guardian of ancient values; Horatio, both as Freudian censor and as the wise and temperate scholar from Wittenberg. Laertes and Fortinbras also appear in the play as alter egos for Hamlet—Laertes a skilled fencer and fiery champion of Ophelia, Fortinbras a "most royal" prince—and Hamlet's progress toward self-knowledge in the play depends in large part upon his readiness to recognize these identities within himself.

The metaphorical equivalency of interior and exterior worlds is set forth with great clarity in an early exchange between Hamlet the father and Hamlet the son. Fading from the battlements, the ghost enjoins at the last, "Remember me" (I.v.91), and Hamlet cries

Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.

[I.v.95-97]

Clearly, the phrase "distracted globe" here carries a primary meaning of "confused mind"; metaphorically, Hamlet pledges to remember as long as he has a memory, which is to say, as long as he lives. But the literal meaning of "globe" is also appropriate here, since the world of the play is likewise "distracted" by the murder of the king, all the personae of the kingdom blighted in language and action; the madness Hamlet assumes when he puts on his "antic disposition" (I.v.172) is a madness already present in the state of Denmark. Moreover, the "distracted globe" may well carry a third relevant meaning, since the theater in which the play's Elizabethan audience "held a seat" was also called the Globe. Hamlet's pledge thus takes on the added meaning "as long as the play is remembered or performed," a sense enriched further by the traditional belief that Shakespeare himself appeared in the original production in the role of the ghost: not only will old Hamlet be remembered, but so too, through him, will the playwright and the play. The mysterious world of theatrical illusion of course becomes itself a principal subject for the play as a whole, and it is a "distracted" world in part because of the difficulty of distinguishing actor from audience. Claudius thinks of himself as merely a spectator watching a play in the "Mousetrap" scene (III.ii); he is not aware that he is at the same time a character in a larger play of Hamlet's devising, or that he and Gertrude are soon to be revealed as an actual "player king" and "player queen." Polonius, considering that "more audience than a mother" (III.iii.31) should hear Hamlet's conversation with the queen, conceals himself behind the arras in her chamber; he is tragically transformed into an actor when his shouts for help provoke Hamlet to stab him blindly through the curtain. Everywhere reality has become elusive, as we have already seen in Horatio's confident rejection of the supernatural and the immediately subsequent entrance of the ghost. Just as boundaries between Norway and Denmark, youth and age, life and death seem to be constantly shifting in this play, so too do boundaries between reality and illusion. "My father, methinks I see my father," exclaims Hamlet to a startled Horatio. "Where, my lord?" "In my mind's eye, Horatio." "My lord, I think I saw him yesternight" (I.ii.184-85, 189). This sudden transition from conventional recollection to supernatural vision, especially when voiced by the supremely rational Horatio, is a leap into the world of illusion.

Hamlet himself is of course perfectly capable of distinguishing in basic terms between the actual and the dreamlike or fictive. The challenge of the ambiguity comes in his conscious refusal to sort these aspects of experience according to conventional classification. There is something electric in the emotion which seizes him when confronted, suddenly, with the denizens of the imagination. It is important to keep in mind that in Hamlet the ghost and the players are parallel entities, compounded of fact and fiction, reason and something beyond reason. In Richard III the characters of dream were ghosts, apparitions, omens which impinged upon the passive consciousness of Richard and of Clarence; in A Midsummer Night's Dream the dream world was inhabited by creative and fertile sprites whose presence was inseparable from concepts of play and imagination. In Hamlet, fittingly, the two senses come together, fused by the imagination of Hamlet himself, now in the condition of Everyman, the man of "conscience" or consciousness. Thus there is a strange but unmistakable triumph in his reply to Horatio, as the ghost cries in the cellarage:

Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[I.v. 164-67]

Horatio's exclamation is an admission that the appearance of the ghost violates his canons of experience. We would expect this to be more or less the same for Hamlet, as it has been for the other members of the watch. But the effect of the apparition on Hamlet is in fact one of liberation rather than of amazement. In part this is because the reality of the ghost is validated by his own imagination. "Touching this vision here, / It is an honest ghost" (137-38), he assures the frightened watchmen. Its message, in fact, has apparently been subconsciously suggested to him before the actual apparition—"O my prophetic soul!" (40), he cries out at news of the usurpation, in a phrase at once wonderfully expressive and remarkably condensed. The foreboding of prophecy, which in the earlier plays required the extensive narration of monitory dream, is here magically contained in a moment.

Hamlet's exchange with Horatio is made even more significant, however, by the addition of the element of wordplay. "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome," he urges. He alludes in part to the courtesy proverbially accorded to visitors from foreign parts, a category in which he affects, somewhat whimsically, to include the ghost. Horatio is thus urged to accept the presence of the apparition without question, extending his cautiously delimited concept of the logical and the real. But at the same time the resonant word "stranger" in folklore denotes "something foreboding the arrival of an unexpected visitor," in effect an omen or sign. The ghost is an apocalyptic forecast of a later revelation. As such it represents the rich and proper sphere of dream, implicitly contrasted by Hamlet with the conventional things "dream of," or envisioned, in Horatio's study. The puns and double meanings here are of great importance, as they will be throughout the play. Hamlet, an inveterate punster and wit whose caustic, ribald humor resembles that of Mercutio, repeatedly attempts to control his environment and indeed the entire external world through the manipulation of language. In doing so he asserts the primacy of the imagination, the dream state of creation in which "words, words, words" are greater than and different from the mere "matter" they contain.

His starting point, of course, has been the message of the ghost, a message itself delivered in a tone strikingly different from that of the surrounding drama. The ghost of old Hamlet has within the play a dual reality: as an apparition he is really more closely related to the omens and oracles of earlier plays than to spirits of imagination, and he appears only to give his fateful report, reappearing once to Hamlet to "whet [his] almost blunted purpose." (III.iv. 112) He is a "real" illusion in the sense in that he can be seen, not only by Hamlet, but by Horatio and the sentries. Yet the queen will see "nothing at all" (III.iv.133) when he appears in her closet; though the audience, once more included in Hamlet's interior consciousness, can both see and hear him. The ghost is in fact an intuition or perception in the mind of Hamlet at the same time that he is corporeally distinct from him, and a willingness to accept this seeming paradox is essential to an understanding of the dynamics of dreaming throughout the play.

A revenge figure descended not only from Elizabethan and Senecan models but also from Patroclus of the Iliad, old Hamlet comes, like his Homeric predecessor, to press his dilatory champion to action in an epic world. His associations with the epic are manifold: he is dressed in "complete steel" (I.iv.52), and his mode of warfare is the single combat in which he defeated old Fortinbras; both costume and martial demeanor contrast as sharply as possible with the luxurious furnishings of the Claudian court and its twin weapons, the rapier and the "painted word." His language, too, is epic in style: "List, list, o list," he intones, (I.v.22); "Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched" (75); "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled" (77); "O, horrible! O, horrible! Most horrible!" (80); and finally, "Adieu, adieu, adieu" (91). We have heard these portentous triplets before, in "The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby," where Shakespeare was clearly burlesquing the language of early tragedy in a play obviously intended by its actors to rival the best of the genre: "Thou wall, 0 wall, O sweet and lovely wall" (MND V.i.176); "O grim-looked night! O night with hue so black! / O night, which ever art when day is not!" (170-71); "And farewell, friends. / Thus Thisby ends. / Adieu, adieu, adieu" (344-46). The voice of the ghost in Hamlet, of course, sounds quite a different note; his incitement to revenge is a plea for Hamlet to return to an Old Testament world as well as to a world of epic values and heroic wrath. But with the murder of the king and the ascension of the political Claudius such a return is rendered impossible, as it will be after the death of Hector in Troilus and Cressida or the defeat of Antony in Antony and Cleopatra—both, like old Hamlet, epic heroes anachronistic in a modern world.

Yet the voice of epic is close to the voice of myth, and the tale of horror the ghost comes to tell has the spare authority of myth and the symbolic form of dream. Significantly, it is a tale of a sleep and a visitor to sleep; equally significantly, it is a tale which has been misconstrued and which requires a new interpretation.

'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown. . . .

. . . Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distillment. . . .

[I.v.35-40; 59-64]

This is an Edenic myth of corrupted innocence, the invasion of a medieval hortus conclusus. In the ghost's interpretation, the metaphorical "serpent" is replaced by the specific "thy uncle," Claudius, the literal invader of the peaceful orchard The version of his death widely accepted in Denmark is unmasked as a fiction which hides the truth through metaphor: "The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown." The tale is important because it interprets the dream which deludes Denmark; its images will recur repeatedly throughout the play and dominate its plot and imagery, constantly reminding us—as well as Hamlet—that old Hamlet was killed in a garden, by a human serpent, who poured poison in his ears. "'A poisons him i' th' garden for his estate" (III.ii.265), as Hamlet will gloss the play-within-the-play.

The garden or orchard assumes the character of a despoiled Eden of the purer past, a garden of attempted innocence which is literally associated with its biblical antecedents by the gravedigger's punning joke about "Adam's profession" (V.i.31), now shared by "gard'ners, ditchers, and grave-makers" (30). It is a garden in which Gertrude's marriage to Claudius "takes off the rose / From the fair forehead of an innocent love, / And sets a blister there" (III.iv.43-45), bringing together the themes of garden and poison. Ophelia calls Hamlet "th'expectancy and rose of the fair state" (III.i.153); she herself, addressed as a "rose of May" (IV.v.158) by Laertes, sings mad songs which are all too apt in their scattering of telltale flowers, and her watery death, "When down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook" (IV.vii.174-75), seems to translate into action the language of Hamlet's first bitter soliloquy on self-slaughter: "Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed" (I.ii. 135-36).

The "serpents" who infiltrate this garden are many: not only Claudius, but also his willing instruments, the insinuating Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Hamlet vows he will trust "as I will adders fanged" (III.iv.204). The poison administered by such "serpents" is that which is rotten in the state of Denmark: the ulcers beneath the skin, cosmeticked over with lies, the contagion that spreads unwholesomely through the night, and above all the poisonous language of deceit and pretense which is everywhere in the play poured into unsuspecting ears. There is, too, the "certain convocation of politic worms" (IV.iii.20) to whom Hamlet consigns the body of Polonius, and the all-conquering Lady Worm, a special and victorious serpent who abides as the genius loci of that ultimate garden, the graveyard.

The ears of the ghost's tale are also omnipresent in Hamlet: in the advices of fathers to sons which occupy so much of the first act; in the "ear of Denmark" which is abused by the false account of the king's death; in the constant practice of eavesdropping: Claudius and Polonius behind the arras listening to Hamlet and Ophelia; Polonius again concealed, this time in the queen's chamber; Claudius sending for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to eavesdrop on Hamlet's plans; Polonius dispatching Reynaldo to ascertain "by indirections" Laertes' reputation in France. Words enter like daggers into Gertrude's ears; Hamlet seeks to know if the king will "hear this piece of work" (III.ii.46-47) as he prepares the play; and the ghost himself, who has initiated the theme, enjoins his son to "List, list, O list."

Indeed there is a sense in which, by the very act of telling his tale, old Hamlet pours poison into the ear of young Hamlet, inflaming him to agony, soul-searching, and revenge, so that the "antic disposition" and the protective cloak of "words, words, words" become for him a temporary but necessary means of escape from the sudden burden of fact and responsibility for action. Thus we find in Hamlet the same triple pattern we have elsewhere observed, from exterior "real" world to interior psychological landscape and back—in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the journey from court to country to court. Here it emerges as a journey into the world of art, play, and fiction, whose own proper personae are the players—players who almost seem to materialize out of his own sudden awareness that the world about him is replete with posture and pretense. Hamlet's journey is a journey into the mental territory of the irrational, and the later "real" voyage to England, where the gravedigger will jest that all men are "as mad as he" (V.i.154), becomes its metaphorical counterpart.

The interior landscape is deftly described by Hamlet himself in a deceptively playful dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the subject of his "bad dreams," (II.ii.243-70), a dialogue which ends with the defiant assertion, "I cannot reason." The entire scene is highly reminiscent of Mercutio's dry disquisition on Queen Mab, contained within a verbal pattern closely analogous to dream logic. But unlike the amiable linguistic duel of Romeo and Mercutio, this contest of wits is a mask for pointed accusation and revelation. There is a heady recklessness in Hamlet's tone, for he is playing with his schoolmates as skillfully as he later intercepts their attempt to "play upon" him. He is wise enough to recognize the limitations of rationality in a world in which fear and death play major roles. His delight in badinage sharpened by double meaning is especially keen when the recipients of his verbal thrusts—Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Osric—perceive only the deceptive surface. In his remarks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the form with which he is playing is argumentum, or syllogistic reasoning, a favorite university game and one well suited to the occasion. His final abjuration, "I cannot reason," rejects not only the triviality of the argumentum but also the self-interest, policy, and cold-blooded "reasoning" of these "indifferent children of the earth" (230). For Hamlet himself is far from indifferent. In an attempt to discover meaning and moral values in a world without them, he places the boundaries of that world metaphorically within himself. Thus he argues that the world is a "prison" (255) not because of the "ambition" suggested by the ambitious Rosencrantz, but rather because he has "bad dreams." He is confined not by physical boundaries, but instead by boundaries which are psychological, part of the realm of imagination. His "bad dreams" are a clear reversal of outer and inner worlds, for the "dreams" are not dreams at all, but rather intimations of the truth behind real events in Denmark. Unprotected by a "nutshell" to insulate him against the pain of sensibility, he moves forward into an area of willed subjectivism, in which "dream" becomes a term synonymous with his own vision. "I cannot reason" thus announces his readiness to abandon logic for emotion. Verbally, at least, he embraces the irrational, preferring Guildenstern's disparaging "dream," and Polonius's "madness," to a world in which logic has replaced human values.

We have noticed that the world of Denmark contains at least three distinct, if related, kinds of illusion: the apparently real illusion of the ghost, verified by the evidence of Hamlet's eyes and ears; the patently false illusion which is the common language of pretense in Claudius's court; and the deliberately fictive illusion of the players, whose world is the world of creative imagination, and whose materials are the same materials as those of the larger play, Hamlet, which contains them. In choosing the world of the creative irrational, the players' world, Hamlet attempts to penetrate the atmosphere of "seeming" which so vexes the court. The instinctive desire to play a part, to escape from the prison of unyielding reality into the interior world of dream and illusion, is a fundamental aspect of his character, and nowhere is it more clearly shown than in his sincere affection for "the tragedians of the city" (II.ii.336). The players' stock-in-trade is this very business of illusion, and it is clear that he feels far more comfortable in their world than in his own. When they are announced, Hamlet once more assumes that strange gaiety which informs his other moments of "playing." Yet he remains mindful of his own limitations; while urging the first player to recite a half-remembered speech, he is suddenly struck by the contrast with his own reaction to actual events. As in Richard III, the soliloquy here becomes the instrument of his own psychological revelation; it is yet another indication of the unity of physical and psychological worlds in Hamlet's persona that we hear his thoughts as if they were spoken aloud:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit?

[II.ii.556-62]

"Dream" is here explicitly equated with "fiction," and also with the poetical terms "forms" and "conceit."

Hamlet is appalled that the player can evince more emotion in a fictive circumstance than he himself in a real one. But once more the implication is of the strangely extended power of dream and creative imagination over reality. The players' element is dream; Hamlet for a moment covets both the element and the response. Later in the same speech he will deprecate himself further, drawing the parallel directly:

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing.

[572-75]

The short line is a pivot turning the subject from the player to Hamlet himself. Where dream in the player's world was a powerful creative tool, dream in Hamlet's bitter estimate of himself is the nonproductive daydream of the village idler, concomitant of inaction. Yet we might observe that the self of whom Hamlet speaks has ceased in part to exist some thirty lines before, at the point when he determined to become not only an actor but also a playwright and director. In conceiving the plan to play "The Mousetrap" before the king, he has begun to exchange the unprofitable musings of John-a-dreams for "dreams of passion" which will provoke passion itself. His self-castigation is once again couched in terms of utterance: he "can say nothing." Yet when he asks for "The Mousetrap," he calls for speech in its most carefully crafted form; and with the insertion of "some dozen or sixteen lines" of his own he speaks through the play, transforming it into a new and private artifact of his own. "Nothing," as always, is a clue to ambiguity here. But what is most significant is that Hamlet has chosen poetry, the realm of the imagination, as the most congenial instrument here; he, too, will "by indirections find directions out" (II.i.66), controlling the world of dream for a moment to make it reveal a hidden truth in the realm of reality.

In all of these instances, concepts of truth and reality have become subjective quantities, controlled and defined by Hamlet's consciousness. It is often remarked that the entire play is full of questions, verbal and thematic, which are never satisfactorily resolved, and which seem to exist for the sake of the question rather than in the hope of any answer. Maynard Mack, in his classic essay "The World of Hamlet,"¹ points out that "Hamlet's world is pre-eminently in the interrogative mood," and that this is an aspect of a prevailing mood of "mysteriousness" throughout the play. Indeed it is this very atmosphere of mystery which is most hospitable to the world of dream. Dreaming for Hamlet becomes a kind of private and individual myth-making, in which we are included through the vehicle of the play, but which remains a closed system of coordinated symbols and images all related to one fulcrum: "conscience," the moral and spiritual dilemma of man.

This central question of conscience and its relation to the dream state is explicitly introduced in the great soliloquy which marks the play's midpoint, the "To be or not to be" speech of act III, scene i. As in so many cases we have examined, the position of the speech is of extreme importance; for a moment Hamlet stands suspended between the real and the illusory, the returning and the going o'er. His is a position very like that described by Keats in a letter to J. H. Reynolds (3 May 1818)—a letter which itself takes the form of a modern dream vision. In it Keats recalls

that tremendous (effect) of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression—whereby this Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken'd and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages—We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist. We are now in that state—We feel the "burden of the Mystery."²

The "burden of the Mystery" is exactly what grips Hamlet at this moment; he will accuse Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of wanting to pluck out its heart. He, too, "see[s] not the ballance of good and evil," for his view of life, like his view of reality, is rendered wholly subjective by the workings of his mind. Yet even in the extremity of moral crisis he plays with verbal images, drawing out a long conceit to make it yield a cryptological solution. The image he chooses, significantly, is once more the central metaphor of sleep and dream.

To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns,
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

[III.i.64-88]

Even here both language and meaning suggest that the "undiscovered country" of dream is more real to him than his immediate surroundings. The magic of sleep is here made metaphorically equivalent to death, so that "to dream" means to take part in some life after death. It is striking that to him "what dreams may come" are more real and more terrifying than the physical fact of dying, just as the world of playing is more real than the world of fact. Yet there is a curious academicism here, a verbal detachment in the midst of this Mercutian catalogue of wrongs. In this speech Hamlet speaks as the philosopher of Everyman, articulating the crucial questions of the human spirit. For all its solitude, it is a formal and public utterance in which the fears and discouragements of all mankind are brought forward and examined. Denmark is a prison; so is all the world. Even the "dreams" of the afterlife are frightening and limiting images, the ultimate case of the embodied irrational. What Hamlet speaks in these lines is a manifesto of the human condition, a subjectivism so far advanced that he identifies with all men rather than with his individual conscience. He is well on his way to the graveyard scene, where the dust of Alexander may be discovered stopping a bunghole.

What happens to Hamlet—and it is a paradigm, in part, for what will happen in each of the tragedies—is that out of his subjectivity grows acceptance and consequent strength. His victory lies in the fact that at last he is able to perceive both the world of dream and the world of reality, the inner world of conscience and the outer world of event. It is this comprehension upon which the drama depends. Hamlet's triumph is an equivocal one, compact of sorrow and resignation, but grounded in an increased self-knowledge. For there comes to him at the last a species of revelation—as Brutus says of himself, his state, "like to a little kingdom, suffers then / The nature of an insurrection" (Julius Caesar II.i.68-69). Most appositely, the revelation comes in the graveyard scene, when Hamlet's confrontations with the world of dream and the supernatural have expanded from the individual (the ghost) to the collective (the human condition) and so to the spiritual or eternal. The eternity of the graveyard is the ultimate leveler, in which Lady Worm claims indifferently the homage of lord and jester. Once more the tone of Hamlet's serious wit may remind us of Mercutio, as he catalogues the residents of the place: politician, courtier, lawyer, jester—again, all aspects of his own complex role. The gravedigger is his final and most telling counterpart, succeeding the ghost and the first player as a repository of values against which he consciously measures himself.

Yet the gravedigger's language differs sharply and significantly from the sonorous epic triplets of the ghost and the mimetic rhetoric of the player; his is no voice of fiction or illusion, but rather one of uncompromising fact, and he speaks a determinedly literal language of spades, shrouds, and skulls. The Hamlet whom he addresses, much altered by his confrontation with the world of dream, is an apt pupil whose psychological landscape may now be identified with the churchyard in which he finds himself; he is at last prepared to accept the literal realities of human frailty and the mortal condition. That he comprehends the lesson of the gravedigger's determined literalism is made plain by his approving aside to Horatio:

How absolute the knave is! We must speak by
the card, or equivocation will undo us.

[V.i.137-38]

The state of equivocation, or ambiguity, has been his own dominant characteristic for much of the play and is of course central to the processes of dream. But in act V the "absoluteness" of the churchyard enforces a rejection of metaphor, euphemism, and verbal disguise; Yorick's skull is literally "chapfall'n" (192) as well as figuratively so. The apparently reductive and often disconcertingly comic literalism of the gravedigger's language, like that of the equally literal and equally comic clown in Antony and Cleopatra, carries with it an insistence on viewing things as they are. Civilizing fictions are stripped away and seen from the perspective of eternity: "let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come" (193-94), just as Claudius's "painted word" will be belied by his deeds.

Hamlet's return to the "real" world, the world literally of things, is made possible by his experience of "equivocation" in language and action—of doubt, fear, misunderstanding, subjectivism, and deliberate ambiguity and pretense. At the play's close he is able to reenter the political world of action because he has made this private journey through the transforming world of dream. And just as a chapfallen skull is remembered because it "had a tongue in it and could sing once" (75-76), so the world of the mortal and "real" is immortalized in the world of art. Thus Hamlet's dying request to Horatio,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story

[V.ii.349-51]

is in a political sense an instruction to inform Fortinbras and the English ambassador of the true state of affairs in Denmark. In another, equally valid sense, however, it is an injunction to perform the play, to tell The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. We have seen parallel resolutions to recount in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and we will see them again in Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. The play as an artifact—"my story"—becomes in each case a surrogate and an example, precluding the necessity for a literal repetition of human tragedy. As life becomes history and history becomes "story," both the audience in the theater and that on the stage—in Hamlet's phrase, "mutes or audience of this act" (337)—are offered a new opportunity for self-knowledge; just as Claudius and Gertrude were the play Hamlet watched, while they themselves watched a play, so we as audience watch ourselves in Hamlet. By viewing the world of Hamlet's interior imagination as dramatically and symbolically equivalent to the exterior political world of Denmark, and the personae of the play as aspects of his consciousness, Shakespeare explores a new dimension of the nature of dream; by further resolving those worlds into a self-conscious fiction, he hints once more at the inseparability of dream from what we loosely call "reality" and suggests that redemption can be approached, and perhaps achieved, by transmutation into art. . . .

In the later tragedies . . . Shakespeare moves . . . toward a new treatment of dream: a transitional stage in which symbols greater than the facts themselves overtake and dominate the world of the play. It is a movement from the particular toward the universal, from the story of one man to the story of all. W. B. Yeats, in an essay called "Emotion of Multitude," perceptively suggests that "there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it."⁶ This second "life," that of the "half-seen world" be-yond the fable, is dream as we have described it. Yet Yeats's two kinds of artistic life can hardly be separated; as he says elsewhere in the same essay, they copy one another "much as a shadow upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight."⁷ It is the merging of these two lives, the growing unity of dream and fable, that takes place in the last plays. And in the last of the "great tragedies," Antony and Cleopatra, this unity is in part achieved by the continued growth of subjectivity, the eradication of the boundaries between seeming and being in the consciousness of the protagonists.

It has frequently been pointed out that Antony and Cleopatra is not a tragedy of the same type as [Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear]. The most popular alternative designation has been "Roman play," a category which includes Julius Caesar and Coriolanus as well as Antony and Cleopatra and which seems to stress a classical as opposed to a Christian framework. With equal validity, perhaps, we may regard it as the last and greatest of the chronicle plays. For our purposes we may accept a mixture of categories without strain, since we are predominantly concerned with a chronological development, and observe that Antony partakes at once of tragedy, chronicle, "Roman play," "problem play," and even, to a certain extent, comedy. This mixture of modes is in fact exactly what we should expect of Shakespeare at this time: it is just this bold synthesis of major tropes which makes the play so vast, a many-colored tapestry of titanic actions and gorgeous language. Shakespeare is at the top of his powers here, and the broad canvas of Antony and Cleopatra gives him scope to incorporate much of what he has previously learned.

Perhaps the most obvious and yet important change from the sequence of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear is that this play's title links two characters, in the pattern of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida. Our attention is thereby drawn to the linking "and," the connection between the two, rather than to either specific consciousness without the other. We are not concerned only with love, even with the titanic love of Antony and Cleopatra, which in its imagery as well as in its oscillation from Rome to Egypt bids fair to encompass the world. Instead we may perhaps conjecture that the entity "Antony-and-Cleopatra" in itself has meaning—essentially, that these two majestic figures, towering over the play which bears their names, are aspects of a single conscience, a single—and outmoded—way of looking at the world. Theirs is an ancient world of heroic values, not unlike that of old Hamlet, or, indeed, of Hector. They are, we might say, older than the thrones upon which they sit; their view of the world, and the extent to which it is controllable and manipulable by their own private actions, is a view which must give way to the practical, colorless reason and "high order" of Octavius Caesar. "Conscience" connotes awareness of self, and of all characters in Shakespeare perhaps none are more intrinsically self-aware than Antony and Cleopatra. "The nobleness of life / Is to do thus;" says Antony,

When such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do't, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.

[I.i.38-40]

The fact that there are two of them means, in dramatic terms, that they are more often than not characterizing one another; even more significantly, characterizations of them are extremely alike. "She makes hungry / Where most she satisfies," (II.ii.239-40) says Enobarbus, Antony's closest companion, of Cleopatra; and Cleopatra in her great dream vision of Antony says of his bounty, "an autumn 'twas / That grew the more by reaping" (V.ii.87-88). Their relationship to the world of dream as we have described it is an extremely close one: they, like Othello, are votaries of dream, believers in prophecy and the supernatural. Antony's exchange with the soothsayer is paralleled by the augurers in Cleopatra's retinue. Dreaming is looked upon by the practical Romans as superstitious delusion: "he dreams," scoffs Pompey, dismissing a false report (II.i.19). The dichotomy we have previously observed, between the scoffers who try to control dream and the believers who are controlled by it, is softened here because of the concentration on character, or what we have been calling "conscience." Antony's encounter with the soothsayer is a good example, because it simultaneously sets a thematic tone and gives us a rapid insight into Antony's overwhelming strengths and weaknesses.

The soothsayer appears at a pivotal moment in Antony's thought. We have met him before at Cleopatra's palace, where in the play's second scene he performed the oracular dramatic function of forecasting in riddle the course of the drama, predicting to Cleopatra's attendants that they will outlive their mistress. Characteristically, the attendants misinterpret this as an omen of long life; yet it is literally true in another sense, since they will die within a few moments of one another and, indeed, within moments of their mistress. In this first encounter the soothsayer is thus parallel to the soothsayer of Julius Caesar or to the earlier monitory dreams. "In Nature's infinite book of secrecy," he says, "A little I can read" (I.ii.10-11); and the fact that it is "Nature's book" will assume a growing thematic importance as the play proceeds. His second appearance, however, is markedly different in tone. We have by now accepted the official place of soothsayers and augurers in the Egyptian court as a major distinguishing factor between the worlds of Egypt and Rome. When the soothsayer appears again, however, he is in Rome; and this subtly but completely alters the comfortable climate of belief. Antony has just accepted the hand of Octavia in a political marriage calculated to bring peace between him and Caesar. With her goodnight to him the soothsayer enters and is catechized by Antony on the prospects of the future.

Antony: Now sirrah: you do wish yourself in Egypt?
Soothsayer: Would I had never come from thence, nor you thither.
Antony: If you can, your reason?
Soothsayer: I see it in my motion, have it not in my tongue, but yet hie you to Egypt again.
Antony: Whose fortunes shall rise higher, say to me, Caesar's, or mine?
Soothsayer: Caesar's.
Therefore, O Antony, stay not by his side.
Thy daemon, that thy spirit which keeps thee, is
Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,
Where Caesar's is not. But near him thy angel
Becomes afeard, as being o'erpow'red: therefore
Make space enough between you.

[II.iii.10-22]

Plainly, this is in part an internal monologue. . . . The soothsayer has a corporeal existence and even a dramatic history in the play; he is not imaginary within the play's terms. But the voice of warning we hear through him is Antony's own voice, projecting a brooding internal premonition of disaster. The soothsayer, like the witches, is here simultaneously an internal and an external character. Maynard Mack, in "The Jacobean Shakespeare," points out that when the soothsayer says, "I see it in my motion," he means "intuitively," and that this is also true of Antony. Mack acutely calls this prediction a "visual surrogate for Antony's own personal intuition."⁸ As such it follows the patterns of many similar supernatural or irrational happenings we have already noted in the tragedies: to put it in its simplest form, the personae and the loci of the drama are themselves consistently surrogate, or complementary, to the operations of conscience in the main characters themselves. We should also note the incorporation of an older theatrical device—the good and bad angels, familiar from the moralities and Doctor Faustus—into the soothsayer's language of metaphor. Once more the irrational is, so to speak, domesticated, made plausible. When later we hear that the "god Hercules, whom Antony loved" (IV.iii.15) leaves him, the effect is the same: a set of character traits—courage, boldness, integrity—have been concretized into a character with a name, though that character's appearance, like that of the "daemon" above, is entirely allusive in the drama itself.

We have touched upon the fact that Antony and Cleopatra are associated with old heroic values which their world can no longer support. In its tacit relationship to myth-making, this tendency is clearly related to the concept of the dream state. Nowhere is the confrontation between this world of heroic gesture and the real, tactical, and unromantic political present made more evident than in Antony's desire to meet Caesar in single combat. He has lost the battle of Actium, and, desperate to regain his honor, he sends a challenge back to Rome for Caesar to meet him "sword against sword, / Ourselves alone" (III.xiii.27-28). The mode of the challenge recalls the world of old Hamlet, who "the ambitious Norway combated" (Ham. I.i.61), and that of Hector, who seeks to settle the seven years' Trojan conflict by meeting singly with a champion of the Greeks. Both in Hamlet and in Troilus and Cressida these heroic moments are relics of a past age; old Hamlet falls victim to the wily and politic Claudius, and, despite the dreams of his wife and the warnings of Cassandra, Hector is slaughtered by the terrifyingly modern-seeming Myrmidons of Achilles. Antony's challenge is no less doomed to failure. Enobarbus murmurs aside on hearing it:

Yes, like enough: high-battled Caesar will
Unstate his happiness and be staged to th'show
Against a sworder! I see men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou has subdued
His judgment too.

[III.xiii.29-37]

Enobarbus is another of those interpreter figures we have found so frequently in the tragedies, who perceives and reports the facts uncolored by imagination. He knows that Antony's behavior is wholly unrealistic; that, unlike Hector, he will not even receive the satisfaction of an affirmative reply. For Antony's mind dwells with the heroism of an earlier age. "Things outward / Do draw the inward quality after them"—this is precisely the movement toward subjectivity we have been recording. Fittingly Enobarbus calls it "dream," and although for him, as for so many, this means "delusion," it is a strength in Antony as well as a mortal weakness. His "judgment," that omnipresent marked boundary of reason, is perhaps his least reliable attribute.

However, it is not for his judgment that we seek to admire Antony, but rather for his superb imagination, which turns all things to dream. His imagination is incommensurate with the exigencies of reality, and what is real to Antony is properly dream to Enobarbus. Yet Antony's self-awareness, his conscience, is by and large adequate to apprehend these shifting realities. His remarkable capacity lies in a kind of negative capability, what in the Antony of Julius Caesar was a strong impulse toward chaos; he is not afraid of metamorphosis. Consider his self-analysis to an only partially comprehending Eros, after the second defeat of his forces:

Antony: Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock
A forkèd mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs:
They are black vesper's pageants.
Eros: Ay, my lord.
Antony: That which is now a horse, even with a thoughty
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
Eros: It does, my lord.
Antony: My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.

[IV.xiv.2-14]

Antony's metaphor is clearly related to Hamlet's teasing of Polonius, as well as to Theseus's speech on "airy nothing" and imagination. The play metaphor ("black vesper's pageants") suggests the fictive quality of the visual metamorphosis he is describing; the effect is once more that of a reversal of categories, the "air" here as in A Midsummer Night's Dream a mockery of reality, which imitates and simulates the real objects of nature. The apparitions of tree and horse shift under the scrutiny of the imagination "even with a thought"—a temporal notation which recalls Lysander's "short as any dream." Antony is acutely aware of his own role-playing existence; the "real" Antony is as indistinguishable from the many momentary shapes as the "real" cloud from rock or dragon. He looks upon himself as a quicksilver entity in a real world—as protean as Puck, but burdened with the mortal substance of Hamlet. He is torn between conflicting sets of values, neither of which he can wholly embrace, and both of which are by this point largely corrupt. When, only moments later, he receives the false message of Cleopatra's death, his personal pattern of reversal becomes complete. Reduced to a sense of total subjectivity in the cloud passage above, he is now moved to action once more, but an action which is still conditioned by the dream of an older age. Convinced by this crowning illusion—that Cleopatra is dead—he makes it come true by killing himself in response. His method of suicide, the ancient Roman custom of running on his sword, is like the earlier impulse to single combat, a heroic gesture which belongs to another time. For Antony's personal dream is a kind of myth-making, the translation of the mortal to the immortal. It is what T. S. Eliot has called "the point of intersection of the timeless with time." And the defeat of time, as we have seen, is a major achievement of the world of dream.

Antony's death comes at the close of act IV, and the whole of the fifth act is therefore Cleopatra's. Cleopatra's sense of self is very acute; she is a constant manipulator of illusion and reality, herself the embodiment of the irrational, the ultimate exception to all rules:

she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

[II.ii.239-42]

She, too, shows an intuitive understanding of the workings of dream, the degree to which reality is only a partial truth. When the clown brings her the "pretty worm of Nilus" in a basket, he warns her not to touch it, "for his biting is immortal" (V.ii.246-47). The malapropism, "immortal" for "mortal," is precisely the impulse we have been tracing in both Antony and Cleopatra; as in so many similar cases, subjective truth comes to the audience in the guise of error, and the clown speaks better than he knows.

Cleopatra's choice of a death is the heroic alternative to a demeaning captivity, a captivity which she particularizes for her attendants by means of the play image:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th' posture of a whore.

[V.ii.216-21]

The image is that of a downward metamorphosis, a rude translation back from the splendid world of Egypt to the shallow imitations of the stage. A version of the play-within-the-play incorporated into natural allusive speech, Cleopatra's verbal picture is a mirror of what has actually been happening upon the stage, but a mirror with a basic distortion. In a sense the reversal is reversed. Sigurd Burckhardt, in Shakespearean Meanings, puts the matter clearly: "What happens here is that we are compelled, against common sense and the everyday certitudes about truth and falsehood, to accept illusion as illusion, trickery as trickery, and in this acceptance find truth."⁹

But while dramatic reality is boldly exposed for itself, magically without destroying the spell of the play, there is another kind of reality which is deliberately undercut. If there is a truth about Cleopatra, it lies in the "serpent of old Nile" and not in the squeaking boy. For Cleopatra, like Antony, projects what is in a sense a myth of herself, which is incompatible with political fact and yet transcends it. She is too large for the world which tries to contain her. And Antony and Cleopatra, like the chronicle plays of the second Henriad with which it has so much in common, is compelled to suggest the impossibility of a coexistence between dream and "reason" in its limiting sense of "order." "The air," says Enobarbus

but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.

[II.ii.218-20]

The air would have—if it could have. But it could not. Order in nature must be maintained. The "airy nothings" of Theseus, the "air . . . thin air" of Prospero and even the "piece of tender air" of Posthumus's riddle must give place in this play to natural law, just as the dream world of Antony and Cleopatra themselves is forced to give way to civil law. Reality, as exemplified by the coming of the sober order of Caesar, is in itself a significant limitation. And yet Cleopatra, conscious of so much, is conscious of this too. In her last magnificent dream vision of Antony she confronts the problem of art and nature, vision and reality; her answer, which is both a tortured and a transcendent one, is our direct and proper portal into the dream world of the romances.

Dolabella is Cleopatra's confidant here, as Eros and Enobarbus have been Antony's; significantly, a great deal of the play's character analysis is verbalized through the device of a major character speaking to a subordinate. It is a more sophisticated dramatic device than that of soliloquy, and in effect it externalizes the interior dialogues of earlier protagonists with t hemselves. As concrete evidence we may note the comparative simplicity of syntax, as compared, for instance, with an extreme example like Hamlet's "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy, which contains eleven rhetorical questions, nine exclamations, and twelve sentences in direct discourse. By contrast Cleopatra, though her words are mostly for her own ears, is fairly straightforward.

Cleopatra: You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams,
Is't not your trick?
Dolabella: I understand not, madam.
Cleopatra: I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man.
Dolabella: If it might please ye—
Cleopatra: His face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, th' earth.
Dolabella: Most sovereign creature—
Cleopatra: His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in 't: an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphinlike, they showed his back above
The element they lived in. In his livery
Walked crowns and crownets: realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket
Dolabella: Cleopatra—
Cleopatra: Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
Dolabella: Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra: You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But if there be nor ever were one such,
It's past the size of dreaming; nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy, yet t' imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

[V.ii.74-100]

Cleopatra's dream is a waking dream, but it is a true one—true, at least, within her own "conscience" and communicating itself to us. She acknowledges the generally low reputation of dream among the forthright Romans; "boys or women" are the dreamers there. Her description of Antony, however, is no weakling's delusion, but rather virtually a theogony in little. In her eyes he becomes a figure like Mars or Thor—related indeed to the Julius Caesar of Cassius's disgruntled description, who "doth bestride the world like a colossus." When we look closer, however, we can notice that a great deal of her description is actually natural imagery: the "sun and moon" in his eyes, his anger like "rattling thunder," his generosity of spirit a constant harvest, with "no winter in't." He is a relative of Adam Kadmon, the sum of the world's inheritance rather than a beneficiary. "Realms and islands were / As plates dropped from his pocket." The structural principle of this description is of considerable interest, for it is actually the reverse of what we have been calling "internal landscape." Where in King Lear, for example, the heath mirrored an aspect of Lear's state of soul, here Antony's soul is the subject, and the world of nature the applied metaphor. This is the creative function of dream again, the dream work producing a verbal artifact. The literal man is indeed, as Dolabella gently implies, not wholly recognizable here; but the dream has an independent verisimilitude of its own. It is the last and greatest production of Cleopatra's conscience. Derek Traversi has remarked, apropos of this subject, that "Cleopatra is living in a world which is the projection of her own feelings. That world, while it lasts, is splendidly valid, vital in its projection; only death, which is the end of vitality, can prevent her awakening from it."¹⁰ The connection we have been striving to demonstrate between conscience and dream is here made manifest.

Even the pacing of this remarkable scene is nothing short of brilliant; just at the point when Dolabella's exasperation begins to communicate itself to us, in the middle of a breath-taking virtuosity of creative description, Cleopatra finely turns the dialogue back to her listener for a moment, before drawing the lesson of her own vision. She is dreamer and augurer in one, expounder and interpreter, and her hyperbole is so instinct with vitality and conviction that she carries us with her through an extraordinary train of reasoning: if there had ever been anyone like the dream—Antony she has described—and there has been and is from the moment she describes him—he would be "past the size of dreaming," since the process of dream itself is not capable of such a creation. Things of nature are not as wonderful as things created by the fancy, she continues; yet to imagine an Antony— as she has, and as Shakespeare has—gives nature for once a creature more extraordinary than those of fancy, defeating the fictive, the "shadows," by means of the real. The circle is complete, the exchange of the dream for the reality translated back into a new form of reality which includes and transcends "shadows." At this level of the imagination the two categories at last flow into one another unimpeded. We have had a hint of the same transcendence in Enobarbus's earlier description of Cleopatra, "O'erpicturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature" (II.ii.202-03). And it is most fitting that in their ultimate enshrinement they should be again equal, as they have been throughout.

The new concept of nature here beginning to make its appearance is one which includes both dream and reality. It is characteristic of the language of Antony and Cleopatra, and indeed of all the tragedies, that Cleopatra should state the concept in terms of argument: "Nature's piece 'gainst fancy." To Perdita and Polixenes it will become "great creating Nature," incorporating without strain the one pole into the other. For in the romances a renewed and expanded nature will in a sense become equivalent to the world of dream, a temporary but transcendent stage of regenerative awareness; the "art" which "itself is Nature" will encompass for a significant moment the antinomies of illusion and reality.

Notes

¹Yale Review, 41 (1952), 502-23.

²The Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Lionel Trilling (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), p. 99.

⁶ In Ideas of Good and Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1903), p. 341.

⁷ Ibid., p. 340.

⁸ In Jacobean Theater, Stratford-upon Avon Studies, No. 1 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960), p. 27.

⁹ "The King's Language" (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1968), pp. 281-82.

¹⁰An Approach to Shakespeare, 2d ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 258.