Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres

This book explores how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, it argues that Shakespeare systematically exploits early modern physiological, religious, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to reshape conventions of dramatic genre, and to experiment with dream-inspired plots.The book discusses the significance of dreams and sleep in early modern culture, and explores the dramatic opportunities that this offered to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It also offers new insights into how Shakespeare adapted earlier literary models of dreams and sleep – including those found in classical drama, in medieval dream visions, and in native English dramatic traditions. The book appeals to academics, students, teachers, and practitioners in the fields of literature, drama, and cultural history, as well as to general readers interested in Shakespeare’s works and their cultural context.

“This book’s radical approach to Shakespeare’s genres is integral to our understanding of the playwright’s dramaturgy, and therefore represents a major scholarly contribution.” (Darren Freebury-Jones, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 72 (1-2), 2021)“Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres, Claude Fretz has ended our wait for such a volume, and in so doing has made a powerful contribution not only to this subfield but also to scholarship on early modern English literature and culture in general. … Marjorie Garber did, Fretz achieves coverage by working topically across and within individual genres.” (Jennifer Lewin, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75 (3), 2022)“The greatest strength of this study is the dialogue into which it enters with the Shakespearean texts. Certainly, Fretz speaks about the plays and their dreamscapes from a well-read historical perspective that allows him to illuminate the webs of meaning in which his primary texts are entangled. … its readers have gained a sense of the generic substance and significance of Shakespeare’s dreams, and of his sleepers, dreamers and insomniacs. And Caliban cries to dream again.” (Joachim Frenk, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 156, 2020)

Claude Fretz is Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and Associate Fellow of the research centre ‘European Dream-Cultures’ at Saarland University, Germany. He obtained his PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He has published on Shakespeare, representations of dreams and sleep in early modern literature, and Restoration drama.