At the end of Platoâs Symposium (c.385â78 BC), after an all-night celebration of the tragedian Agathonâs success in the Athenian drama festival, Aristodemus, a follower of Socrates, has fallen asleep. When he awakes, he notices that Agathon, the comedian Aristophanes, and Socrates are still up and drinking. Half-conscious and half-asleep, Aristodemus cannot âremember most of the discussion, because heâd missed the start of it and anyway he was sleepyâ (Plato 2008, p. 71). However, he can still recall Socratesâ attempts at persuading the two playwrights that âknowing how to compose comedies and knowing how to compose tragedies must combine in a single person and that a professional tragic playwright [is] also a professional comic playwrightâ (p. 71). Socratesâ suggestion is that the art of the tragedian is very similar, if not identical, to the art of the comedian and that tragedy and comedy are alike in their artistic essence. Even though no classical playwright wrote both comic and tragic plays, Socratesâ point is greeted with agreement by both Agathon and Aristophanes, which is attributed to their tiredness (pp. 71â2). In Platoâs Symposium, sleepiness and nocturnal inebriation contribute to the fusion of the arts of comedy and tragedy: even though Socratesâ rationale for combining the two genres into one discourse remains obscure, the participantsâ drowsiness makes them concur with him anyway. It seems that the grounds on which the two genres are separated are as tenuous as the ones on which they may be merged and that something as trivial as sleepiness can make these artificial divisions disappear.
Whereas in the classical world, the conflation of comedy and tragedy was largely confined to theoretical reasoning as found in Platoâs Symposiumâand the comedian and the tragedian remained separate professionsâin the English Renaissance, the distinction between comedy and tragedy was more blurred: early modern playwrights wrote in the genres of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy, as well as in various modes that can be more difficult to classify, including history, court drama, and masque.1 In the early modern period, the dramatic experimentation that is little more than a flight of fancy in Platoâs Symposium became reality; and in Shakespeareâs plays, ideas and devices of dreams and sleep were crucial to its realisation. It is the aim of this book to explore the deep connection between Shakespeareâs dramatic worlds, which are defined by the playsâ structures of genre, and his use of images of dreams and sleep. The book argues that devices of dreams and sleep regularly support Shakespeareâs deviations from earlier conventions of comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, or romance and that they are, moreover, at the heart of the innovative dramatic and generic designs seen in his late plays.
Shakespeareâs refashioning of genre, of course, would not have been possible without the general disregard of dramatic conventions in the Renaissance. Elizabethan playwrights were probably familiar only with the broad outlines of Aristotleâs account of dramatic form, and this helped facilitate the development of looser dramatic practices (Dewar-Watson 2018, pp. 30â9; Montano 1985, p. 73; Neill 2010, p. 122). Poloniusâs description of Hamletâs actors, which pushes the terminology of genre to breaking point, suggests that generic experimentation was very much part of theatre culture at the time: âThe best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimitedâ (Hamlet, 2.2.333â6). Elizabethan dramatic practice famously led Sir Philip Sidney, who was familiar with classical dramatic theory (Stewart 2001, pp. 54â5, 109; Dewar-Watson 2018, pp. 34â7), to lament the disregard for decorum and accuse his contemporaries of producing âneither right Tragedies, nor right Comediesâ (Sidney 1595, sig. I1r). The fact that only a small number of the performances listed in Philip Hensloweâs diary have generic designations may indeed suggest that genres were much less relevant in performance than they perhaps would have been in print (see Berek 2006, p. 161). In the case of tragedy, Tanya Pollard has argued that most of Shakespeareâs contemporaries would have understood and recognised this genre not from its formal characteristics, but mainly âthrough its effect on audiences: a successful tragedy should move its hearers not only to sorrow, but also to tearsâ (2013, p. 85). This flexibility in the early modern understanding of dramatic genre is shown by the Italian-French scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger. He argued in Poetices Libri Septem (1561) that a tragic plot did not in fact require an unhappy ending, but only needed to âinclude terrible thingsâ (translated in Orgel 1979, p. 114). This loose definition of tragedy explains, for example, why Shakespeareâs Cymbeline (1610) is introduced as a tragedy in the 1623 folio, despite ending with family reunion and political reconciliation.
In many respects, Elizabethan drama demonstrates a disregard for classical genre theory. Janette Dillon has shown that early plays like Thomas Prestonâs Cambyses (1561) and Richard Edwardsâs Damon and Pyhtias (1564â5) already mix tragic and comic matters (Dillon 2002, pp. 48â9); and even if drama became, as Dillon suggests, more âgenerically classifiableâ towards the end of the sixteenth century (p. 49), its classical conventions continued to be breached. The anonymous play Mucedorus (c.1590), for example, contains comic as well as tragic material and is viewed by Howard Felperin as a dramatic romance (1972, pp. 19â20). The playâs prologue sets the tone for its generically hybrid plot: in a dialogue between the allegorical figures of Comedy and Envy, the latter vows to âmixe your [Comedyâs] musicke with a tragick endâ (Mucedorus 1598, sig. A2r)âor, as Comedy sees it, âwith tragick fumes | To braue my play vnto my deepe disgraceâ (sig. A3r). The anonymous court drama The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1582), too, combines elements of romantic comedy and tragedy and is often cited as a possible influence on Shakespeareâs Cymbeline (see Ward 2012). That early modern playwrights were conscious of what they were doing is shown by John Lylyâs explicit defence of these generic innovations in his prologue to Midas (1590), where he argued that drama needed to reflect Englandâs changing population:
Traffic and travel hath woven the nature of all nations into ours, and made this land like an arras, full of device, which was broadcloth, full of workmanship. [âŠ] If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused because the whole world is become a hodgepodge. (Lyly 2000, Midas, Prologue, lines 13â16, 20â2).
Similarly to Lyly, the Italian humanist Francesco Robortello, who published the first major Renaissance commentary on Aristotleâs Poetics (c.335 BC) in 1548 together with a series of essays on genre, proclaimed that in comedy, âthere should also be present that which is taken from the nature and custom of human actions, which always have in them something troublesome or distressingâ (quoted in Herrick 1950, p. 232). To both Lyly and Robortello , the mimetic function of drama meant that comedy needed to become more varied and could even include unsettling and quasi-tragic events.
That Shakespeare composed his works at a time of eroding genre conventions and that he, too, displayed considerable generic and dramatic ingenuity, has been discussed exhaustively in modern critical writings (Doran 1954, pp. 105â215; Danson 2000; Snyder 1979; Guneratne 2011). In this book, I do not seek to repeat those observations; instead, I intend to offer a fresh and radical approach to Shakespeareâs genres through an analysis of the functions of dreams and sleep, showing that representations of dreams and sleep are interwoven with Shakespeareâs conception of genre. I describe this approach as âradicalâ because it ultimately proposes a new way of considering the generically unclassifiable late plays, viewing them as a dramatic kind that is designed to escape both genre and logicâlike a dreamâbut is at the same time the outcome of Shakespeareâs earlier attempts to experiment with comedy and tragedy (including comic or tragic history plays), as well as with dreams and sleep. My discussion extends a strand of literary criticism and historical investigation that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Scholarship on dreams in Shakespeare, in particular, has developed significantly from the blanket assertion made by Elmer Edgar Stoll in 1927 that, âwith Shakespeare, as with Elizabethan dramatists generally, it may be taken as a rule, fairly absolute, not...