Reading the Early Modern Dream

The Terrors of the Night

Sue Wiseman, Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O'Callaghan, Sue Wiseman, Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O'Callaghan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415386012
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155402
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dreams have been significant in many different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This thought-provoking collection of essays explores dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements. In topics ranging from the dreams of animals to the visions of Elizabeth I, and from prophetic dreams to ghosts in political writing, this book asks what meanings early modern people found in dreams.

1 Introduction

Reading the Early Modern Dream

S. J. Wiseman

I

That there should bee divine dreames seems unreasonably doubted by Aristotle. That there are demonicall dreames wee have little reason to doubt. Why may there not be Angelicall? If there bee Guardian spirits, they may not bee unactively about us in sleepe, but may sometimes order our dreames, and many strange hints, instigations, or discoveries which are so amazing unto us, may arise from such foundations.

But the phantasies of sleepe do commonly walk in the great roade of naturall & animal dreames; wherein the thoughts or actions of the day are acted over & echoed in the night. Who can therefore wonder that Chrysostome should dreame of St. Paul who dayly read his Epistles; or that Cardan whose head was so taken up about the stares should dreame that his soul was in the moone!¹

The nature of dreams and dreaming troubled ancient philosophers and Renaissance theorists alike. A true dream could be predictive, but not all dreams were true. Thomas Browne here gives us the possible nature of dreams — if they could be ‘demonicall’ then why not ‘Angelicall’, he asks. Yet, he reminds his reader, many dreams are ‘naturall & animall’ in origin. For people in seventeenth-century England these were significant problems. At the same time, Browne hints at the way in which dreams suggest something about the dreamer’s state of mind — an increasingly important concern in dream interpretation. The essays that follow address the status and interpretation of dreams in England and Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. As the material considered here suggests, dreams were practically and theoretically important. Examining a broad range of written dreams, attending to ways of writing, vocabulary and shifting perspectives on the experience of the dream, the essays in this collection also suggests some shifts in the significance of the dream between the beginning and the end of the period. Let us turn to early modern thinking on dreams.

At the start of our period certain questions pressed upon the dreamer: Are dreams significant and if so which ones and how? How can one tell a good dream from a bad? Where is human and where supra-human agency in a dream? In the written dream many of these questions are foregrounded and, sometimes, answered. The available dream theory, though, responded to them in distinct ways. Thomas Hill’s Most pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretacioun of Dreames (published in London, 1576 or possibly earlier) emphasises prognostication.² Hill, however, is reserved on the question of the origin of the prognosticatory power of dreams, though he does mention spirits occasionally; he is more concerned with the origin of dreams in the person. He attributes dreams ‘to the Imaginative parte’, and argues that, contrasting with ‘the motion of wakynge’, which ‘beginneth from the outwarde senses, and endeth at the memorative’, we can see that ‘the motion of sleep contrarye begynne from this, and Endeth at the outward motions’. Accordingly, it is to be understood as ‘a passion of the inner partes, and not of the memorative, nor cognitative’.³ The second part of Hill’s study offers a magnificent, wearying, list of dream images explained, and has attracted the interest of subsequent critics to the extent that it has become key to the reception of Hill’s text. Hill’s Interpretacioun is sometimes taken as the main source of dream interpretation in the early modern period, and as offering information on how early modern people set about making sense of their dreams. However, it is not clear that Hill’s approach entirely answered the questions seventeenth-century men and women came to ask of dreams and night experiences. Indeed, other writers ask other questions — a key question was whether dreams were to be explained as supernatural or as generated by the state of the sleeper’s mind and body. Artemidorus, for example ‘proposed somnium as proleptic experience, and insomnium as nightmares which reflected matters of mind and body’. including how ‘divine or demonic inspiration co-existed with secular categories which explained mental behaviour’.⁴ Many writers were concerned with the problem of how to distinguish types of dreams. The fact that a particular dream might be attributed to divine inspiration, demonic mockery, or melancholy induced by poor diet had a destabilising effect on the possibilities of dream interpretation.

During the seventeenth century what the dream said about the self became significant. Thomas Tryon’s interest in the dream as a potential source of self-knowledge is an index of the shift in the emphasis in dream theory during the seventeenth century. In De Anima Aristotle sees dream as the product of imagination without sensory regulation, and so untrue. Even so, the ancients were also a sources of the idea that a dream might be neither delusional, nor a visitation, but, as Manfred Weidhorn puts it ‘subjective’ — caused by the ‘innate powers of the soul’ set free in sleep.⁵ Tryon, without responding specifically to Aristotle, sees dream as continued activity in the absence of sense. Tryon argues that if ‘Man is the compleat Image of God and Nature, and contains the Principles and Properties of all things Corporial and Incorporeal’.⁶ Man has gross aspects, but also ‘Soul; and Spirit which gives Life and Motion to the Body of Flesh, and answers to the Soul of the great World’. Therefore, man is ‘the little World’, and like God ‘the Soul and Spirit in Man, it is always in motion’.⁷ As the scripture says of God:

he slumbereth not, nor sleepeth; for sleep does truly signifie death and weakness, and nothing sleepeth but what is mortal and finite. So the soul and spirit in man sleepeth not, as being the Breath of God and Eternal[.]

Dreams, then, are evidence of God’s guarantee of the human for it is like imagining ‘Fire without heat’ to conceive that ‘an Intellectual Immortal Soul, can for one moment cease from Action suitable to its Nature’. Tryon’s sense that dreams are part of God’s work in the human leads him to emphasise what they can tell the dreamer about him or her self — ‘[s]o that if a man would but turn their Eyes inward, and learn to know themselves, and the Principles and degrees of their own nature’ by interpreting their dreams they could ‘consequently know their own Complection’.⁸

However, it is also characteristic of this period that although Tryon saw dreams as an inward eye — a route to self-understanding — he nevertheless situated his argument in the context of contemporary thinking. Browne and Tryon are typical of seventeenth century writers on the dream in their emphasis on a range of criteria impacting on interpretation. At the end of the period the context in which Tryon sees his own interpretation is given in the synopsis of his fourth chapter:

• 1st. The Constitution
• 2dly, Profession or Course of life.
• 3dly, The influx of the Planets.
• 4thly, Diet or Medicine.
• 5thly, Evil Spirits.
• 6thly, Good Spirits and Angels.
• 7thly, and lastly, Extraordinary Visions from God;

The body, prognosticatory power, health, sleep and the things that have power of human fates and feelings — this is the context in which Tryon saw himself working in the late seventeenth century. He integrates humoral theory, too, reminding the reader to make ‘distinction of the several kinds of Dreams, arising from each Complexion, Sanguine, Cholerick, Melancholy and Phlegmatick’.⁹ In this he is close to the view of the subject found in John Elyot’s The Castle of Health (1610). Recommending ‘moderate sleepe’, Elyot reminds us that ‘digestion is made better or more perfect by sleepe, the body fatter, the minde more quiet and cleere, the humours temperate, and by much watch all things happen contrary’.¹⁰

In addressing the early modern dream, modern theorists have often drawn on and responded to the dominant theories of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, post-dated by the publisher to 1900 so that it could catch the new century. After a slow start (it initially only sold 351 copies) it had, as we know, a transforming effect not merely on the consideration of dreams but on the concept of the human itself.¹¹ From the point of view of the history of dreams, Freud’s intervention on the subject of the dream was decisive because of his splitting of manifest and latent content. Other attempts to ‘solve the problem of dreams’ mistakenly ‘dealt directly with their manifest content’.¹² As we know, Freud saw wishes as both expressed and concealed in the dream. For him, the ‘manifest content’ — what we might remember or indeed tell — was to be understood as a compressed symbolic representation of the latent content. Freud considered the manifest dream to be a pictogram (in visual terms) or, in terms of written text, to be ‘half a page’ story in comparison to the many pages needed to make an interpretation which would, even so, remain a provisional engagement with the ‘dream thoughts’ or latent content.¹³ Latent content — the contradictory impulses generated by the psyche — is for Freud the key component of the dream; it is latent, not manifest, content which led the interpreter to understanding of the unconscious. Freud’s identification of dreams as the ‘royal road to the unconscious activities of the mind’ put dreams at the centre of twentieth-century thought. Dreams gave Freud the evidence he needed that ‘what is suppressed continues to exist . . . and remains capable of psychical functioning’ — and so dream interpretation was put at the service of a new way of knowing the subject.¹⁴ However, his downgrading of the manifest content of the dream — the object of so much interest to other dream-interpreters — can be said to have had the opposite effect. Under and since Freudian analysis the dream has been a part of a dynamic of knowledge of the self and culture which privileges very different parts of the dreaming experience, and knows them in very different ways, from the frameworks available to early modern dream theorist.

Post-Freudian writers have discussed how the history of the early modern dream can be written inevitably in the light of Freud’s epoch-making reinvention of the dream but also with attention to the terms of the early modern debates. Interpretations of the early modern dream are crucially affected by whether critics see sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dreams as closely related to the medieval period (which supplied dream interpreters with many of their resources, if not always their paradigms) or as either embryonically or more fully modern — part of the same epoch as Freud. Many writers have canvassed the early modern dream for signs of modernity and the processes by which it was interpreted for signs of modernity. Thus, Thomas Hill is included in the anthology, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860 because, although it is ‘mainly concerned with prognostication’, nevertheless, ‘some of Hill’s interpretations imply that he recognised dreams were also determined by fears and wishes’; the editors also see his attribution of ‘constant meanings to certain objects and happenings’ as anticipating ‘modern theories of dream symbolism’. For Hunter and Macalpine, Hill also discloses that ‘the content of dreams has apparently changed little over the centuries’.¹⁵ Kathleen McLuskie argues that the vocabulary readers use to interpret dreams has remained remarkably stable from the early modern to the modern period. Writing of dream in contemporary film, specifically David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, McLuskie argues, ‘In its complex intertextuality and its play with Freudianism, Blue Velvet seems very much of its time. Yet the range of cultural reference which every spectator must bring to this film offers a model of the complexities required to provide an adequate account of dreams in earlier cultures.’ As she points out, although modern and early modern interpretations and uses of dream symbolism differ widely, in each case the decoding of symbols is a crucial way in which the ‘personal’ dream can ‘function socially’.¹⁶

Other writers have placed more emphasis on the specifically historical characteristics of early modern dreams and dream interpretation, seeing dreams in the context of early modern political and religious culture, and emphasising the centrality of supernatural ways of thinking to early modern approaches to dreams. From this point of view the significant issue about the dream is not so much the ‘personal’, or the question of what they may tell us about the subject, as the way in which the dream has social or political purchase and is shaped by early modern iconography and genre. Keith Thomas also takes Hill’s The Most Pleasaunte Art of the Interpretacioun of Dreames as his starting point, but emphasises that ‘religion. . . reinforced the ancient belief in the divinatory power of dreams’. Dreams helped men and women to take decisions — they had a practical impact on daily life. As Thomas sees it, the key issue is the prognosticatory power of dreams not the diversity or enigmatic qualities of the dream experience. Accordingly, he writes that ‘[m]ost of the “visions” and “revelations” which were so common during the Interregnum were probably what we would call dreams’.¹⁷ And at the same time, as Nigel Smith reminds us, other writers did come to ask other questions — including how ‘divine or demonic inspiration co-existed with secular categories which explained mental behaviour’.¹⁸ As Kate Hodgkin’s essay in this collection indicates, this area was fraught and, for seventeenth-century writers on dream, crucial.

The period addressed by the authors in this collection can be characterised as one of stability in contrast to the epochal shifts in oneiric interpretation initiated by, for example, Aristotle and Freud. However, if the period under consideration saw relatively little change in the understanding and interpretation of dreams, as these essays indicate, the idea of the ‘dream’ was doing important labour in early modern culture.¹⁹ One indication of the hold that dreams had on questions of cultural interpretation is the rich and various formal spread running from the dream-vision poem to theoretical considerations, diaries, letters, plays, pamphlets and poems. Accordingly, we find the dream understood as a genre of writing (the dream-vision), a collection of interpretable symbols, an experience which an individual might attribute to God or the devil, an indication of physical and mental health and its opposite, and a compromised sign of human status itself, as the dream was called upon to articulate crucial desires and problems in early modern experience. The essays that follow attend to the formal dimensions of the dream and, at the same time, suggest a thematic engagement with seventeenth century culture. Four categories are important in this thematic engagement: the relationships between soul, and to a lesser extent mind, and body; the question of how the dream might tell us about psychic structures; what the early modern dream might tell us about the ‘human’; and the political dream as instrumental and performative.

The Jacobean editor of the Mirror for Magistrates, Richard Niccols, Rachel Speght, the author of a poetic dream-vision, and the poet Edmund Spenser are some of the writers considered in this collection. Each, in ways inflected by their status, education and religious and political situation, had access to mediated versions of classical and medieval dream theory and contemporary writings on dream. However, while some writers — like Sir Thomas Browne — were alert to the distinct sources of particular opinion on dreams that was not the case with all writers. To Niccols and Speght perhaps narrative conventions were more important than careful theorisation of the root of dreams. Moreover, dream interpretation was likely to be part of a current situation. Thus, seventeenth-century readers of dreams did not often approach the subject from the point of view of a full theoretical history but in terms of what they wanted to understand. Besides specific circumstances of the writings discussed, shifting currents of thought affected writers. As these essays demonstrate, the interpretation of dreams required the interpreter to make a judgement on relationship between body and soul, body ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Dream
• 2 Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneiric Transport in Seventeenth-century Europe
• 3 'Onely Proper Unto Man': Dreaming and Being Human
• 4 Dream-visions of Elizabeth I
• 5 Dreams, Prophecies and Politics: John Dee and the Elizabethan Court 1575-1585
• 6 Dreaming the Dead: Ghosts and History in the Early Seventeenth Century
• 7 'Imaginarie in Manner: Reall in Matter': Rachel Speght's Dreame and the Female Scholar-poet
• 8 Dreaming Meanings: Some Early Modern Dream Thoughts
• 9 'I Saw No Angel': Civil War Dreams and the History of Dreaming
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index