Dream Sequences in Shakespeare

A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Meg Harris Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000280807
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

This book takes a new approach to Shakespeare's plays, exploring them as dream-thought in the modern psychoanalytic sense of unconscious thinking.

Through his commitment to poetic language, Shakespeare offers images and dramatic sequences that illustrate fundamental developmental conflicts, the solutions for which are not preconceived but evolve through the process of dramatisation. In this volume, Meg Harris Williams explores the fundamental distinction between the surface meanings of plot or argument and the deep grammar of dreamlife, applied not only to those plays known as 'dream-plays' but also to critical sequences throughout Shakespeare's oeuvre.

Through a post-Kleinian model based on the thinking of Bion, Meltzer, and Money-Kyrle, this book sheds new light on both Shakespeare's own relation to the play and on the identificatory processes of the playwright, reader, or audience. Dream Sequences in Shakespeare is important reading for psychoanalysts, playwrights, and students.

Chapter 1
The individual and the group: Richard II and Julius Caesar

In this chapter I would like to discuss two plays about the adolescent mind. By this I do not necessarily refer to young adults of a certain era in a certain social context, but to a particular state of mind. The adolescent state of mind is that which marks a turbulent turning-point in the evolving mentality of an individual who is emerging from a quiescent or latent condition. Richard II and Julius Caesar are both concerned with the adolescent’s relation to his ‘group’ and attempt to grow from its shelter into an individual, to develop a sense of personal rather than group identity. The challenge for the adolescent, in Meltzer’s view, is to suffer the paradoxical feeling of moving backwards into dependence on internal objects in the face of the hormonal and societal pressure to progress ‘ruthlessly’ to success:

The adolescent thinks that what leads him forward into the adult world is in reality regressive, while what he experiences as the thing which pushes him back, to the point of making him into a child again, is in reality the very thing which makes him an adult … should he be ruthless, inflicting suffering on others in order to achieve success, or should he turn backwards and be the one to suffer?

(Meltzer & Harris, [2011] 2018, p. 27)

When the ‘dreaminess becomes too painful’, the adolescent who finds the sense of helplessness intolerable may retreat into this march for success.

In Richard II and in Julius Caesar, we see different dramatisations of the conflict between success (leadership) and internal reliance in relation to the surrounding group.

Richard II: a dream of deposition ^*

Richard II is the king who deposes himself in a dream of moving from a narcissistic (paranoid-schizoid) to a depressive object-related vertex, with a sense also of moving from homosexual to heterosexual values. His self-deposition appears to be imposed by his group – the aristocratic society of his upbringing – but is in fact engineered by himself. It illustrates the fundamental Kleinian developmental shift of values. Essentially it is a story of growing up and out from within the adolescent group whose basic assumptions he is too intelligent not to perceive. In disposing of his ‘kingship’, his figurehead role of pseudo-divinity at the head of the group, he appears he is one of those ‘aloof’ adolescents. The loss of the crown is a dream of deposition – deposition of these basic assumptions.

In the process he moves from player-king to poet-king, as he was originally dubbed by Walter Pater, who described the entire play as a ‘lyrical ballad’ ([1889] 2016, p. 211). The background imagery of the play in which his story is set forms an intricate medieval tapestry of significant emblems: crown, sun, green land, tree circulating blood. This tapestry reminds us of the hierarchic structure of England as the idealised mother country of all the characters, which like an organism demands the harmony and obedience of all its components in accordance with the basic assumption of Divine Right. Like all basic assumptions (in Bion’s definition), this is known by everyone to be a lie but is supposed to be necessary for social stability and protection from enemies. It was a lie in fact of Shakespeare’s day, not of the historical Richard’s, underlining that this was probably Shakespeare’s most dangerous play, with Elizabeth herself famously remarking ‘Know ye not, I am Richard II?’ In the garden scene, the gardeners point out how they prune trees in order to keep them in order: if any grows too high, it will have its head chopped off, the moral being that this is the way the country should be governed in order to pacify its nobility and avert civil war. The nobility think in the same way, but Richard has a not-yetformulable premonition of some other way of thinking. What appears to be his weakness is really his inkling of another possible role in life, another identity.

The mother-land

Initially the play’s ‘adventitious poetic gold’ (Pater) accrues to the person of Richard himself in a way that reflects the glorious idealisation of the mother-country, expressed in John of Gaunt’s famous speech:

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house

Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessed lot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings …

(II.i.42–51)

The fortress island womb, ringing its precious stone, mirrors the crown. But Richard is internally driven to sacrifice his kingship in order to develop as an individual – a progression that is enacted by his social humiliation and death. His story has always moved readers and audiences, yet strangely, it is not generally regarded as a developmental achievement but as ‘poetic justice’ in the sense of self-directed revenge brought on by a sensitive but deluded and doomed personality.

Gaunt’s speech is his emotive swansong, knowing in his heart that the day of that beautiful myth is over. He describes himself as both ‘inspired’ and ‘expiring’ and even prophesies the beginnings of modern capitalism:

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or pelting farm …

(ll. 57–60)

A new system of government is on the horizon, based on ‘inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’ and the end of glorious empire (300 years before it happened or had scarcely begun):

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

(ll. 65–66)

He also speaks the only words of truth to Richard, pointing out to him that he is not lord of time:

Richard: Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live.

Gaunt: But not a minute, king, that thou canst give.

(I.iii.225–226)

These are words that come back to Richard for re-digestion in his own final scene. It is Gaunt indeed who first suggests the idea of self-deposition when he prophesies that Richard is ‘possess’d to depose himself’ – with a pun on possession as both madness and ownership. He will no longer own his mother-country, but Richard has already discovered that that is an illusion. Only on the verge of death can Gaunt say what he means, give voice to the music in his soul, for ‘the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony.’

In this way, Gaunt’s deathbed exhortations to Richard, though intended as impassioned warning and almost a curse, represent his glimpse of an alternative worldview and have an undercurrent of intelligent truthful vision that in fact awakens Richard’s curiosity. Richard’s final dismissive comment on Gaunt’s demise – ‘His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be’ – is in a way a perverse and unwilling acceptance of an emotional inheritance. Inspired and expiring, Gaunt breathes a type of poetic responsibility into his nephew, distasteful as Richard finds it. There is a closeness in mindview that is absent in Boling-broke’s relationship with either his father or his uncle York, whom he flatters and smoothly addresses as ‘father’.

Speechless death

The process of Richard’s relinquishing or deposing his narcissism – in which he is king of the rigid but fragile social organisation – begins with his rebelling against accepted codes of conduct. This occurs when he stops the duel between two of his subjects, Mowbray and Bolingbroke – not from sheer arbitrariness as might appear, but because a feeling-fact is pushing at his consciousness (as Bion would say), demanding to be formulated:

Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,

And both return back to their chairs again.

(I.iii.119–120)

Their blood, he says, would be a waste of an expensive upbringing. Instead of blood he suggests banishment, and the two nobles react in different ways. He who will be the future king (Bolingbroke) says defiantly that he will carry England with him wherever he goes; he is a man of action, and banishment is freedom. The other (Mowbray) feels he has been both humiliated and entombed. What interests Richard (and us) is that Mowbray’s sense of imprisonment derives from the feeling that his native language has been taken away from him:

Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,

Doubly portcullis’d within my teeth and lips

And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance

Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now:

What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,

Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

(I.iii.166–173)

He goes, he says, to ‘endless night’: his capacity for self-expression and symbol-formation has been sealed off; both the cutting and the kissing capabilities of his buccal cavity are closed down; his internal mother is incommunicable, guarded by a portcullis of suffocating teeth. Because he will have no-one to speak to in his native tongue, he is overcome by ‘barren ignorance’.¹ Knowledge and self-knowledge are lost when facility in language is lost.

During the first two acts Richard has been a man of few words, by contrast with the deluge of insults hurled by the others. But as Stanley Wells has emphasised, this is a play in which ‘tongue’ is a keyword, often paired with ‘heart’ in a context of the false and true use of language. It seems to be as a result of Mowbray’s heartfelt lament that Richard acquires an interest in language; the idea, and image, of the tongue within the mouth becomes a governing metaphor in the play, undergoing various transformations that echo the images of the ‘hollow crown’ and the sea-girt isle (from womb to death’s head). This, together with Gaunt’s prophetic vision, fuels his new adventure.

In Shakespeare’s portrayal, Richard’s supposed crimes as a king are presented as discontented rationalisations – a casual reference to his alleged homosexuality, and some ruffled talk about ‘blanks, benevolences and I wot not what’ (II.i.940). What we have seen onstage is not his misgovernment but his disregard of decorum, his exposure of the social lie on which all rely for their sense of security. With a fatalistic inevitability, Richard departs for Ireland while society plots its revenge, and there he undergoes a sea-change. After this point the play enters the realm of dream. When he returns to face his deposition, poetry pours out of him, alongside the evaporation of his political support. Prefiguring the ‘tears and smiles’ of his final public procession of (Christlike) humiliation, when dust is thrown on his head, he greets his native earth with ‘weeping, smiling’:

Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords:

This earth shall have a feeling …

(III.ii.23–24)

Sensuous contact with the earth, the mother-land, is a new source of emotionality, awoken through identification with Mowbray. He appreciates the preciousness of the speaking object –...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The individual and the group: Richard II and Julius Caesar
• 2 The reason of love objects: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 3 Dreamlife and adolescent identity in Hamlet and Ophelia
• 4 Dreams of dark corners: legalism at play in The Merchant of Venice and Troilus and Cressida
• 5 Explorations in minus K: Macbeth and Othello
• 6 The turbulence of aesthetic conflict: King Lear
• 7 Love and the evolution of thought: Antony and Cleopatra
• 8 The organ of consciousness in Cymbeline
• 9 A dream of reparation: The Winter’s Tale
• 10 The birth of ideas: The Tempest
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Dream-life in the post-Kleinian model of the mind
• References and bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index