“My dreams presage too true”: Dreams as a Dramatic Device in Elizabethan Drama
“My dreams presage too true”: Dreams as a Dramatic Device in Elizabethan Drama

Author(s): Pavel Drábek
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Cultural history, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Elizabethan drama; metaphysics; techniques of drama construction; dreams in plays; Shakespeare
Summary/Abstract: Throughout the entire period of Elizabethan drama dreams were used as a powerful dramatic device. They served as a means of character development (an early type of psychology), popular metaphysics as well as techniques of drama construction. This paper discusses dreams and their role in several plays by Shakespeare, The First Part of the Contention (also known as King Henry VI, Part II), King Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and in the apocryphal Arden of Faversham and Sir Thomas More. These plays – although not a full list of Elizabethan plays that have dreams in them – may be read and understood within a single context, historically, that of the years 1590–93, in which they were all written and performed. As the dramatic function of the dream is analogical in those plays, the group may be referred to as forming a subgenre of the Elizabethan dream play.

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