"Your actions are my dreams": sleepy minds in Shakespeare's last plays.

IN MAKING HIS famous declaration "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep" (4.1.156-58), (1) Prospero has long been thought to be saying goodbye to his magical powers with an analogy between the insubstantiality of the masque for Ferdinand and Miranda that now has ended and the fragility of humanity and human endeavor itself. As he prepares to drown his book, Prospero's tone becomes more elegiac, and he seems to place less emphasis on fleeting things. The presence of sleep and dreams in his valedictory language reveals a very different tendency, however, in which the contemplation of such powerlessness creates an anxious awareness in him of mental life itself, more than it inspires awe and wonder concerning the shape of human existence. (2) Although Prospero's elegant words have an air of lofty certainty, there is no solace in such a tenuous grip on the world. What unnerves him, what he wrestles with here, is the unfixed quality of the "dreams" and "sleep" he refers to. Their ungroundedness is precisely what makes mental life and language itself both extraordinarily sensual and urgent. T. G. Bishop remarks that

   By this late stage in his career, Shakespeare's dramatic language
   has become an instrument subtle and searching enough to register
   not only the surface gestures of a character, but also the secret
   affections or intentions that inform those gestures. The
   imagination has become a layered thing, often obscure to itself,
   inventing its purposes moment by moment at several levels. (3)

The most salient aspect of the imagination's opacity in the last plays is its consistent investigation of the reality of mental life, its evocation of an absorbingly staged drama of the mind even as--or perhaps because--the plays readily attempt to achieve certainty in the midst of discrepancies between surfaces and secrets, and the affective sources of action. During their most memorable moments, these plays claim in paradoxically sensual terms that that we are our mental experiences, and that mental experiences have undeniably sensual effects.

Northrop Frye remarks that the romances contain an "imaginative faith" that "is something much more positive than any mere suspension of disbelief, however willing"; sleep and dreams put intense pressure on that faith by affirming the difficulty of measuring the distance between perception and truth, knowledge and belief, and memory and action. (4) They permit characters to go far in avoiding knowledge that would prove either threatening or embarrassing, and to nourish false beliefs, memories, and desires. Shakespeare's plays precede Freud and contemporary neurological research in noticing that sleep and dreams expose and create unsettling emotions far more often than they instill happiness in those who experience them. (5) Dreams show that characters know both a little more and a little less than they think they do about themselves, others, and the world. (6) Thereby dreams create a skeptical stance toward self-knowledge by alienating such figures from themselves, from a firmer familiarity with the content of their own minds. Nowhere do sleep and dreams more insistently flame these fundamental topics than in Shakespeare's last plays. Clearly they are relevant to discussions of earlier works including Richard III, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth, but they permeate the last plays in specific ways that are shared by those plays as a whole, and especially by the two plays this discussion will focus on, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

The skepticism that Stanley Cavell persuasively finds to dominate The Winter's Tale is immersed in the language of sleep and dreams. Cavell argues that Leontes' jealousy is rooted in a deep reluctance to recognize his own fatherhood. (7) Such a recognition would put an end to "the very intensifying of his identification with Polixenes," (8) an identification that is aided by sleep. Sleep allows their identification to prolong itself; dream signals its extreme end in that it illustrates the play's need to face its own startling, implicit recognition that the identification already has gone too far. Sleep is as close to a perfect escape from intractable problems, great and small, as characters ever achieve. In the opening scene of the play, Archidamus remarks that when his turn comes to host the Sicilian king in Bohemia, he will be forced to remedy his own country's deficiencies with "sleepy drinks" that render those who taste them "unintelligent of our insufficience" (1.1.14-15). The brief but highly significant mention of this drug-induced state literalizes a forcible if somewhat desperate reconciliation between perception and reality, as if it were the only way to maintain a friendship built on sameness, the mutual exchange of gifts, and visits of equal extravagance. Sleep permits the avoidance of discrepancies between expectations and the way things really are, between wishful thinking and the stubborn presence of difference.

In a similar move that may not seem so at first, the Bohemian shepherd who later discovers the infant Perdita remarks that he "would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest" (3.3.58-60). In his silly way the shepherd reveals the sheer versatility of sleep as a compellingly flexible solution to problems ranging from the scaring off of sleep to the damage to reputation caused by pregnancy out of wedlock. The shepherd and Archidamus realize the detrimental effects of the availability of ordinary cognition, judgment, and will to people whose minds and bodies one seeks to influence. When rhetorical persuasion or physical violence cannot succeed, putting someone to sleep is always a viable, albeit temporary, solution. In the play's very next scene, the chorus, Time, asks the audience to suspend disbelief as the play jumps ahead sixteen years, imagining that they "had slept between" (4.1.17). Time effectively makes the play fulfill the shepherd's wish, imposing Frye's "imaginative faith" by skipping over the years reminiscent of those in which friendships such as Leontes and Polixenes' are solidified, and hence their identification with one another is forged. And yet the Old Shepherd quickly forgets this wish when he says of Florizel, disguised as Doricles, that if he chooses his daughter "she shall bring him that / Which he not dreams of" (4.4.181-82).

As if in response to the concerns and ambitions of the older generation, the young prince and princess themselves address these matters later on in the same scene. Florizel reveals his haste in showing the Old Shepherd that the younger generation will exceed expectation with dreams: "One being dead, / I shall have more than you can dream of yet; / Enough then for your wonder" (4.4.382-84). And when we see Perdita talking with Florizel, she memorably uses the language of dreams to show him that the game of love is over: "this dream of mine / Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther" (4.4.452-53), lines that Coleridge found some of the most affecting in the entire play. (9) With declarations like this, Perdita brings us toward the end of the illusionary world of Bohemia and toward the reunion with the real queen in the final act. The idea that sleep is the great reconciler of significant theatrical problems reflects a solution within the play that an earlier play, Midsummer Night's Dream, situates at its very end in an address to the audience: "Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear" (5.1.432). In The Winter's Tale, sleep is asked to heighten the credibility of the world onstage; by contrast, Puck suggests that sleep protects the theater against the incredulity that waking consciousness facilitates. (10)

Sleep and dream, then, are collapsed into one. They are no longer ontologically distinct because from the play's very first act the identification with Polixenes that Leontes suffers from is a form of sleep, in which dreams are common property that protect sleepers from waking into an unfamiliar and hence destabilizing world. (11) Polixenes admits as much for himself when he fondly reminisces about the "innocence" of their friendship: "we knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd / That any did" (1.2.69-71). Such a dream would have constituted an intense, nightmarish crisis--it would have meant entering a far more suspicious world peopled by minds whose interiors one cannot access. Until now their friendship has protected them from the shock of that inaccessibility, but even "the best case of knowledge" is vulnerable to "the transformation of a scene of knowing for oneself into a sense that true knowledge is beyond the human self, that what we hold in our minds to be true of the world can have at best the status of opinion, educated guesswork, hypothesis, construction, belief." (12) With the consistent aid of sleep and dreams, this transformation is exactly what Leontes experiences in the course of the first three acts of the play. The former self becomes the dreaming self, the self dreaming of omniscience because it deeply fears its own shortcomings.

The instrumentality of the sleep and dreams of childhood I have described as sheltering Leontes from exposure to the disturbing epistemological discrepancies between one's perceptions and the world quickly combines, however, with Leontes' rapid descent into doubt. A prescient Cartesian, he assumes that one can never know that one is not dreaming (Perdita will later examplify someone who can). Using the language of dreams yet once more, he inflicts the consequences of this doubt about the validity of his own perceptions onto the body and activities of Hermione. With his chilling retort "your actions are my dreams" (3.2.82), a line that responds to Hermione's "My life stands at the level of your dreams," it becomes clear that he is so infected with jealousy that Hermione ceases to be a real person to him, and his own mind is at once a source of disgust and denial; it becomes all he knows. He is "an Othello who is his own Iago." (13) Her actions are his dreams because like a dreamer, he cannot control his mental life so it completely controls him and the world he sees. I read Leontes as saying not that her actions are so nightmarish that they haunt him as such, as resembling a dream that contains clues meant to challenge his belief in her faithfulness. With "your actions are my dreams," he suggests that he cannot imagine her actions or Hermione herself as literally existing anywhere else but inside his own delirious mind. Her existence turns him inward because she frighteningly embodies what is uncontrollable and unknowable about other people; that is all he can know about her. Unable to acknowledge that he is implicated in this process of making her into such a creature, that in fact his version of her existence is a construction of his own, he becomes fixated on removing himself from such a daunting association as if she is the one who is out of reach. The jealous mind is an inward looking one because all it has are its own thoughts to feed on, and yet it is this very quality that causes it to become disgusted by itself. Without thinking it cannot be so; without his own thoughts she cannot exist, and his thoughts repulse him. Until Leontes' mind is rid of this absorption the play cannot move beyond him. (14) It stays in a dream world, capitulating to the temptations of sleep.

In an early scene in The Tempest, Ariel initiates a series of episodes that distinguish this play as being preoccupied in other ways with sleep as an ingenious mechanism of psychosomatic control. It is seldom remembered that just after the tempest itself with which the play begins, Ariel forces the boatswain and the mariners to fall asleep until late in act 5, and Ariel performs the same trick with many of the island's visitors, including Gonzalo, in the middle of the play. Sleep is Ariel's focal point for simultaneously managing affect and plot alike. Thus Prospero prolongs his control over those he needs to manipulate, without doing any noticeable physical harm. The question of what they have done to the sleepers' newly awakened minds, however, remains tantalizingly open. Even for those who are already awake, something of a reawakening occurs. Take the moment, for example, when Antonio turns to Sebastian and speaks like a would-be seducer of wrongdoing, playing the role of Lady Macbeth to Sebastian's Macbeth:

Ant. ... Th'occasion speaks thee, and My strong imagination sees a crown Dropping upon thy head.

Seb. What? art thou waking?

Ant. Do you not hear me speak?

Seb. I do, and surely It is a sleepy language, and thou speak'st Out of thy sleep. What is it thou didst say? This is a strange repose, to be asleep With eyes open--standing, speaking, moving--And yet so fast asleep.

Ant. Noble Sebastian, Thou let'st thy fortune sleep--die, rather; wink'st Whiles thou art waking.

(2.1.207-17)

Sebastian lets Antonio take the lead in this conspiracy plot whose rhetoric centralizes an idea of sleep that moves between the word's literal and metaphorical meanings. The "sleepy language" Sebastian hears is one he will not acknowledge being attracted to. It allows Ariel stealthily to succeed in his mission to get him to try to turn treasonous ideas into dangerous actions, to manage their expressions of desire and their urgently deceptive motives. Just before the two plotters are able to murder the sleeping Alonso and Gonzalo, Ariel rescues them by means of a song whispered to Gonzalo that vaguely informs him of the imminent threat to his life. Here Ariel brilliantly uses sleep to show off his magical ability to control both mental perception and the bodies of characters under his spell, an ability shared by Prospero and wished for in The Winter's Tale by characters such as Time, the Shepherd, and Archidamus in the moments we have already discussed. The process of thinking paradoxically is sleepy and a form of sensation in scenes like these, titillating the evil characters with temptation and making them aware of the degree to which mental activities like cognition, for Sebastian, are sensual: they prompt, resemble, and create heightened awareness of bodily states, especially sleep. Whether one is trying to seize political power or to reminisce about youthful indiscretions, sleep can represent either the vulnerable lure of oblivion or the eerier attractions of seizing control over one's circumstances. When it does so it also creates an obscured sense of mental agency, as we shall see it does for Miranda in the second scene of act 1. Here, Gonzalo is on his guard when he awakens but does not say whether he knows who is to blame or to thank for his new state of mind. We do not see him reasoning his way through the meaning of the song in his ear, but merely responding to it. What does Gonzalo know, consciously and unconsciously? Has he heard pieces of the conversation while asleep? Alonso, for all we know, still believes that Antonio and Sebastian have protected him from grave harm. Sleep enables the audience to know somewhat differently. It silently exposes unusually resonant discrepancies between what characters know and what we know, but it also shows us that characters can have interiorities that we cannot know in full.

The products of sleep can be tellingly diverse: they enable plots or narratives to unfold, they alert characters to expressions of desires for power, and they show the success of magical projects (Prospero's and, by extension, Ariel's) in subtly undermining a sense of control over destiny even before that sense of control has made itself felt. (15) When sleep overtakes a character onstage, it turns waking characters into an audience of sorts and can arouse strange, and even menacing, emotions or temptations in them. The plot against the lives of Gonzalo and Alonzo hatched while they sleep surely gains urgency by their vulnerable bodily presence onstage. Likewise, because of their sleep onstage, wakened characters such as Gonzalo unknowingly attain unusual relationships between language and self-knowledge. Sleep may have provided them with some way of understanding the world that we have no access to, and will never know. Their minds are filled with ideas that they cannot quite register as their own, and yet they are unable to dismiss the same ideas as foreign or irrelevant. Nor are the ideas any longer in the full possession of the magus. We watch the character ruminate on or accept some truths as given without fully knowing how they arrived at them. Whether or not we can have this knowledge, and what it would mean to, are two of the deeper questions that sleep and dreams ultimately point us to but cannot answer. (16) As David Bevington remarks, "As sleep becomes more theatrical, it serves as an apt vehicle for explorations of carnival inversion, indeterminacy of meaning, uncertainty as to the will of Providence, and the ironies of human lack of self-awareness." (18)

An example of what I have been arguing is also a sensual uncertainty highlighted by sleep and dreams occurs in act 1 scene 2, when Prospero puts Miranda to sleep without her knowledge that he is doing so, right after she asks about his responsibility for the tempest. He says "I know thou canst not choose" (1.2.186). Sleep in this case creates an excess of interpretation whereby it is difficult to know whether or not the character's utterances about it or upon waking are expressive of his or her own thoughts or if the mind remains fettered by the outside force, in this case Prospero. Miranda's sleep raises several possible interpretations that are far from mutually exclusive: first, that Prospero believes she needs to sleep in order to understand, that is to remember, his narrative; second, that it enables her to forget the question as soon as she asks it about his role in the tempest's origins; and third, that it further illustrates Prospero's willfulness. One recent analysis Heather James puts forth is that "by lulling her into an involuntary sleep, Prospero puts an end to a line of questioning that cuts across the grain of his paternal absolutism.... Unable to acknowledge his plans [for the men who have arrived], he cuts short her questions and plunges her into sleep." (18) Prospero may also go one step further, and cause Miranda later on to offer the following: "The strangeness of your story put / Heaviness in me" (1.2.306-7). Whether or not Prospero inspires this sentiment is left unspecified, but the play intimates the possibility. Surely, as James implicitly suggests, the ensuing conversation between Prospero and Ariel would have alerted Miranda to her father's control over the storm. In turn, this very control (and the conversation about it that she sleeps through) again directly involves sleep: during their conversation we learn that Prospero has had Ariel put the mariners on the ship to sleep too. Ariel won't release them until act 5, when their account of their bewilderment and uncertainty about whether they sleep or wake will resemble that of Sebastian in act 2, though without implying any of his greed: "even in a dream, were we divided from them, / And were brought moping hither" (5.1.239-40). Release from sleep's bondage does not entail immediate detachment from its effects. As we have seen, sleep often suffuses characters with a deeply mournful, and sense-driven conceptualization of their own emotional lives. It leaves them in the thrall of forces that seem, and in this case in fact are, out of their control. In a parallel development it establishes a wildly vivid sense of the same characters' physicality with words like "moping."

Echoing and parodying its previous manifestations, sleep permeates another hostile, if somewhat comic, attempt to alter the power imbalance on the island that Ariel and Prospero have already proven themselves capable of using it to establish. When Caliban in act 3 proposes that he and Stephano destroy Prospero while he sleeps, he reveals his own knowledge of how sleep exposes one's vulnerability to several kinds of assault. Caliban uncannily seems to be repeating what has already happened in act 2, telling Stephano that in order to take control of the island they need to seize Prospero's books and by doing so they will have turned him into the "sot" that Caliban is. Caliban's plans call for violent collaboration ("I'll yield him thee asleep, / where thou mayst knock a nail into his head" [3.2.60-61]) and he repeats his instructions involving sleep:

   Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him
   I' th' afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him,
   Having first seiz'd his books ...
   Remember
   First to possess his books; for without them
   He's but a sot, as I am;
   (3.2.87-93)

Finally, Caliban again turns to Stephano: "Within this half hour will he be asleep. / Wilt thou destroy him then?" (3.2.114-15). Sleep exposes Caliban's foolish plotting, because no one takes him up on the idea, more than it poses as a real threat to Prospero, but in doing so it reveals an intimacy between Caliban and Prospero, whose sleep patterns Caliban is well aware of. (19) Caliban's familiarity with the island extends to its inhabitants in surprising ways, though sleep takes revenge on the revenger himself in that Stephano and Trinculo fail to follow through.

So far sleep has been shown to be a condition that purports to solve a range of epistemological and moral issues both within the late plays and about them; specifically it allows characters to control or to imagine controlling one another's private actions or thoughts, political and social power, and perception. It also allows them to posit a private space of obliviousness: with its suspension of physical mobility and normal cognition, sleep also shields others from full knowledge of their conditions, as witness the boatswain's reaction to his bewildering experience on the island. None of these instances, however, quite prepares us for Caliban's account of sleep and dream in act 3. In his well-known speech, sleep registers a private access to worlds that lie outside his immediate, daily life, whether we believe the passage to be "one of the loveliest passages in the play" or "the matrix for the culminating masque-like depiction of the monster's flawed ideal," (20) to quote from two of the diverse responses he has succeeded in generating:

   Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,
   Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
   Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
   Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
   That if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
   Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
   The clouds methought would open, and show riches
   Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak'd
   I cried to dream again.
   (3.2.135-43)

Caliban questions not only the ontological specialness of the real world but also the preference for it. Music leads him to sleep which leads to dream, creating such intense longing for its repetition that he prefers the dream to all else. The plenitude that dreaming offers is an escape from the impoverishment that characterizes the existence he desperately wants to transform, and it also indicates the plenitude that is what one reader recently has called Shakespeare's "compensatory powers of language." (21) It is a moment of complete concentration; nothing else matters but the recollection of a oneness with "the isle" and the "riches." Vicariously experiencing his "delight" in his intimate knowledge of the island and the sensual pleasures of listening, sleeping, and dreaming, we are watching Caliban come as close as any Shakespearean character does to creating the very circumstances he describes. Another striking feature is that the readiness is what predominates: Caliban recounts the infinitely enjoyable, repeated experience of a perpetual state of anticipation. The riches never do come either in the dream or elsewhere and we cannot know if Caliban is drawn to replay the scene because the riches may one day drop or because it is delightful as is; the promise itself seems nourishing enough. Caliban's dreaming mind is a retreat from everyday life so superior to that life that it becomes a blissful form of self-fulfillment. His mental life is so intense that it momentarily compensates for, and almost causes us to lose sight of, the suffering of his ordinary existence even as his crying hints at that suffering. We hold both aspects of his experience in mind and acutely experience both of them with him. Even to himself, and to us, he is a little out of reach. The fervency with which he encourages the tramps to attack Prospero gives way to an indulgence in sensuous experience that returns us to enchantments that are neither dangerous nor didactic.

The only other experience of dreaming that comes close to Callban's in intensity is Antigonus's dream in the third act of The Winter's Tale. Earlier I suggested in brief that in order for the effective purgation of Leontes' skepticism to occur, a readily identifiable sacrificial moment is required that dissolves all the epistemological doubts that his jealousy has engendered. Antigonus's dream transforms him from a peripheral character into that crucial sacrifice; as such, it is an episode with which interpretations of the play have not sufficiently been concerned. (22) With it, Shakespeare realizes manifold possibilities for how dreams can reflect complex mental states, carefully demonstrating the deepest truth they do in all the last plays: the palpable reality of mental life greatly differs from its truthfulness. As we have seen, the less true Leontes' beliefs become, the more he separates himself from the social world of the play, and the harder it is to envision his eventual return to normalcy. The swift expulsion of falsity--and, before that can happen, the beliefs' physical and mental separation from Leontes and full embodiment in another character--are the most convincing means Shakespeare ever designs for restoring a character and an entire play to the ready acceptance of knowledge that such skepticism had prevented for three long acts. (23) Just as it looks back to and is an attempt to solve the problems raised in the play's first three acts, to think about how one would stage it also calls attention to its anticipation of Hermione's appearance in act 5. As Kenneth Gross has written about the latter scene, in which the statue's "silence speaks out of a paradoxical, resistant inwardness" at the same time that its "more gently elegiac air" is remarkable, (24) Antigonus's dream-figure betrays the frustrations and inadequacies, as well as the wondrous epistemological ambiguities, of its own task. Although the dream authorizes the restitution of Leontes' court, its price tag is Antigonus's life; it looks ahead to another consequence, that of Leontes and Hermione's final failure to achieve a successful reunion. Even as (marital) life is restored, the play challenges the idea that one ever can fully recover the lost object of desire. Antigonus investigates these matters long before act 5.

First and foremost, Antigonus's dream is dramatically useful in that it facilitates the movement of the action of the play from the Sicilian court to the green world of Bohemia. (25) The transition is as psychological as it is physical, marked by the altered quality of Antigonus's language, which is suffused with an elegance and calmness that it never had before. I quote the dream in full, as well as some of Antigonus's reflections on the dream:

   I have heard (but not believ'd) the spirits o'th' dead
   May walk again. If such thing be, thy mother
   Appear'd to me last night; for ne'er was dream
   So like a waking. To me comes a creature,
   Sometimes her head on one side, some another--
   I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
   So fill'd, and so becoming; in pure white robes,
   Like very sanctity, she did approach
   My cabin where I lay; thrice bow'd before me,
   And (gasping to begin some speech) her eyes
   Became two spouts; the fury spent, anon
   Did this break from her: "Good Antigonus,
   Since fate (against thy better disposition)
   Hath made thy person for the thrower-out
   Of my poor babe, according to thine oath,
   Places remote enough are in Bohemia,
   There weep, and leave it crying; and for the babe
   Is counted lost forever, Perdita
   I prithee call 't. For this ungentle business,
   Put on thee by my lord, thou ne'er shalt see
   Thy wife Paulina more." And so, with shrieks,
   She melted into air. Affrighted much,
   I did in time collect myself and thought
   This was so, and no slumber. Dreams are toys,
   Yet for this once, yea, superstitiously,
   I will be squar'd by this. I do believe
   Hermione hath suffer'd death, and that
   Apollo would (this being indeed the issue
   Of King Polixenes) it should here be laid,
   Either for life or death, upon the earth
   Of its right father. Blossom, speed thee well!
   (3.3.16-46)

Hesitant and yet insistent, Antigonus shares his new experience with benign incredulity. He utters two of Leontes' false beliefs, namely that Hermione is adulterous and that she is dead. It is puzzling that Antigonus assumes both of these to be the case. As for the second belief, he is already on his way to deliver Perdita, according to Leontes' instructions, "to some remote and desert place" (2.3.176) when Paulina later falsely attests: "I'll say she's dead; I'll swear't" (3.2.203). In addition, when Hermione tells Antigonus that "places remote enough are in Bohemia" she uses two words Leontes had used in the speech just quoted from in act 2, when he tells Antigonus to bring Perdita away (2.3.176), resonating with Freud's observation that dreams yield "evidence of knowledge and memories which the waking subject is unaware of possessing." Hermione was in jail when Leontes spoke these words to Antigonus and presumably could not have heard them. Paulina, who may have repeated his instructions to Hermione, was also absent during the conversation between Antigonus and Leontes. Dreams are wish-fulfillments in creating better, more well-integrated responses to situations than one feels one has given in waking life; the dream lets Hermione address Leontes' charge and control the dramatic situation from what Antigonus considers to be beyond the grave. But it is at the same time a simple, pithy plot device. Antigonus thereby gets to perform an act of condensation: several duties are taken care of at once. He not only embodies Leontes' false beliefs, he responds (through Hermione) to Leontes' wishes, changing their potential consequences, in ways that he could not imagine before.

Finally, there is a delicately ekphrastic quality to the dreamed Hermione. She is a statue of sorts. Hermione's "pure white robes / Like very sanctity" clearly have religious overtones and suggest that she has sacrificed herself like Alcestis. One of the most conspicuous aspects of the visual description here is its distinctive emphasis on Hermione's ceremonious liquidity. She is "a vessel" that is "fill'd" and that releases tears through her eyes as if they were a fountain's "spouts" soon "spent." The account invites us to remember Gail Kern Paster's observation that this sort of attention to the female body was "a culturally familiar discourse" that "inscribes women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of the female body's material expressiveness--its production of fluids--as excessive, hence either disturbing or shameful. It also characteristically links this liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency." (26) Here Hermione is literally a "vessel" of both bodily fluids and a speech that has extraordinary effect, but Antigonus's perspective on what comes from her is much more sympathetic than Paster's tends to be. He clearly pities her and is in awe of her presence and gestures, facing with trepidation and unease this last task of his life as a member of Leontes' court and, in doing so, unwittingly transforming the nature of that court. Toward the end of The Body Embarrassed Paster notes how several contemporary manuals recommended that women who have just given birth not be emotionally excited or made upset, which makes this scene a significant extension, through the mind of Antigonus, of how Leontes in the trial scene performs "a clearly unwarranted intrusion of patriarchal power." (27)

The language of Antigonus's "spiritual visitation," according to J. H. P. Pafford, makes him seem to exist "in one sense outside the play." (28) Antigonus describes Hermione's appearance as achieving a beautiful purity (in her white robes and intricate evasions of likeness she looks ahead to the late-espoused saint in Milton's sonnet). Her distress, her turmoil, and the quality of her agony clearly echo the trial scene and address the question of Leontes' jealousy in a way that allows her to embody its wrongful effects. In conveying this picture, Antigonus himself becomes a vessel of sights and sounds that he is barely in control of, and he uses a different rhetorical technique, reminding us that he is unable to undergo the kind of transformation Leontes will.

The dream foreshadows the attention that the statue of Hermione receives at the end of the play. If, according to Janet Adelman, "identified with Cleopatra in his longing for Antony, Shakespeare in effect locates the recuperative power of his own art in the female space of her monument, making her imaginative fecundity the model for his own; and in his imaginative alliance with her, he is able to recuperate theater itself, rewriting its dangerous affiliation with the female in Macbeth and Coriolanus," (29) then with Antigonus's dream Shakespeare distances the play from one model of imaginative fecundity in order to make room for the final monument-turned-flesh in the final act of the play. Thereby Shakespeare offers us two Hermiones at the end of the play: Antigonus's Hermione and Paulina's Hermione, with the former making way for the latter. Comparing Paulina to another magus with whom this essay has been concerned, namely Prospero, Stephen Orgel notes: "Paulina requires much less in the way of apparatus, only a discovery curtain and a Hermione capable of standing absolutely motionless for eighty lines; but her demand for a suspension of disbelief, her invocation of wonder, and most of all, her claims for the therapeutic quality of her performance sound much more like Renaissance apologias for theatre than like any Renaissance version of religious experience." (30) Antigonus's speech likewise evokes wonder and requires no apparatus. He not only demands that the audience suspend their disbelief, he admits to having imaginative faith in the sensual reality of his own mind and acting on the impulses it urges him to accept as truth.

Antigonus thereby makes possible the shifting rhetoric of act 5 in which a single word that signifies the play's definitive movement away from sleep and dreams and therefore away from Leontes' false surmises, the word "awake," is able to accrue multiple thematic connotations as The Winter's Tale draws to a close. Remember that Perdita herself had used it in relation to the dream of Florizel in act 4. Just after instructing her audience that "It is requir'd / You do awake your faith" Paulina brings the statue of Hermione to life. She does so with the command "Music! awake her! strike!" (5.3.94-95; 98). Using the same imperative not only to control the collective frame of mind and response that her dramatic spectacle should elicit, but also to animate the statue of Hermione, Paulina indicates her directorial role and assumes an ability to manage belief, affect, and, indeed, the very ontological existence of those around her. (31) She replaces her husband's Hermione with the real thing, but the real thing requires a different kind of imagination. By doing so she carefully shifts Leontes' and our attention from his initial willingness to experience "what you can make her do" (5.3.91) into active mental participation. Forbidding the audience to remain "content" hearers and "lookers-on," she attempts to make them achieve the heightened state of apperception reminiscent of that with which dreams are experienced and their meanings pondered by characters like Antigonus, or Caliban when he cries to dream again. Lastly, Paulina's act of awakening strategically, if literally, banishes Leontes' false beliefs by evoking the trial scene in which Hermione invokes metaphorical versions of the same set of somatic conditions, calling Leontes' accusations "surmises (all proofs sleeping else / But what your jealousies awake)" (3.2.112-13). Here being "awake" means leaving behind that jealousy and the destruction it created. Hers is one of the final attempts of the last plays to shape the reality of characters' minds, an attempt made possible by dreams and demises.

Paulina, like Ariel, now will be done with such tricks, leaving Prospero as the single artificer continuing to bewilder characters such as the boatswain: "even in a dream, were we divided from them, / And were brought moping hither" (5.1.239-40). (32) Although Prospero has renounced his magic and prepared himself for a new life in which every third thought will be his grave ironically it is the realm of sleep, brother of death, that remains the world in which his effects, as on this still confused character, linger. The Winter's Tale attempts to replace dreams and sleep with an awakened faith; with the effects of Prospero's use of sleep, the residual powers of his magic succeed in haunting the end of The Tempest.

Notes

(1.) The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). All quotations of the plays, unless otherwise noted, are from this edition.

(2.) For good recent discussions of Prospero's sense of "the pressure of mortality" see Mary Ellen Lamb, "Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives' Tales in The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and The Tempest," Criticism 40 (1998): 552-53, and David Lindley's introduction to his edition of The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30.

(3.) Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 149. See also Russ McDonald's recent Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). McDonald remarks on how Shakespeare's last plays show "a renewed faith in the theatrical enterprise, a devotion to the surface, a commitment to the material value of the medium, a positive assessment of such potentially dubious phenomena as illusion, ornament, and the signifier as signifier" (47-48).

(4.) Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 19. The dream in Shakespeare's romances is discussed at great length by Marjorie Garber in Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 139-214. My discussion is indebted to hers, and especially to her sense of the distinctive quality of dreams in the romances and that of the poetry of the plays itself.

(5.) J. Allan Hobson writes that "anxiety, fear, and surprise are the most common affects to undergo a marked intensification during dreaming" (The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates Both the Sense and the Nonsense of Dreams [New York: Basic Books, 1988], 7).

(6.) In a much contested passage, Freud noted, "it is a very common event for a dream to give evidence of knowledge and memories which the waking subject is unaware of possessing" (The Interpretation of Dreams, in the Standard Edition of the Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London: Hogarth Press, 1955], 4:14). This point will become particularly relevant when I explicate Antigonus' dream. But for a discussion of Freud's notion of "evidence" in dreams, see Jacques Lacan who treats Freud's dream of the burning son as being a suggestion of "a mystery that is the world of the beyond" (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan and ed. Jacques-Alain Miller [New York: Norton, 1981], 34; see also pp 54-60), and also Dan Merkur, Unconscious Wisdom: A Superego Function in Dreams, Conscience, and Inspiration (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). Whether or not we should even call the "evidence" about which Freud writes either "knowledge" or "memories" has long been debatable by neuroscientists and philosophers. For example, Hobson himself begins his "psychophysiological theory of dreaming" with a distinction between Freud's reliance on subjective knowledge and "obscurity" and his own focus on dreams as "transparent" and yielding discoveries about the brain that can objectively be known (Hobson, 12-14). For a rebuttal to Hobson, see Patricia Kitcher, Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 113-49. Same philosophers claim, centre Freud, that dreams should not be taken seriously as experiences. In Dreaming (1959) Norman Malcolm claims that all we can know about the dream is the awake subject's report and that the report indeed is the dream--unlike public events, dreams are not verifiable or to be considered occurrences. In "Are Dreams Experiences?" Daniel C. Dennett makes a distinction between memories and experiences and argues that dreams cannot be the latter because they are the former, and recent ones at that: "the dream one 'recalls' on waking was composed just minutes earlier" and that the "subject is not In a privileged position to answer" questions about whether or not the dream is an experience (Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology [Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978], 129-148).

For psychoanalytic readings of Shakespeare's plays variously indebted to Freud, though not always to his work on dream interpretation, see Norman N. Holland, ed., Shakespeare's Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially 198-238, Christopher Pye's Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Stephen Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 210-24 and Cynthia Marshall, "Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject" PMLA 117 (October 2002): 1207-16.

(7.) "Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter's Tale," in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 193-221. For a psychoanalytic reading of the play that argues that Leontes' jealousy is based on his latent homosexuality, see J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1949). Compatible with my argument is Randal Robinson's point that Leontes "is frightened by uncontrollable fantasies of disgrace when circumstances make him intensely libidinal," and that he does "make progress toward the acceptance and development of his libidinal ego" though I do not agree that Leontes "responds to [Hermione] warmly" at the play's end ("Stage Images in Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale," From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, 224). For an interpretation that holds that Leontes is equally uncomfortable with and threatened by "his own interior" for reasons having to do with his philosophical skepticism, see David Hillman, "Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body," in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Carla Mazzio and David Hillman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 95-96. Other sources of Leontes' jealousy not discussed herein are the idea of maternal self-sufficiency, noted by Madelon Sprengnether in relation to dreams and fantasy in Freud, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 76-77; for a related discussion, see Jessica Benjamin's article "The Primal Leap of Psychoanalysis, from Body to Speech: Freud, Feminism, and the Vicissitudes of the Transference," in Freud 2000, ed. Anthony Elliott (New York: Rontledge, 1999), 110-38.

(8.) Cavell, 213.

(9.) Coleridge's marginalia are reprinted in the Signet edition of The Winter's Tale, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Penguin, 1998), 146. For a persuasive view of the relationship between Florizel and Perdita which lends credence to the idea that they are really in love, see William Empson, "Hunt the Symbol," in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 232-35. For a view that takes seriously the perspective of Derek Traversi, in which the plot of the last plays is secondary to the poetry, see Russ McDonald, "Poetry and Plot in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 315-29. I agree with the idea that "[the verse] illuminates and comments on two central themes of The Winter's Tale, the complexities of perception and the importance of time in the process of perception," (328).

(10.) See also David Bevington's comments that "Sleeping onstage in Shakespeare often occurs at moments of otherworldly visitation, as in medieval drama, or evokes at least a powerfully ominous world of magic," ("Asleep Onstage," From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, ed. John A. Alford (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1990), 69).

(11.) T. G. Bishop makes a similar point (Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, 144). Another positive version of the work of the dream, namely its creation of a "great constancy" (in the words of Hippolyta) that affirms the imagination's power, is discussed by Kathryn L. Lynch, "Baring Bottom: Shakespeare and the Chaucerian Dream Vision," in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 99-124.

(12.) Cavell, 7.

(13.) Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 639.

(14.) Kaplan and Eggert, "'Good queen, my lord, good queen': Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in The Winter's Tale," Renaissance Drama 25 (1994): 110.

(15.) These comments should indicate that I agree with Janet Adelman that Leontes "in his inability to tolerate the unreliable world outside himself, had retreated to the space of his delusion," (Suffocating Mothers, 235). While Adelman locates the costs of Leontes' return to the world in terms of control of the female, I instead read Antigonus as the central victim. Perhaps these readings are not mutually exclusive. Although his focus differs from mine in that his seems to be on whether or not the ghost of Hermione is "real or unreal" (203), a view closer to my own would be that of Stephen Greenblatt, who writes of this speech that "to the extent that The Winter's Tale is centrally about horrible consequences of taking fantasies as realities--the whole cause of Leontes' viciously false accusation against his wife--then we are meant to distance ourselves from Antigonus' dream and to think of his ghost story as a psychological projection" (Hamlet in Purgatory [Princeton'. Princeton University Press, 2001], 202).

(16.) For a brief argument about Shakespeare critics and their acceptance of Prospero's cruel control over others, see Empson, 238-43.

(17.) To a certain extent, this is also the theme of Howard Felperin's "'Tongue-Tied Our Queen?': The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 3-18.

(18.) Bevington, 53.

(19.) James, "Dido's Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response," Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 370.

(20.) As Leslie Katz and Kenneth Gross remark, "In thwarting Caliban's attempt to remove and replace oppressive hierarchies, Stephano and Trinculo pick up on the gleeful ease with which puppets refuse to take sires ... Puppets can be seen as all revolt, all spirit of contradiction. Caliban seeks to channel precisely this species of aggressive momentum into a shared dream of usurpation" ("The Puppet's Calling," Raritan 15 [1995]: 22). See also Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 24-7.

(21.) See, respectively, Hallett Smith's introductory essay to The Tempest in the Riverside edition, 1660; and John G. Demaray's Shakespeare and Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 121. For the eloquently argued view that Caliban shows us "the wonderful quality of the island becomes here an image of frustration for Caliban-frustration both in the dream and out of it, because even if the riches did descend, what value would they have on the island?" see Stephen Kitay Orgel, "New Uses of Adversity: Tragic Experience in The Tempest," in In Defense of Dreading: A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism, ed. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 124.

(22.) The phrase is Russ McDonald's (Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, 188).

(23.) References to the dream in recent years include that which Stephen Orgel includes in his edition of The Winter's Tale, where he writes of Antigonus's dream of the ghost of Hermione that "Roman Catholic thinking admitted the existence of ghosts, but Protestantism was skeptical and in the official view, ghosts were delusions produced by the devil. To the drama of the period, however, they were indispensable, and Antigonus keeps all the options open" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 153. For an argument about Antigonus' illogical thinking, see David Thatcher, "Antigonus' Dream in The Winter's Tale," The Upstart Crow 13 (1993): 130-42.

(24.) If, according to Adelman, "The Winter's Tale restores the mother to life and makes the father's generativity and authority contingent on her return," (Suffocating Mothers, 236) it can only do so after the father's delusions are gone. See also Valerie Traub, "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare's Plays," Shakespeare Studies 20 (1987): 215-38. While I disagree with Traub's assertions that "Hermione's 'unmanageable' sexuality must be metaphorically contained and psychically disarmed" and that "her silence toward Leontes" in act 5 "bespeaks a submissiveness most unlike her previous animation" (230), it is clear from the rest of my article that I agree with her useful point that "the anxieties that incited him to impose stasis upon her are still immanent, indeed, inherent, in their relationship" (233). Paulina attempts to assuage such anxieties in her "audience" broadly conceived, as does the play itself with the death of Antigonus, but we have no reason to believe that they do not linger in the mind. Marjorie Garber's observation that in Antigonus's dream Hermione's "death" symbolizes Antigonus' "failure of belief, another instance of unawakened faith" (171) is relevant here.

(25.) Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 100,101.

(26.) Bishop also marks this moment as the play's key transformation, but he locates the pivotal figure in the bear and not Antigonus's dream (152-53). See also Palfrey, 111.

(27.) Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 25. See too her essay "The Body and Its Passions," in which Paster notes that the early modern period was "a moment in the history of bodies, minds, and souls when bodily fluids could still carry the full weight of a character's destiny, a moment when dense causal networks linked body, mind, culture, and the physical world" and that "If bodily fluids were the stuff of emotions, then to alter the character and quantity of a body's fluids was to alter that body's passions and thus that body's state of mind and soul" (Shakespeare Studies 29 (2000[: 46),

(28.) Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 273.

(29.) Pafford, ed. The Winter's Tale (London: Routledge, 1993), lxxxvii.

(30.) Adelman, 192.

(31.) The Winter's Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 62.

(32.) Lynn Enterline has persuasively linked the play, and this scene in particular, to its Ovidian and Petrarchan heritages as well as to literary theorists' critiques of J. L. Austin's speech-act theory. Of Paulina's lines, she comments: "her command represents an idea about language as performance" rather than being "literally a performative utterance"; the idea, Enterline explains, is Ovidian: "the dream of a voice so persuasive that it can effect the changes of which it speaks" (The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 222).

(33.) For another reading of Paulina's words that is concerned with Renaissance theology, see Walter S. Lim, "Knowledge and Belief in The Winter's Tale," Studies in English Literature 41 (2001): 317-34.

(34.) As Harold Bloom remarks, in act 5 "Prospero's abjuration sounds more like a great assertion of power than like a withdrawal from efficacy"; he is "an uncanny magician whose art has become so internalized that it cannot be abandoned, even though he insists it will be" (Shakespeare, 683). The boatswain's speech, then, brings the play to where it first began, because it reminds us of his role in both act 1 and act 5, through which we are able to witness the bewildering effects of Prospero's powers. For a discussion of the play that also emphasizes Prospero's desire for control throughout the play and especially in act 5, see Orgel, "New Uses of Adversity," 129-32. Orgel writes, "His tone is that of a character with a full comprehension of the experience of the drama; and the sense it gives us is of a mind achieving full control of itself" (114). When he fears relinquishing that control, sleep provides instrument and metaphor for power over others and the threat of of oblivion.

JENNIFER LEWIN is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She has published articles on eighteenth-century poetry and on the New Criticism, and she also writes on contemporary American poetry. Currently she is completing a manuscript on sleep and dreams in early modern poetry and philosophy.