Dream
Stephen Greenblatt observed that ‘an experience recurs in the study of Renaissance literature and culture: an image or text seems to invite, even to demand, a psychoanalytic approach and yet turns out to baffle or elude that approach’ (131). This is especially true when it comes to Renaissance dreams. Take William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (first performed c. 1595) — when the young Athenians escape the rigid society of the city for the sexual free-for-all of the forest, it is hard not to glimpse the shadow of Sigmund Freud among the trees. But it is important to remember that Renaissance dreams were an experience profoundly enmeshed in the philosophical and religious culture of early modern Europe. As Janine Rivière documents in her study of Dreams in Early Modern England (2017), there were, broadly speaking, three ways of thinking about dreams in the Renaissance. Dreams reflected the health of the body and mind; they had prophetic power; or they represented spiritual communication.
Battista Dossi. Die Nacht (Der Traum). 1544. Gal.-Nr. 131 © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
To understand the relationship between dreams and health, the first of the categories outlined by Rivière, it is necessary to know what happened to the sleeping Renaissance body. As the person drowsed, damp humours (explored elsewhere in this series) cut the brain off from the external senses, and hence the internal senses seized control. The faculty of fantasy — sometimes, but not always, synonymous with imagination — was particularly important. Fantasy’s usual role was to take sensory impressions, and to select, reshuffle, and remix them for the consideration of the higher intellectual faculties. During sleep, because of weakened or absent reports from the external senses, fantasy was free to produce bizarre imagery (in this respect, Renaissance dream theory is surprisingly close to modern neuroscientific hypotheses). As Robert Burton put it in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ‘Phantasie, or Imagination […] is an inner sense, which doth more fully examine the Species perceaved by common sense, of things present or absent, and keepes them longer, recalling them to minde againe, or making new of his owne. In time of sleepe this faculty is free, & many times conceaves strange, stupend, absurd shapes’ (sig. C2r). The precise nature of these shapes might provide the physician with a clue as to the body’s health. For example, Burton’s predecessor Timothy Bright recorded in his Treatise of Melancholie (1586) that the dreams of melancholy people ‘are fearefull: partly by reason of their fancie waking, is most occupied about feares, and terrours […] and partly through blacke and darke fumes of melancholie, rising up to the braine, whereof the fantasie forgeth objectes, and disturbeth the sleep’ (sig. I2r).
Dreams, as noted above, were also held by some to provide cryptic clues about the unseen world of the future. Such prophetic dreams existed long before the Renaissance. Indeed, English editions of the books of dream interpretation attributed to second-century CE Greek diviner Artemidorus were influential in early modern England (and in early modern Wales, as evidenced by a fragment of a seventeenth-century Welsh-language edition). According to the Artemidorian formula, the images seen in dreams symbolised future events; however, their meaning could be modified by the social status of the dreamer. To take one example, a 1606 English edition of Artemidorus explains that ‘If any one dreames that he comes out of a womans belly [...]. This dreame is good for him which is poore, for he shall have meanes or frindes which will mainetain him, […] To him which is rich this dreame signifieth that he shall have no rule in the house, but others shal overrule him against his wil, for children are governed by others’ (sig. B5r). There are intriguing signs of further personalisation of dream interpretation in the casebooks of the astrological physician Simon Forman (1552–1611), who had recurrent dreams of waters and floods. On 6 September 1599, at a quarter past five in the morning, we find him casting a horoscope to check ‘Vtrum est Turba vrsus me sup somnm [sic] meum qd fui in mare’ — ‘Whether there is trouble in store for me or not upon my dream that I was in the sea’ (CASE5960). To Forman, the meaning of his dream depended not only on its imagery, but on his unique cosmological position.
CASE4062: Horary consultation, Elizabeth Thornfield (21 July 1598) /
CASE4063: Diary entry (21 July) /
CASE4064: Horary consultation, Thomas Warren (22 July).
Forman, vol. 3, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 195, p. 134r. © Bodleian Libraries, Oxford (CC BY-NC 3.0).
It is worth staying with Forman as we consider finally the religious implications of dreaming. Forman only published one book in his life, The groundes of the longitude: with an admonition to all those that are incredulous and beleeue not the trueth of the same (1591). This short text contains more admonition than longitude, being mostly given over to justifying the notion that Forman, a man from comparatively humble origins, had managed to figure out the holy grail of maritime navigation (in fact, longitude would remain an unsolved problem for another 150 years). Forman quotes the Bible: ‘And in the latter daies I will powre out my spirite upon all flesh, and your yoong men shall dreame dreames, and your old men shall see visions, and your children shall tell of things to come’ (sig. A4v). This verse — Joel 2:28, repeated in Acts 2:17 — encapsulated fundamental questions for Reformation Europe. Who did God speak to, and how? The Geneva Bible (1561) interpreted the verse as meaning (in Acts) that ‘God will shewe him selfe verie familiarely & plainely bothe to old and yong’ and (in Joel) that ‘as they had visions and dreames in old time, so thei now have clearer revelations’. In other words, the passage might be read as evidence that the word of God could be received and interpreted by all. However, the age of miracles, including miraculous dreams, was over, and all humanity now needed was the printed word. Even asleep, no-one was exempt from the religious conflict of post-Reformation Europe.
The Renaissance conception of dreaming was very different to that of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. However, early modern dream theories give us glimpses of the materials with which Freud constructed his Interpretation of Dreams — anarchic mental faculties, strangely powerful visual images, the possibility of decoding hidden meaning in the terrors of the night. It is perhaps significant that during this period, dream lost its medieval meanings of joy, noise, and frenzy, and took on primarily the connotation of a vision experienced during sleep. We might think of the Renaissance as the period in which the word dream moved definitively to a private and mysterious realm inside the human mind.
Niall Boyce is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Selected Bibliography.
Anon. The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament, trans. William Whittingham, Anthony Gilby, and Thomas Sampson (Geneva, 1561).
Artemidorus. Judgement, or exposition of dreames, trans. Robert Wood[?] (London, 1606).
Bright, Timothy. A treatise of melancholie (London, 1586).
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621).
Forman, Simon. The groundes of the longitude (London, 1591).
Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’ in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York & London, 1990), pp. 131-45.
Kassel, Lauren, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji (eds.) The Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: A Digital Edition < https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk > [accessed 22 April 2021].
Rivière, Janine. Dreams in Early Modern England: ‘Visions of the Night’ (London & New York, 2017).
17 June 2021.