Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (review)

Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Edited by Peter Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 194. $65.00 cloth.

Reading Dreams ends with an essay that stresses the difficulties of the pursuit to which this volume is devoted. Kathleen McLuskie asserts that "reading dreams is always a process of translation. The dreamer translates incoherence into memory; the dream theorist translates dream into theory. . . . Yet the process of translation is culturally determined not by a single model of interpretation, but by conflicts in the range of interpretation offered by a variety of texts" (162-63). One of the strengths of this volume is that it gives its reader a good sense of such a range of interpretation across several centuries. In doing so, it also does justice to the multiple ways that dreams can be read at any given moment. Dreams are discussed as both prophetic and postprandial phenomena; they are understood (sometimes simultaneously) as evidence of everything from divine revelation to dietary (ir)regulation to humoral imbalance.

In addition to stressing the productive collision of different understandings of dream production and interpretation, Reading Dreams rightly resists the temptation to construe the texts on which its contributors focus in terms of an absolute transition from the late medieval to the early modern. Peter Holland, for example, offers an admirable survey of different models of Renaissance dream interpretation which includes not only Montaigne's dismissive discussion of dreams as omens but also Descartes's account of prophetic dreams of his own that "mark[ed] a crucial stage in [his] intellectual life . . . and on his movement towards formulating the cogito" (125). Moreover, Holland concedes that the Renaissance accepts the models of dream interpretation inherited from classical antiquity and the late-medieval period. Similarly disruptive of distinctions between medieval and early modern, Kathryn L. Lynch asserts that "A Midsummer Night's Dream can . . . be read as an extended meditation on the right relationship between reason and imagination" (103)—the very relationship explored by Chaucer in his dream visions, most notably his Legend of Good Women. Lynch positions Shakespeare's play in the late-medieval tradition of "poems. . . beset with irony and scepticism at the possibility of imaginative transcendence" as represented by dreams (103).

Several of the essays are interested in the perils and politics of dream interpretation. Both McLuskie and Holland are relevant here, but it is in a piece by David Aers that this theme is most fully advanced. Aers takes up Milton and Chaucer, although most of his essay is devoted to Freud and his now-notorious sessions with Dora. Aers is concerned with the power dynamic inherent in Freudian psychoanalysis and, in particular, with the way that Freud occludes Dora's desires through analysis: "Dora's voice is silenced and her own account of the event [i.e., of a sexual assault made on her by a family friend], let alone of her feelings, [is] denied or, rather, subsumed and superseded in the exegete's imperialistic discourse" (87). He then turns to read Milton's Adam as inhabiting a similarly imperialistic relationship to Eve and her dream; from there he moves to The Canterbury Tales in order to show Chaucer's more complex and subtle relationship to the operations of interpretation: in "The Nun's Priest's Tale" Chaucer "bestows critical attention on the strategies of power and gender in the making of dream interpretations" (96). Chaucer, then, is understood as unmasking the operations of power unreflectively performed by Milton and Freud.

So far I have touched on those essays that are at least partly early modern in emphasis, but two of the strongest essays in the collection focus on the late-medieval period. Peter Brown compellingly situates English dream visions of the late-fourteenth century in relation to poetic narratives (such as Orfeo and the Dit dou lyon) that also represent the altered consciousness of the narrator. Brown shows that...