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

Reviews 155 Brown, Peter, ed., Reading Dreams: The Interpretation ofDreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; cloth; pp. x, 194; R.R.P. £35.00; ISBN 0198183631. This stimulating slim volume of seven essays shows how far the historical stud of dreams has advanced in recent years. Its title notwithstanding, it adopts a determinedly interdisciplinary approach which provides a welcome release from the straitjacket in which literary criticism has for so long imprisoned the dream vision form. Moreover it boasts of being thefirstcollaboration by Englishspeaking scholars to encompass both the medieval and Renaissance periods. The book had its beginnings in a postgraduate course at the University of Kent to which three of the contributors gave preliminary versions of their papers. The editor then secured further contributions from scholars well known for their research on medieval and Renaissance dreams. The first of the essays is actually an introduction, written here not by the editor but by A. C. Spearing, author of the classic 1976 study Medieval DreamPoetry . Spearing not only provides a critical overview of the volume but enthusiastically seizes the opportunity to champion the virtues of a wider definition of dreaming and a more precise analysis of its historical and cultural context. Against the depressing optimism of modern neurophysiology, Spearing i s inclined to believe that dreams matter, or at any rate that w e will never be able to finally convince ourselves that they don't. Thefirstof the essays proper is Peter Brown's 'On the Borders of Middle English Dream Visions'. Brown begins by taking up the question of why dream vision poetry became so extraordinarily popular in England in the second half ofthe fourteenth century. O f the 30 or so major poems surviving from this period, a third are explicitly dream visions while several others show some characteristics of the genre. Brown argues that the convention of dreaming signals entry to an altered state of consciousness. Drawing on the anthropological theory of V. and E. Turner, Brown argues that dreaming functions as a form of internal pilgrimage, placing the dreamer in a liminal state in which the (usually masculine) subject disengages from the social world in order to seek a more authentic reintegration. The popularity of the dream form thus appears as a response to the severe social conflicts of the period. In 'Medical and Moral Authority in the Late Medieval Dream', Stephen Kruger, author of Dreaming in the Middle Ages, links the dreams in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess to physical illness, 156 Reviews the ascendancy of medical and astronomical theories of dreaming and the late medieval concern with the body, and with a body of unstable and ambiguous gender at that. David Aers pursues the gender issue still more vigorously in 'Interpreting Dreams: Reflections on Freud, Milton, and Chaucer', in which he denounces the oppressive and negating strategies employed by Freud towards Dora and Milton's A d a m towards Eve. In contrast to these vicious patriarchs, Chaucer shows a subtle and humorous understanding of the complex gender and power strategies involved in the social act of dream interpretation. The supposed contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is also at issue in Kathryn Lynch's 'Baring Bottom: Shakespeare and the Chaucerian Dream Vision' in which Lynch argues persuasively that Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is indebted to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare use the ambiguous status of dreams to maintain conflicting levels of interpretation while denying a privileged perspective, but Shakespeare goes further than Chaucer in his affirmation of the supremacy of the imagination. Peter Holland's 'The Interpretation of Dreams in the Renaissance' provides an entertaining overview not only of dream theorists but also of dreamers - Descartes dedicating the dream confirming his vocation to the Virgin Mary, Montaigne failing to have any, Vives being ridiculed by the professors when he wants to lecture on them, Lucrecia de Leon drawing the attention of the Inquisition for dreaming too politically, Rabbi Modena interpreting dreams for his congregation, Girolamo Cardano analysing the role of memory in his dream diary. Clearly for many Renaissance writers dreams were no...