How Historic People like Julius Caesar and Shakespeare Interpret Dreams

The simplest dramatic use of the dream relies on it being ignored or misinterpreted. The audience is thus given a cue as to what is likely to happen, and dramatic tension is created by the characters knowing as much as they do, but carrying on regardless. At a more subtle level, Garber (1974) argues that in both Richard III and Julius Caesar there is a sense in which disregarding portents is part of a more general characterization - of individuals who have taken their destiny into their own hands, or think they have, in contrast with those who consciously submit to their fate. However, the context in which dreaming is used in the plot has to be constructed to suit the play - the ideology of the culture in which it is set must condition the characters' responses. It is here that we can gain some insight into the assumptions that Shakespeare and his audience made about beliefs in antiquity, compared with more modern medieval beliefs - Richard HI reigned a mere century before the play was first performed.

In Julius Caesar Calphurnia dreamt that Caesar's statue, 'like a fountain with an hundred spouts, did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans came smiling and did bathe their hands in it'. Portents a plenty are also reported - 'a tempest dripping fire' (St Elmo's fire?), a lion walking sulkily through the city, a bird of ike night hooting and shrieking at mid-day, and of course the soothsayer's warning to 'Beware the Ides of March.' In this context the portentous dream :5 used as another example of the superstition of antiquity, rather than being a statement of current belief.

Incidentally, a character in the play called Artemidorus is described as a teacher of rhetoric, but this is probably not an anachronistic reference to Artemidorus of Daldis, whose dream books became widely available in printed Latin and Greek on the Continent for the first time in the second half of the sixteenth century. The play was taken from Plutarch's Lives, in which Artemidorus is described as a native of the Isle of Guidos and a doctor of ihetoric in the Greek tongue. Artemidorus of Daldis was not born at that time. The first English translation of Artemidorus's Oneirocritica, by Robert Woods, was published in 1606. It must have been a popular book as it had gone to five editions by 1656 and 24 editions by 1744. However when the play was written (in 1601) Shakespeare may have been familiar with the Latin or Greek version, but his audience in the main would not.

In Richard III Clarence has every reason to fear for his life, since he has been imprisoned in the Tower of London. The reason he offers to Richard for lis incarceration is that the king had been 'hearkening after prophecies and dreams ... and suchlike toys as these had moved his highness to commit me bow'. Here belief in such portents is presented as being obviously wrong-headed, and it follows that offering such dubious evidence could only be in the interests of dark political ends. Clearly Shakespeare's audience was expected to take a skeptical view of dreams as portents, attributing such beliefs to the ancients.

Clarence's dream is much more closely described than any in Julius Caesar, and is a highly believable nightmare of drowning. Clarence has escaped from the Tower and is crossing the Channel with his brother, Gloucester (later to become Richard HI). Walking together on the ship's deck, Gloucester stumbles and Clarence, in trying to steady him, is knocked overboard. A graphic description of drowning is followed by his translation to the 'kingdom of perpetual night'. The two abrupt changes of scene - from the deck to the water, and from the water to the next world - are typical of the 'scene shift* phenomenon of dreaming. Even more convincing as an account of a real dream is the idea that Gloucester is somehow was responsible for his death - but only accidentally. This is a truly classic example of dream-work, as described by psychoanalysts. The latent thought is the notion that Gloucester may be plotting to murder Clarence - an idea too horrifying to contemplate. The dream-work process thus thinly disguises this, making Gloucester kill him all the same, but accidentally. 'Gloucester will kill me by accident, though he doesn't want to' (Garber, 1974).

It is my contention here that neither Shakespeare nor his audience believed that dreams predicted the future, although they were certainly prepared to entertain the idea. The interest and subtlety of the plays rely on a considerable degree of skepticism of the infallibility of dreams as guides for the future.

The Grimm brothers, according to Donald Ward (1981), introducing his translation of their legends, described the nightmare as being a traveler in physical form. In one of these stories some shepherds who observed one regularly using a boat to cross a river, and removed the boat, reduced the nightmare to wailing pitifully and threatening them, demanding the return of the boat:

At night they like to ride horses, and in the morning one can see that they have done so because the horses are exhausted ... They like to tangle their victims' hair into elflocks or as they are also called, tangle locks, or mare's braids. They do this by sucking on the hair and twisting it.

Are we really expected to believe this? The account hovers on the brink of farce, and must surely have been intended as a spine-chiller more analogous to a modern horror film than a literal description of something that was to be believed. We are invited to thrill to the idea of travelling nightmares, but the essentially humorous style informs us that it is not to be taken entirely seriously.

The upshot of this foray into the literature on beliefs in antiquity seems to be that there was a great deal of credulity but some skepticism, as well as some wonderfully entertaining stories. Much of what went on seems unremarkable in terms of modern beliefs and practices - either in the fringe cults and the established churches or in modern psychotherapy. As today, people liked the idea of weird beliefs about dreaming, but imputed them to foreigners (such as the Assassins) or the ancients.