Dream in Shakespeare by Marjorie Garber

Author:Marjorie Garber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1974-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Othello:

O monstrous! monstrous!

Iago:

Nay, this was but his

dream.

Othello:

But this denoted a foregone conclusion,

’Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream.

Iago:

And this may help to thicken other proofs

That do demonstrate thinly.

[III.iii.410–28]

In form this “dream” is quite different from the actual Shakespearean dreams we have examined; its internal development is exceedingly clear and logical, without any of the disguising elements which characteristically transform dream thoughts into dream content. But Othello is blind to this revealing rationality of design, and the narration of the “dream” itself is highly skilled. The presence of internal dialogue heightens the dramatic immediacy of the alleged situation at the same time that it avoids the static narrative quality we have frequently noticed in earlier dreams. The intrusion of aphorism into what purports to be direct description is highly effective, because it seems to impart credibility to the verdict of Cassio’s “looseness of soul.” In describing the supposed love-making scene, Iago deliberately inserts words like “leg,” “thigh,” “plucked,” which emphasize the physicality of the scene he has invented. The fact that he is describing an encounter between two men gives to the entire picture an added unsavoriness, a physical disgust which by contrast seems to augment Iago’s own moral rectitude. Finally, the excoriation of fate, in which Othello believes much more strongly than Cassio or Iago, seems to underscore the contempt of the dream-Cassio for all that Othello symbolizes.

The effect of the “dream” is immediate and dramatic. Othello is prepared to interpret the entire scene as truth, but Iago shrewdly heads him off. “Nay, this was but his dream,” he says. The reversal is dizzying. We know that this was not Cassio’s dream, but rather something Iago has “dreamed up” as a ruse. Yet Iago solidifies Othello’s credulousness by seeming to denigrate what he secretly urges. His surface attitude toward dream is consistent; he sets little store by it. Yet he affects to be persuaded by Othello’s insistence. Othello, for his part, is pretending less conviction about the absolute truth of dreams than he actually possesses. “ ’Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream.” Everything we know about him, and about his sense of self, must lead us to believe that there is no “but” about it. Dreams are part of that illogical and superstitious world from which the Othello of the Anthropophagi, the Othello of the handkerchief, can never wholly be separated. It is this side of Othello that makes the drama possible. We may say without exaggeration that when he vows, earlier in this same scene,

Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again

[III.iii.90–92]

the chaos of which he speaks is the collapse of reality into dream, or dream into reality. Desdemona has, so to speak, only offended in a dream—in “Cassio’s dream” and in Othello’s own deluded mind.

The final sorting out of apparent truths from real ones comes in the deathbed scene, of which Dr. Johnson wrote without hyperbole that it is “not to be endured.

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