Julia Buckley's Blog - Posts Tagged "dreams"
Shakespeare Week!
So excited to be a part of Shakespeare week. What are your favorite Shakespearean quotations?
I was just discussing Shakespeare's repeated theme of dreams and waking in his works with my students today, and the idea that writers have explored reality by asking if life itself is a dream, or, conversely, if we are awake but "asleep" to our possibilities, never really knowing the meaning of life.
Hamlet sees sleep as an escape until he remembers dreaming:
"To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
Hamlet fears what might come in the afterlife (even the father he idolizes is in purgatory), and this is one of the things that talks him out of suicide.
But poor Hamlet isn't getting much out of life, nor does he understand his role: "Time is out of joint; oh cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right."
Prospero, in THE TEMPEST, uses dreams to convey the brevity of life, and illusion of power:
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on/And our little life is rounded with a sleep."
I was just discussing Shakespeare's repeated theme of dreams and waking in his works with my students today, and the idea that writers have explored reality by asking if life itself is a dream, or, conversely, if we are awake but "asleep" to our possibilities, never really knowing the meaning of life.
Hamlet sees sleep as an escape until he remembers dreaming:
"To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
Hamlet fears what might come in the afterlife (even the father he idolizes is in purgatory), and this is one of the things that talks him out of suicide.
But poor Hamlet isn't getting much out of life, nor does he understand his role: "Time is out of joint; oh cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right."
Prospero, in THE TEMPEST, uses dreams to convey the brevity of life, and illusion of power:
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on/And our little life is rounded with a sleep."
