In hindsight, Clarence’s dream had a horrible premonitory power, extending to the detail of his death by drowning, but its significance reaches beyond this local irony. It reveals something broadly important about tyranny on the rise: its frightening ability to penetrate the mind in sleep, even as it can also penetrate the body. In Richard III, dreams are not decorative touches or mere glimpses of individual psychology. They are essential to an understanding of a tyrant’s power to exist in and as everyone’s nightmare. And the tyrant has the power to make nightmares real.
