Publication details
Death-as-Sleep Metaphor and Its Dramatic Roles in Shakespeare’s Plays
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In his 1860 study on medical lore in Shakespearian drama, Dr. John Charles Bucknill made the observation that “[t]here are few subjects that Shakespeare has treated with more pathetic truthfulness than the distress arising from want of sleep”. Indeed, as more recent investigations into the history of medicine show, the discussion of sleep had a particularly strong tradition in early-modern England, both in scientific and popular discourses; and Shakespeare, as the leading dramatist of the period, liked to make use of contemporary theories in his plays. We may observe that sleeping – and dreaming – are often employed in Shakespeare’s oeuvre as powerful dramatic devices, contributing to the unity of individual dramatic pieces and the delineation of their characters. Along with numerous cases of literal sleep, however, Shakespeare also repeatedly explores much darker aspects of sleep, especially its connection with death. This link, firmly rooted in Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian traditions, provided Shakespeare with a powerful dramatic instrument for the straightforward development of the plot in the earlier plays as well as a source of complex theological and existential speculations in his later work. The present paper will attempt to trace the development of death-as-sleep metaphor in Shakespeare’s dramatic canon and will place it in the context of scientific, theological and popular lore that formed the cultural and intellectual background against which the plays in question were originally written and staged. |
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