P L A Y W O R L D A N D R E A L W O R L D : D R A M A T I C I L L U S I O N A N D T H E D R E A M M E T A P H O R JUDITH SCHERER HERZ Concordia University ^Borges's observation that literature is "a controlled and deliberate dream" was based on the lines of Luis de Gongora: A dream is a playwright Clothed in beautiful shadows In a theatre fashioned on the wind. "W hy does it disquiet us to know," Borges asks in another essay, "that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? These inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators then we, -their readers or spectators, can be fictions."1 What do these observa tions offer us by way of critical tools for reading Shakespeare's plays? Do we find out something about Shakespeare's dramaturgy from their perspective or do we merely solace our ears with gnomic rotundities?2 I think if one proceeds cautiously one can indeed claim fruitful results for the interpreting of Shakespeare's plays by following the dream topos. This often invoked triple metaphor - life is a play / life is a dream / a play is a dream - is much more than a moralizing observation on our transiency.3 Elaborated within the plays, it is the theatrical equivalent of illusionism in the graphic arts. The painter's shadow tricks, his manipulation of light and line, his trompe l'ceil deceptions are analogous to the playwright's creation of the play illusion. When a character claims his experience is like a dream or he is acting as in a play, or when the audience is told "think that you have but slumbered here," we are placed in the same position as the viewer of one of the grand illusionist ceilings of, for example, Andrea Pozzo. Where does real architecture leave off and architectural illusion begin?4 In terms of this study, what is the relationship between "real" world and play world? How does the exploitation of the triple metaphor - life, dream, play - create and sustain the dramatic illusion? Reading the plays alert to their dreams and dreamers yields several observa tions: l. The dream experience in its confusing and provocative actuality was clearly of special fascination for Shakespeare. English Studies in Can ad a, iii, 4, Winter 1977 3»7 2. Although the literary dream tradition - chiefly the medieval dream vision, the prophetic dream episode, and its closely related dream-as-conscience episode - was a ready part of Shakespeare's range of reference, he did not expand these forms in any significant way, but left them pretty much as he found them. 3. Although The Taming of the Shrew is the only play framed as a dream vision and the number of foreboding or prophetic dream episodes is no greater in Shakespeare's plays than in those of his contemporaries, the reader is over and over again made to feel a dream presence in the plays. In The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest, (to indicate only a few) the play is often felt to be a species of waking dream. That is, we watch the characters as they encounter embodiments of their dreams and we watch them as dreamers ourselves, asked to believe in the spectacle in proportion as we believe in our dreams. Antipholus of Syracuse walks through a landscape of mirrors, convinced that he must be dreaming. Sebastian follows Olivia, as if in a dream. Macbeth hears a prophecy that seems to be the secret voice of his "horrible imaginings," a dream-realm "whose murder yet is but fantastical." Moreover we watch Mac beth enact his dreams as he moves through the play in the triple character of playwright, actor, spectator.5 Even before Duncan's murder he can plot the entire scenario - see the act, the inevitable retribution. But he dons his costume nonetheless (he "buckles his distempered cause"), until finally he becomes...