Imputed Dreams: Dreaming and Knowing in Tudor England

Abstract

This essay will examine reports of prophetic dreaming by a mid-sixteenth-century Catholic servant, eventually hanged for predicting the death of Henry VIII and in the process implicating such powerful men as Bishop John Fisher. It will then consider at greater length, in relation to the fatality of dreaming, two contemporaneous literary dream-texts by the prose writer Thomas Nashe and the poet William Shakespeare, who display by different generic means the aura of fear and consequence still enveloping dreams in 1595. l will take hold of one thread that runs through the period’s theatrical representation: the fearful idea that souls are not securely fixed in individual, nameable and placeable bodies, and that neither the border of the body nor the border of bodily life are stable from the point of view of early modern dream and vision. A matching and related fear is traceable in Nashe’s Terrors, the fear of oneiric error, wandering across borders usually experienced as rigid and definitive. Here on the border of modernity, the two writers help us see the psychological and political stakes of crediting or rejecting dream – costly either way.