Review of Periodicals (72.1)

Boars and Dolphins in Shakespeare

Claude Fretz’s article focuses on two Shakespeare plays which are not usually paired: Richard III and Antony and Cleopatra. His thesis is that Shakespeare’s plays use animal imagery along with dream references to enhance plot and character. A disproportionate number of pages — a good fourth of his article — are devoted to setting the stage for his argument about how this happens in the above two plays, but still, the whole essay is beautifully written, and the introductory section is useful and pleasurable reading in its own right. In it Fretz summarizes some of the more important work on dreams and animals in Shakespeare, like that of Bruce Boehrer and Jeanne Addison Roberts, and also discusses ancient, medieval, and Renaissance texts promoting animal and dream symbolism, among them Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Arthurian legend, and the Bible. Noting that Shakespearean dreams often employ animal symbolism that predicts characters’ actions, Fretz concludes that Shakespeare always shows “a deep interest in the integration of dream and performance,” and that whatever inherent symbolism the animal images contain and promote, the “representation of his characters’ dreams can never be divorced from the theatrical and narrative contexts in which they occur.” Readers might disagree with Fretz’s assertion that Richard III’s characters are blind to Richard’s beastliness, and that his animal nature is only indirectly disclosed (to the characters) by Hastings’ dream of an attack by a raging boar. Yet his linking of the dream-boar imagery to Richard’s subsequent dialogue…