When considering Marjorie Garber’s success as not only an early modernist but also a cultural critic, few remember that her dissertation and first book were on dreams in Shakespeare’s plays. She has excelled at initiatives that combine traditional scholarship and popular culture; with Shakespeare After All (2005), based on Garber’s undergraduate lectures, her accessibility as a guide to all things Shakespeare was reestablished. The reissue of Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, first published in 1974, allows renewed appreciation of her talent for specialized accounts of the playwright’s innovativeness. Although comedies offer glimpses of his later care in deploying representations of dreaming, his dependence on symbolism and other formal elements as devices for generating plot and character gave way to the romances’ complexity and subtlety.

In a new prologue, Garber links her own subsequent scholarly interests to this early monograph by recognizing how the topic pervades literature as well as “cultural performances, politics, and public affairs” (xi). There she acknowledges recent interdisciplinary work on early modern dream interpretation while noting the relevance of Freud, whose theories play a large role in her analyzing of Shakespeare: the prologue concludes affirming theater’s vitality, pace Artaud and others, as a space of wish fulfillment.

A comprehensive introduction describes relevant concepts and figures in the history of dream interpretation, from Homer and Macrobius to native English folklore and Chaucer, with an attentiveness unusual for the early 1970s to the comparative value of each development. If her point is that “transformation is at the heart of dream,” the influence of, say, either the book of Daniel or a prior author such as Artemidorus, whose second-century CE dream-interpretation manual found a wide audience in multiple Renaissance translations, is limited: “the idea of creating a dream, or of the Jungian association of dream and poetry, was completely outside the range of his thought” (8). Shakespeare’s affinities with or superiority to other thinkers indicates his sophistication in understanding the human condition. More recent scholarship may be more nuanced, but it lacks such refreshing judgments.

The first part is on four early plays: Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. Garber traces progress from the dream as a prophetic mechanism, sometimes awkwardly as with Richard’s Bosworth dream, to its embodying authorial strategies and the minds of minor characters; the dreams of Calphurnia versus Cinna, for example, respectively display Shakespeare’s penchant for integrating historical lore and for surprisingly effective originality: with the dream of the latter, “in one short scene of less than forty lines the whole myth of the play is concisely expressed” (58). Garber is skillful not only at arguing for dreaming’s various roles, but also establishing the plays’ major elements: e.g., “an absolute rejection of the irrational is a fatal misjudgment in the world of Richard III” (21). The next part, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, finds in that comedy evidence for her thesis that a “transforming creative process becomes the subject as well as the technique of the play” (70). The process touches fairies, the players, and Athenians; after a reading of Bottom’s dream, Garber highlights the general centrality of language, as in Demetrius’s hopes of the lovers’ retelling their dreams as they leave the woods: “this final impulse to recount is a counterpart of the ballad projected by Bottom, a creative transformation turning experience and insight into a self-contained verbal form” (86). If Garber’s idealizing views can seem dated, here and elsewhere her emphases on the metacommentary of dreams and on subjectivity and interiority strike one as unusually relevant to today’s critical climate.

Part 3 is on the tragedies, with Hamlet, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra as the subjects of its central sections; part 4 focuses on the romances. In tragedy, dreams are indexes of protagonists’ dark mental states, with their detachment from reality, in Garber’s view, being measurable by belief in destructive dreams: “the uses of dream and illusion are ultimately all framed so as to let us share the subjective inner world of the protagonist” (123). This inner world indicates awareness of the imagination’s shaping of persuasive ideas and the irresistibility of destructive forces. On the other hand, romances transform inseparability of the minds and fascinations with language into something rich and strange; figures such as Marina, Hermione, Imogen, and mainly Prospero are captivated by dreams, but when “the concept of dream becomes as elusive as that of poetry itself,” it fosters an appreciation of both concepts’ “luminous intensity” (151). Throughout, Garber capaciously interweaves a sensitivity to smaller themes, such as the play within the play, with the general project of understanding dreams as increasingly indicative of the redemptive nature of theatrical power. As current discourse about early modern culture distances itself from assessing relative worth of artifacts from that culture, Garber’s pleasure in the texts inspires enjoyment in the insights her intimacy yields.