[MR] Exhibit: 'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream' at Folger Shakespeare Library - washingtonpost.com

[David Chessler]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/11/AR2009031104044.html?hpid=artsliving

To Dream in Bard's Day? At Folger, That's the Question

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 12, 2009; C01

Before heading to bed, the medieval mind had fearful things to 
ponder. There was the succubus, a female demon who would gather seed 
from men while they slept, and her male counterpart, the incubus, who 
would redeposit it in unsuspecting women. These were the 
quintessential Nightmares, devilish figures whose presence was sensed 
as a heaviness, to the point of suffocation, on the chest. To ward 
them off, you might try a prescription of dragon guts steeped in wine.

That was the world of sleep and dreams bequeathed to people of 
Shakespeare's day. But, as "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream," a new 
exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library demonstrates, these 
torments coexisted in early modern times with far more rational and 
soothing visions of dream life. In a diffuse, and at times 
fascinating, show, the landscape of nocturnal life in Renaissance 
England turns out to be a place in great flux, as new scientific and 
pseudoscientific ideas jangled with the old, haunted, superstitious ones.

Thomas Nash's "The Terrors of the Night," represented in the 
exhibition by a 1594 edition, took a refreshingly modern approach. "A 
dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, 
which the day hath left undigested," he wrote. Perhaps Nash went to 
bed hungry, because he was given to culinary metaphors for sleep. In 
another context, he argued that one could no more predict the future 
from dreams than "guess what meat is there upon a spit" from the 
smells coming from the kitchen.

<<<snip>>>

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday 
at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St. SE. Admission 
is free. Through May 30. For more information go to 
<http://www.folger.edu>http://www.folger.edu.



--
D__/d   chessler at capaccess.org
               chessler at usa.net