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The Dream Of The Rood Interpretation

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A both-sides-win demonstration of retooled and revitalized tradition: when you wish for a Position Paper to push the two-page limit, your dreams come true. Who would guess that this form, intended for essays written and read at a breakneck clip, would prove so amenable, so elastic, and so gloriously conducive to the fast-paced pondering of an essay twice its size when called upon to exegize the dreamscapes of Antony and Cleopatra and "The Dream of the Rood"? In asking a simple Freudian question of each text--what are the wish-fulfillments disguised in your dream depictions?--the Position Paper has magically become a space for expansive syntax, mirthful speculations, and insolent digressions. In its simultaneous protraction and compression, …show more content…

The indecisive dreamer--one imagines him praying for a "sign," a solution to a quandary that has tortured and crucified him--is treated to a turbulent passion play by the figures of his unconscious. My theory is that the cross which narrates the dream's Crucifixion is a concise visual "condensation" of the dreamer's wishes, both conscious and semi-conscious (Freud 151). Hilariously, when we first see the "wondrous tree," it is surrounded by an aureole, "the brightest of beams"; it's as if the dreamer's unconscious is worried that he's too dull-witted to recognize his disguised wish without the eye-catching aid of bombastic backlighting (4-6). The "victory-tree" is victorious because elected by the unconscious to absolve the dreamer of his interminable inner conflict (12). "Beneath that gold I began to see / an ancient wretched struggle, for it first began / to bleed on the right side": the dreamer can vividly see under the tree's adornments the very struggle that he has, until now, only been able to experience as thoughts and feelings, a struggle which drains from the tree now that the dreamer has realigned with his destiny …show more content…

Cleopatra's dream has received minimal critical attention in the canon of Shakespearean scholarship and is completely overlooked even among the appreciations I like best (Harold Bloom's and Camille Paglia's), a curious fate for a passage that forces us to reprocess not only the Egyptian queen but her rambling, indigestible play as well. Difficulty isn't the problem; these critics' foci are comparatively subtler and practically impervious to unspecialized contemplation. How to explain, then, the agonizing struggle, especially at this crucial moment in the play, evinced by many of the best and most illustrious actresses of stage and screen who have braved the role? Perhaps the critic who expects--nay, hopes--that our most gifted actors will also necessarily be good or even merely adequate readers is dreaming. But to misunderstand Cleopatra's dream is to misunderstand Cleopatra; no serious, earnest interpreter of the part can botch this passage. (An impromptu recitation by Helen Mirren uploaded to Youtube proves the point: she purrs the lines warmly, flirtatiously, stuck as she is in the kittenish register that has, by now, become the default interpretation among Cleopatra's most flagrant misreaders. Mirren refuses to modulate; she doesn't understand that Cleopatra must mature in the span of these twenty lines or else the play capsizes.) A perfunctory analysis

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