| The most representative and significant dream plays written during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in Europe and China came from the pens of William Shakespeare, Pedro Calderon do la Barca and Tang Hsien-Tzu. Their plays, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, La vida es sueno, Mu-Tan Ting (The Peony Pavilion), Nao-Ko Chi (no English translation as yet), and Han-Tan Chi (The World Inside a Pillow) share in common not only a play-within-a-play structure but also various important Baroque themes related to dream motifs: the problem of illusion and disillusion, or appearance and reality, the journey to the dream world and regenerative return; and the life-dream equation.;By the end of the sixteenth century, the harmonious and unifying world-view of the early Renaissance was replaced by confusion and doubt; generally-accepted meanings of life were put to the question in Shakespeare's The Tempest and Calderon's La vida es sueno. The dreams in Tang Hsien-Tzu similarly treat the ephemeral conditions of life. His Nan-Ko Chi and Han-Tan Chi are based on a long historical tradition, intermingled with popular folk belief as well as Buddhist and Taoist philosophy. The dreams in these dramatists motivate plots, create tension, aid in problem-solving, and elevate the characters into a state of heightened self-knowledge. They reflect the internal psychological confusion and conflict of the characters. Finally they provide the basis for the philosophical metaphor that life is a dream.;The characteristics about dreams, like dream of wish-fulfillment, dream of ideation, supernatural dreams and prophetic dreams, as presented in Shakespeare, John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe reflect an awareness of the Renaissance tradition concerning nocturnal visions, which derives from Greek and Latin literature, contemporary folklore, and the Medieval genre of dream-vision. The Chinese of the sixteenth century shared similar beliefs that dreams may arise from imagination, or may be inspired by supernatural beings. Plays like Fei-Wan Chi, Yi-Hsia Chi, and Hung-Fo Chi all reveal these conceptions. |
