Friday, October 30, at 4:00 PM in Pugh 160, the second of our MEMS Graduate Student Talks
Ken Silverman (Classics)
“…steep my senses in forgetfulness”: The Temptation of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV
The king of 2 Henry IV is a very sick man. The anxieties of containing a civil war, of suspecting the intentions of his oldest son, and the guilt of how he reached the throne, have nearly broken him. In his only soliloquy, he is suffering from insomnia, and his thoughts tend towards a fantasy of a long dreamless sleep. Henry’s oblivion-fantasy fits well within psychoanalytic discussions critics have already begun about these plays. My paper continues this discussion by examining how the king’s language exposes an “infantile” fantasy: a desire to return to an experience of prenatal consciousness (what Freud called the “oceanic” state). In meditating on sleep, the king opens a whole network of memes that extends back to ancient literature – – – whether the rich or poor man sleeps more soundly; the patriarchal analogy of equating “kings” with sleepless parents and their humble subjects with babies; popular and scientific ideas about sleeping and dreaming; the biblical concept of God as an “orderer,” a Creator who is always taming a universe tending towards chaos. At the intersection of all these ideas, two opposite mental states come into view – these have something to do with the difference between “sleeping” and being “awake.” Both these mental states are important to human happiness, and Shakespeare’s Henriad inquires into how we might be able to reconcile them.