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CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: On Forgetting

Edited by Alma Prelec and Emily Di Dodo

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 17

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  To speak of memory loss in the theatre most commonly evokes the image of actors fumbling their lines. Another type of theatrical forgetting can, however, be equally problematic: failing to forget dreams. While real-life dream recall is startlingly poor, early modern French characters ‘remember’ their night-time visions with remarkable lucidity. When these (non-existent) experiences from pre-theatrical time are narrated as veridical fact, the audience seems to gain privileged access to a doubly fictional world. In fact, as this paper will show, onstage dream narratives combine creation and recollection. In doing so, they further complicate the relationship between truth and fiction. Through analysis of two suitably peripheral dream narrations — Tristan l’Hermite’s Mariane and Jean de Schelandre’s Tyr et Sidon, Seconde Journée — this paper will probe the status of dream memory on the early modern stage.

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