SOURCE: "A Dagger of the Mind: Dream and 'Conscience' in the Tragedies," in Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 88-138.

In the following excerpt, Garber analyzes the blurring of dream and reality in the tragedies Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use.

Richard III V.iii.310

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

Hamlet III.i.83

Richard III. . . is Shakespeare's first truly psychological play. The long, self-revelatory soliloquies, the apparitions, and the narrated dreams all create a reality both inside and outside Richard, wedding the subjective condition of consciousness to the objective conditions of London and Bosworth Field. The word "conscience" echoes repeatedly throughout the play: Margaret rails at Richard "the worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul" (I.iii.221); one of Clarence's murderers, though he acknowledges "certain dregs of conscience" (I.iv. 122-23) in himself...