SOURCE: “Dream and Plot,” in William Shakespeare's Richard III, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 5-14.

In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Garber examines the way the dream sequences in Richard III serve as metaphors for the play's larger action and analyzes the role of omens and apparitions in constructing the world of the play.

The great popularity of the dream as a dramatic device among the Elizabethans is surely due at least in part to its versatility as a mode of presentation. Both structurally and psychologically the prophetic dream was useful to the playwright; it foreshadowed events of plot, providing the audience with needed information, and at the same time it imparted to the world of the play a vivid atmosphere of mystery and foreboding. Thus the Senecan ghost stalked the boards to applause for decades, while the cryptic dumb show, itself a survival...