Prof. Dr. Claude Fretz

ASSOZIIERTER PROFESSOR

 

Claude Fretz is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature at Sun Yat-sen University (China). He is also a Fellow of the research centre ‘European Dream-Cultures’ at Saarland University (Germany), which is funded by the German research foundation (DFG). His PhD is from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham (UK). His research has attracted funding in China, the UK, Germany, and Luxembourg.

 

His primary research interest and area of publication lies with the dramatic works of Shakespeare in their early modern (Elizabethan and Jacobean) contexts, and with their classical, medieval, and European influences/connections. He is also interested in contemporary appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare in global contexts, and is actively involved in interdisciplinary research projects related to dream cultures. Most recently, he has co-led an international and interdisciplinary investigation of representations of animal dreams, as part of which he co-organised a conference on ‘Dreams and the Animal Kingdom in Culture and Aesthetic Media’. In addition, he is guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (ESCI, SCOPUS, and EBSCOhost) on the topic of ‘Narrating Dreams: Solution and Dissolution’.

 

Claude Fretz is the author of Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), a monograph which explores how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, the book argues that Shakespeare systematically exploits early modern physiological, religious, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to reshape conventions of dramatic genre and to experiment with dream-inspired plots. Claude is also co-editor of Performing Restoration Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a book which arises from an AHRC-funded research project and investigates how Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare used to be performed and how they can be performed for audiences today. He has also published various journal articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, on early modern literature, on representations of dreams and sleep in the Renaissance, on modern theatre practice, and on Restoration drama. His work has appeared in journals including Shakespeare, Critical Survey, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture 1660-1700, Cahiers Elisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, Etudes Epistémè, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, and others.


    • Shakespeare and early modern literature
    • Shakespeare and performance
    • Dreams and waking visions
    • Sleep and insomnia
    • Representations of the supernatural

     

    Claude Fretz’s monograph, Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), investigates how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, it argues that Shakespeare systematically exploited early modern physiological, religious, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to reshape conventions of dramatic genre. The book discusses the significance of dreams and sleep in early modern culture, and explores the dramatic opportunities that this offered to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It also offers new insights into how Shakespeare adapted earlier literary models of dreams and sleep – including those found in classical drama, in medieval dream visions, and in native English dramatic traditions.

     

    His article ›»Full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams«: Dreams and tragedy in Shakespeare’s Richard III‹ argues that dreams are an important and deliberate part of Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy in Richard III. Shakespeare, when composing this play, exploited the uncertainty in his time about whether dreams were natural or supernatural phenomena in order to deploy dream devices as a form of commentary on the material as well as spiritual implications of his characters’ actions. As a result, dreams ultimately sharpen the play’s focus on human agency by amplifying the characters’ ambitions, crimes and guilty consciences.

     

    His article ›»Either his notion weakens, or his discernings / Are lethargied«: Sleeplessness and Waking Dreams as Tragedy in Julius Caesar and King Lear‹ examines how Shakespeare’s dramatic representations of insomnia and waking dreams support his tragedies’ iconic emphasis on bodily and mental suffering. It considers Brutus’s insomnia and the nightly appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Julius Caesar, as well as King Lear’s sleeplessness and his ontological uncertainty about whether his misfortune may be a dream. Whereas Brutus’s vision of Caesar’s ghost is often interpreted as a supernatural visitation, the article argues that it can equally be read as a physiological hallucination caused by Brutus’s sleeplessness. The article also proposes that King Lear’s sleeplessness and the metaphorical description of his waking reality as a dream form part of Shakespeare’s design of Lear’s tragedy as one that is primarily concerned with the character’s experience of suffering.

     

    Claude Fretz is currently working on an article examining the conception of time and space within dream frames in the plays of Shakespeare and in other early modern writings, including Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. As part of that, he is investigating descriptions of the dream state in various early modern treatises, with particular regard to time, space, and sensory perception, and is considering how Shakespeare might have adapted this cultural or scientific understanding in his own representations of the dream state.

     

     

    Monographs

    Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

     

    Edited Volumes

    with Richard Schoch and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Hrsg:): Performing Restoration Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023.

     

    Journal Articles and Book Chapters
    • with Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch: ‘Introduction: New Shakespeare for a New Era’. In Performing Restoration Shakespeare, ed. Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Claude Fretz, and Richard Schoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 1—14. Full text available at https://hal.science/hal-04124633v1.
    • ‘Shakespearean Boars and Dolphins: Representing Character through Animal Dreams in Richard III and Antony and Cleopatra’. Critical Survey (ISSN 1752-2293), 35:1 (2023), 44—63. Full text available at https://hal.science/hal-04124625v1.
    • ‘Dreaming of Serpents and Asses: Shakespeare’s Ovidian Animal Dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Shakespeare (ISSN 1745-0918), 2023. Full text available at https://hal.science/hal-03708673v1.
    • Performing Restoration Shakespeare “Then” and “Now”: A Case Study of Davenant’s Macbeth’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (ISSN 1729-6897), 48:1 (2022), 27—56. Full text available at http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Music/2-Fretz.pdf
    • "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen": Multisensory Dreams in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, Traum–Wissen–Erzählen (ISSN 2567-7993), vol. 9 (2021): Träumen mit allen Sinnen [Dreaming with all Senses], ed. Stephanie Catani and Sophia Mehrbrey (Leiden: Brill; Paderborn: Fink), pp. 157—177.
    • ”Not wond’ring at the present, nor the past”: Dreaming through Time and Space in Shakespeare, In: Zeit im Traum, ed. Christian Quintes and Laura Vordermayer (Leiden: Brill; Paderborn: Fink, 2021).
    • "marvellous and surprizing conduct”: The “Masque of Devils” and Dramatic Genre in Thomas Shadwell’s The Tempest’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 43:2 (2019), S. 3—28.
    • "Full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams": Dreams and Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Richard III‹. In: Cahiers Elisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 92:1 (2017), S. 32-49.
    • "Either his notion weakens, or his discernings | Are lethargied": Sleeplessness and Waking Dreams as Tragedy in Julius Caesar and King Lear‹. In: Etudes Epistémè, 30 (2016). https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/1383 [letzter Zugriff: 15.09.1018].
    • ›Postcolonial Appropriations and their Quarrels: Shakespeare’s Tempest and Conrad’s Victory‹. In: Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language, 5 (2013), 28-36.

     

    Others

     

     
    June 2021

    »Four nights will quickly dream away the time«: The Spatial and Temporal Experience of Dreams in The Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, via the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ Society for Renaissance Studies Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK)

     

    Feb 2020:

    »Dreaming with the Senses in Shakespeare and Colonna« European Dream-Cultures Conference, Saarland University, Saarbrücken (Germany)

     

    April 2019

    »Performing Restoration Shakespeare«; Othello’s Island Conference, Centre of Visual Arts and Research, Nicosia (Cyprus)

     

    December 2018

    »Dreams in Shakespeare«; University of Trier, Germany

     

    November 2018

    »Dreams in Shakespeare«; Saarland University, Germany

     
    August 2018

    »Performing Davenant’s Restoration-era Macbeth«; Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

     

    August 2018

    Workshop on a Restoration Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

     
    June 2018

    »›Strange enchantment‹: Sleep, Dreams, and Comedy in Endymion and A Midsummer Night’s Dream«; British Shakespeare Association Conference, Queen’s University Belfast

     
    January 2018

    »Performing Restoration Shakespeare: Achieving Impact and Public Engagement with Theatres« University of Huddersfield

     

    December 2017

    »Insomnia and Madness in King Lear and Macbeth«; Oxford-Globe Forum for Medicine and Drama in Practice, University of Oxford

     

    July 2017

    Workshop on Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Tempest; The Globe Theatre, London

     

    March 2016

    »Dreaming and Awakening into Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Othello«; Othello’s Island Conference, Centre of Visual Arts and Research, Nicosia (Cyprus)

     

    September 2014

    »›Either his notion weakens, or his discernings | Are lethargied‹: Sleep, Dreams, and Sensory Perception in Shakespearean Tragedy«; Night of the Senses: Dreams and Sensory Illusion, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, Institut du Monde Anglophone

     

     

     

    Before joining Queen’s University Belfast as a Research Fellow, Claude taught widely across the early modern period in the University of Birmingham’s Department of English, including the modules ›Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean‹, ›Songs and Sonnets: English Poetry from Chaucer to Donne‹, and ›Shakespeare’s Comedies‹. He has also taught English medieval, eighteenth-century, and Victorian literature, as well as critical theory.