"But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly; better be with the dead."
In "Othello" is a striking picture of the sudden change, in the
direction we are considering, which comes over a tranquil mind from the
commission of a great crime. Iago says to Othello, after he has wrought
"the deed without a name":--
"Not poppy nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou own'dst yesterday."
The greatest punishment which comes to Macbeth after the murder of
Duncan is lack of sleep. Nowhere in the language, in the same space, can
be found so many pictures of the blessedness of repose as in the
familiar lines:--
"Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep;
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast."
And the principal reason which deters Hamlet from suicide is the fear
that even if he does sleep well "after life's fitful fever is over,"
still, that sleep may be full of troubled dreams.
"To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
Richard III. says, when the catalogue of his crimes is full, and when he
"sees as in a map the end of all":--
"The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham's bosom,
And Anne, my queen, hath bid the world good night."
In addition to the fuller phrases wherein are shown the blessedness of
sleep, or the remediless nature of its loss, many brief sentences occur
scattered throughout the plays, and emphasizing the same great lesson.
For instance:--
"Now o'er one half the world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep."
"With Him above
To ratify our work, we may again
Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights."
"You lack the season of all natures, sleep."
"My soul is heavy, and I fain would sleep."
"For never yet one hour in his bed
Have I enjoyed the golden dew of sleep."
"For some must watch and some must sleep,
So runs the world away."
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank."
"The best of rest is sleep."
"Our little lives are rounded with a sleep."
The various passages cited above prove and illustrate that no author has
written so feelingly, so appreciatingly, as Shakespeare on the subject
of sleep and its loss.
The diligent commentators on his works have investigated laboriously the
sources from which he drew his plots and many of the very lines of his
poems. He was a great borrower; absorbing, digesting, and making his own
much of the material of his predecessors. But it is a noteworthy fact,
that none of the exquisite lines in praise of sleep--that gift which the
Psalmist says the Lord giveth to his beloved--can be traced to other
source than the master. These are jewels of his own; transcripts from
his own mournful experience. In middle life he remembered hopelessly the
tranquil sleep of his lost youth, as
"He that is stricken blind cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost."
He had suffered from insomnia, and he writes of this, not "as
imagination bodies forth the forms of things _unknown_," but as one
who, in words burning with indestructible life, lays open to us the
sombre record of what was experience before it was song; who makes us
the sharers of his griefs; who would awaken in the similarly afflicted
of all time that compassionate sympathy which goes out to those whose
burdens are almost greater than they can bear.