In Shakespeare’s plays, characters do not simply wake up from sleep; rather, they awaken into profound, transformative confrontations with themselves and their worlds. Shakespearean Awakenings provides the first sustained investigation of literal and metaphorical awakenings across Shakespeare’s canon. Ranging from physical on-stage and off-stage awakenings to the semantic deployment of the term, this book treats the moment of waking not as a mere postscript to a dream but as a site of dramatic, religious, bodily, psychological, and political change. Tracing the trope across genres, this book examines how Shakespeare appropriates and subverts classical, scriptural, and early modern traditions of awakening narratives. It explores how Shakespeare moves beyond traditional, religiously reformative models of conversion to dramatise moments of moral, emotional, and political disorientation. From the failed spiritual awakenings of Richard III and the rebirths of The Winter’s Tale to the humoral, sexual, and Senecan crises in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, Shakespeare depicts awakening as a liminal experience where interior selfhood intersects with intersubjective social order. The book extends its analysis to twenty-first-century performance, revealing how directors leverage the subversive potential of Shakespearean awakenings to interrogate discourses on structural, ecological, and political justice. Shakespearean Awakenings offers a vital new framework for understanding the relational and volatile nature of early modern identity—and its enduring contemporary resonance.

Claude Fretz has taught Shakespeare and early modern English literature at universities in the UK and China. He received his PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He is the author of Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and co-editor of Performing Restoration Shakespeare (2023) and Narrating Dreams: Solution and Dissolution (2024). He has also published his research in journals including Shakespeare, Critical Survey, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture 1660–1700, Cahiers Elisabéthains, and Études Épistémè.