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‘She wakes’ (V.3.22) and is forced to make the decision, the almost unbearable suspense is relieved by a longprotracted
crime, followed by an immediate punishment. The scene of Othello standing, as if forever, over the
bed with his sleeping potential victim is arguably one of the most delicately powerful dramatic situations in
Shakespeare’s entire canon.
The power of the image of a sleeping character on stage has been repeatedly acknowledged. 2 David Bevington
has traced the origins of the effective use of the topos in Western dramatic genres to mediaeval religious plays,
with the twelfth-century dramatizations of the dream of the Three Magi (based on Matthew 2. 12) being one of
the earliest instances (see Bevington, pp. 54–56). 3 Shakespeare favoured this device, having deployed it
numerous times throughout his dramatic career. Othello’s observing the beauty of his sleeping wife, whom he is
about to strangle to death (Othello, V.2); Giacomo’s nocturnal venture in the bedroom of Imogen, whom the
former seeks to incriminate in the eyes of her husband, Posthumus (Cymbeline, II.2); the murder of Old Hamlet
in his sleep, re-enacted before King Claudius as an accusation of his crime (Hamlet, III.2); the represented
angelic dream of the wronged Queen Katherine (or rather the Princess Dowager at that point) on her deathbed
(Henry VIII, IV.2); the final misunderstanding between King Henry IV and Prince Henry, caused by the Prince’s
wrong evaluation of the nature of his father’s sleep (2 Henry IV, IV.3); and the procession of eleven ghosts, who
pass their judgements upon the sleeping King Richard III and the Earl of Richmond before the decisive Battle of
Bosworth Field (Richard III, V.5), are just a few examples. Moreover, in the early 1600s, there was a wave of
Jacobean plays containing dramaturgically important scenes with a sleeper at their centre, including Barnabe
Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607), Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1608–11), The
Valiant Welshman (before 1615) of dubious authorship, and the Beaumont and Fletcher apocrypha The Faithful
Friends (between 1604 and 1626). Interestingly enough, all these plays are, in one way or another, connected
with the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatrical company. 4
Perhaps the most intriguing example of a Shakespearian sleeper is, however, the original. It is to be found in
what is most probably Shakespeare’s earliest history (if not his earliest play at all), Henry VI, Part Two, and its
merit lies not only in its capacity to foreshadow the employment of one of the playwright’s favourite tropes in
his later works, but also (as shall become obvious from the following discussion) to give us a valuable insight
into the development of early Elizabethan staging practices and the manner in which this development was
reflected by the dramatic texts of the period.
The play which modern audiences know simply as Henry VI, Part Two (or 2 Henry VI for short) was first
published anonymously by the London stationer Thomas Millington in 1594 as The First part of the Contention
betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the
banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the
notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime vnto the Crowne. The opulent title, which
foregrounded the most popular events of the plot and served mainly as an advertisement for the potential
buyers of the printed book, remained unchanged for the second edition of the piece, published by Millington in
1600. In 1619, the play was printed once again (by Thomas Pavier), this time in a volume together with Henry
VI, Part Three (the First Octavo published by Millington in 1595), under the general title, The Whole Contention
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