Were It Not for Bad Dreams: Songs after Hamlet and Berryman

Were It Not for Bad Dreams takes its title from Hamlet's thought that he could live 'bounded in a nutshell' and count himself 'a king of infinite space' were it not for bad dreams.These are not autobiographical poems in the confessional sense. But neither are they impersonal exercises in Shakespearean ventriloquism. Taking John Berryman's Dream Songs as permission rather than model, Steve Cranfield reimagines Hamlet as a chamber in which private pressures - grief, belatedness, fear, inhibition, institutional absurdity, the desire for witness, and the comedy of self-division - can sound through other voices.The self is not located in one speaker but dispersed across the cast: watchmen, courtiers, messengers, players, gravediggers, sailors, fathers, kings and witnesses all speak from the margins as well as the centre of the play. The poems ask what remains of grandeur when it is handled by clerks, actors, soldiers, messengers and the dead; and what becomes of Hamlet's hesitation when it is heard as a modern condition - wounded, lucid, absurd, and still searching for the courage to act.