He then says that he and Richard looked towards England, and recalled ‘a thousand heavy times, during the wars of York and Lancaster, that had befallen us.’ A thousand is an exaggeration, but it shows that Clarence is being warned of more bad things to come. This sets the mood of the speech. It is full of warnings and sentences suggesting bad times.
Clarence says ‘Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in falling, struck me’. This is a forewarning that Richard is going to cause Clarence to suffer in the future. When Clarence says ‘methought’ it shows that he is a bit doubtful as to whether it was an accident or not. He thinks that it was an accident when he ‘stumbled’, but isn’t too sure. Clarence falls into the ocean.
The next three sentences, after Clarence falls overboard, all end in exclamation marks. Clarence has fallen into the sea and is scared. The exclamation marks add more drama to the sentences, enhancing Clarence’s fear.
At the time this play was written, the sea had not really been explored, so whatever was hidden at the bottom was a mystery. Shakespeare decided to make the sea seem full of glittering treasures, yet horrific at the same time. This is one way Shakespeare makes the speech dramatic.
Clarence says he thought he saw ‘a thousand fearful wracks’ and ‘a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon’. He uses the word ‘thousand’ again as this is a large amount and probably an exaggeration to express how overwhelming it was.
Clarence goes on to say that there were ‘Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels’. This gives the image of endless amounts. No limits. The fact that there are jewels at the bottom of the ocean is ironic as there is treasure, but no one to have it.
In the next section of the speech, Shakespeare makes the view of the seabed both vivid and horrific. He does this by making the glistening jewels seem like the eyes in skulls. The fact that there are skulls there signifies Clarence’s upcoming death.
Eyes are an important sign of life and are said to be the ‘windows to the soul’, whereas jewels are inert and inanimate. The jewels that were once beautiful and precious have changed to being frightening by mimicking life in dead bodies. The jewels are said to have ‘wooed the slimy bottom of the deep and mocked the dead bones that lay there scattered’. Shakespeare is personifying them as they are not actually alive and only living things woo and mock. Clarence is scared by this as it looks like the skulls are alive. It seems as if the dead has come alive to get him. It is a sign of his impending doom.
After this Clarence tells Brackenbury that he tried to ‘yield the ghost’. He wanted to set his soul free and die, but ‘still the envious flood stopped in my soul and would not let it forth’. He feels suffocated by the sea and the dream and wants to die and escape but he cannot. The way Clarence describes his desire to die is in a very dramatic and crude way. Clarence says that as his body would not let his spirit escape, his body ‘almost burst to belch it in the sea’. The dream continues to torture Clarence. When Shakespeare says that his body ‘almost burst’ he is trying to portray the immense pressure Clarence was feeling. He is underwater, and so he is surrounded by water which overwhelms him and he is fighting against the dream and the water, trying to escape it. As he is underwater he may have been holding his breath and if he continues to do this, it may feel like his lungs are going to burst. This is how he will feel when he is actually killed as he is drowned.
The sea is described as an ‘envious flood’, threatening to swallow him and not stopping him from escaping. The air is described as being ‘empty, vast, and wandering’. When he says that the air is ‘wandering’ it shows that Clarence feels that if he could reach the surface, he would be free. Shakespeare’s uses of the word ‘empty’ shows that Clarence is feeling lonely. He thinks that if he dies and his soul is set free he will be all right and the dream will end, but the next part of the speech shows otherwise.
Clarence is transported to hell and even though he felt it couldn’t get any worse previously, he now feels that this is just the beginning of the worst part.
He sees the river Styx (a river in hell) and ‘that sour ferryman poets write of’ (meaning Charon, the boatman who rowed the dead across the river Styx). He calls hell ‘the kingdom of perpetual night’. The typical image of hell is of hot, fiery pits, yet he sees it as a gloomy and depressing place that is forever in the dark.
Clarence meets two people in hell. The first is his father-in-law, the Duke of Warwick who asks Clarence ‘What scourge for perjury can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?’. This roughly translates to ‘What punishment for lying can hell provide for disloyal Clarence?’. This shows that Clarence is feeling guilty about being disloyal to his father-in-law during the previous war. At the start of the war he supported his father-in-laws side, but when he realised he was on the loosing side, he switched. He feels guilty about this and feels that Warwick holds a grudge and may come for him in his afterlife.
The second person to visit Clarence is ‘a shadow like an angel’. It is strange that he should associate a shadow with an angel as shadows are usually seen as dark and dull whereas angles are usually seen as white and glowing. I think Shakespeare did this as Clarence is in hell, and most things in Clarence’s hell are dark and gloomy so this glowing angel stands out. By saying it seemed like an angel however, shows that Clarence sees the object as refuge at first, as angels are usually found in heaven. He then says that it is ‘dabbled in blood’, painting a less pleasant picture. The fact that it has blood on it suggests that this is a murderer and this person has killed someone. It is yet another sign of Clarence’s future end.
This vision is made worse, as Clarence says that the character ‘squeak’d out loud’, and said to him ‘Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, that stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury. Seize on him, Furies, take him into torment!’. This is another vision that makes Clarence feel guilty. It is someone who he killed in battle that also feels that Clarence was disloyal and unreliable. One must remember that these images are from Clarence’s own thoughts, his own dream. This shows that he feels guilty about killing this person and guilty about stabbing his father-in-law in the back.
In the next part of the speech, Clarence is describing a flock of Furies (wild tormenting creatures who pursue the guilty) who fly around his head as the ‘ghost’ directed. Shakespeare recreates the noise by describing them as ‘hideous cries’ and by saying that they ‘howled in mine ears’. This gives the reader the impression that they were making noises directly into his ears. This must have been very traumatic and intense as it awoke him from his dream and left him thinking that he ‘could not believe but that I was in hell’.
The pace of the poem at this end point rises, only to suddenly drop as he wakes from the dream. This gives the impression that he is suddenly awoken from the dream as he is shocked awake. This is a common feature of many nightmares.
Some aspects of Clarence’s nightmare still feature in horror today. A common feeling is that of drowning and suffocation. It is a feeling of helplessness and a widespread fear, although the fear would have been more horrific in Shakespeare’s time as the sea was more or less untouched and completely unknown. Another shared feature is hell. It is a placed commonly feared by the guilty minded as they worry that it actually exists and they may be sent there after death. As Clarence’s dream was all about death, and he had a guilty conscience, it isn’t unexpected that he would worry about hell as religion was important at this time and it would have been drilled into people about the consequences of sin.
As I have mentioned previously, Clarence’s dream was prophetic, a prediction, a warning. The next part of the play is the death of Clarence (off stage). The audience is told that he is drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. The dream is a warning the Richard is going to kill him by drowning. In the dream Clarence pushes him overboard, killing him, and in the play, Richard has him drowned. This is Shakespeare’s way of telling the unaware audience Clarence’s future.
