SOURCE: "Hermia's Dream," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Holland is an American educator and critic who employs a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to literature and emphasizes the subjective nature of our response to literature. In the following excerpt, originally published in 1979, he analyzes Hermia's dream in A Midsummer Night's Dream, relating it to the play's ambivalent treatment of love.

Literature is a dream dreamed for us.
           —The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968)

What could be more imaginary than a dream of a dream of a dream? Yet Hermia's dream is just that in A Midsummer Night's Dream. She dreams but later decides she was dreaming that she dreamed. Then, at the very end of the play, we, the audience, are told: "You have but slumb'red here"; we dreamed that she dreamed that she dreamed.

A...