研究発表要旨

Shakespeare and Buddhism in  Bruno's Dream

Wendy Jones Nakanishi   
The idea that the human consciousness of the experience of life constitutes a kind of dream is a conceit which features largely in Shakespeare - professedly one of Iris Murdoch's favorite writers - and also in Buddhist teaching. John Bayley describes his deceased wife as having been raised in a 'happily godless' household, with neither of her parents showing any interest in religion or forming affiliations with any church, going on to claim that Murdoch's interest in the 'spiritual' developed in her days as a student at Oxford University, nourished by her studies of philosophy, with an insatiable curiosity naturally extending to the great minds whose ideas have changed the world. According to Peter Conradi, Murdoch's biographer and close personal friend, Murdoch had been studying Buddhism since the 1940s, when she embarked on an unrealized project of publishing a work on the Dalai Lama. 
Chronology supports a connection between Bruno's Dream and Shakespeare. Bruno's Dream was published in 1969. Conradi's biography of Murdoch observes that, on the publication of The Red and the Green in 1965, feeling dispirited and lacking in direction, Murdoch had decided to re-read the whole of Shakespeare's works, studying the plays over the following four years. It is scarcely surprising, then, that in Bruno's Dream we find echoes of such plays as The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. We can also find in this novel allusions to Buddhist notions of the significance - or lack of it - inherent in life and death. 
Bruno's Dream centers upon the decaying, decrepit figure of Bruno Greensleave - bed-bound, riddled by guilt, tormented by doubts and fears and lusts - as he struggles to come to terms with the fact of his impending death. The novel's opening sentence describes Bruno wakening from a troubled dream; its closing sentence relates the fact of his death. It is probable that Murdoch deliberately fashioned the novel's format as an echo of the famous lines from The Tempest likening life to a 'dream' rounded by a 'sleep'. Murdoch also alludes to Hamlet, in which Shakespeare describes our fear of death as possibly arising from our terror that it might represent a troubled sleep from which there is no awakening. As an old man in failing health, Bruno, accordingly, dreads the night because of the nightmares it will bring. 
The American critic Harold Bloom argues that one of Shakespeare's most significant achievements lay in his delineation of characters able to 'overhear' themselves and, subsequently, to analyze their thoughts and ideas dispassionately and to modify their behavior. The process of 'overhearing' which can result in a person's recognizing and accepting change in himself and others can be likened to the Buddhist notion of the enlightened individual's 'awakening' from the dream of self-obsessed thoughts. The main objective of Buddhism is 'wakefulness' in the sense of an immediate, continuous, clear awareness of one's body and mind, unclouded by emotions, beliefs or self-centered thinking, accompanied by a recognition that the world is 'bathed in love'. Bruno's Dream charts the course of its characters embarked on this spiritual quest.