Such Things as Dreams are Made Of, uh …, On

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Cover image: Ariel on a Bat’s Back, Watercolor by artist Louis Rhead (1857–1926). Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0). Above: "Portrait in Noir (An Impression of Mary Astor in 'The Maltese Falcon')," Oil on Canvas, 2007, by the author.

The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorite movies, ends beautifully, all the bad guys rounded up, with the final scene showing Brigid O'Shaughnessy (played by Mary Astor)—murderer, seducer, manipulator, with big sad eyes—looking out through the metal gates of an old-time elevator: a pre-vision of her future behind bars. Then: “the end,” in elegant white script letters, as the music swells (tuba, bass drum, trumpets) and the picture fades. The penultimate scene, however, is somehow less conclusive—and, enchantingly, more suggestive.

Detective Polhaus (played by Ward Bond) holds a statuette, less than two-feet high: the figure of a bird, a falcon, painted black. It is the prize around which the movie has circled—the goal and yet, as well, in the term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, a MacGuffin: it is not what it seems and the story is much less about the black bird than what a nefarious and wonderfully talk-happy (see TCM.com “I Like to Talk”) cast of characters will do to get it—and what they imagine it to be.

“It’s heavy,” Polhaus observes, cradling the statuette like a baby. “What is it?”
Private detective Samuel Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart), touching the falcon, caressing it with two fingers, then taking it tenderly, possessively, as if it were soft and not hard and weighty like a dumbbell, replies: “It’s, uh…the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Ward Bond and Humphry Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Warner Bros., 1941.

Perhaps only slightly less well known than “Here’s looking at you, kid,” this is one of Bogie’s signature lines and probably his most evocative. What does he mean? The stuff that dreams are made of? The statuette that he sweetly taps and jealously retrieves from the policeman was supposed to be a jewel encrusted treasure and not the lump of worthless metal that it turns out to be; it represents a kind of alchemy in reverse: a vision of gold and rubies become common lead. And yet Spade is wistful, gentle with this “treasure,” as if he is protecting something bigger, something more than what we see. For him, even though this prize is revealed to be a disappointment, it holds yet some magic. In suggestion? In those visions the search for it engendered? On one level, we might understand this thing presented as but a decoy, and the treasure, the priceless and true falcon, something still to be attained and yet to be found, as is indeed proposed by Kaspar Gutman, the arch-villain and suave criminal-gang ringleader (played by Sydney Greenstreet in all his orotund mellifluousness). But the actual treasure seems to me to be somehow beside the point. Perhaps it is the quest or the dream that matters—this is something available to all of us; and this the daily bread of the private detective and man of action, Samuel Spade, who needs sleep, sometimes, but would be nothing without the quest, his call to action.

The phrase, the line, or a version of it, of course, comes to us centuries earlier in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s curious and powerful play that’s also filled with evildoers—and, within which, so much of dreams is made.

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The Tempest, Act I, Scene I, engraving, 1709, Jacob Tonson (16–56?–1736), publisher. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0)

It’s perhaps only a coincidence, though a fun one, that in both the The Maltese Falcon and The Tempest a kind of shipwreck plays a dramatic role. In the Maltese Falcon, it’s a vessel called La Paloma that goes down, somewhere toward the middle of the story. Captained by a man named Jacoby (played very briefly and without credit by Walter Huston, actor and father of the film’s director, John Huston)—a one-time partner of Gutman’s gang who briefly holds the falcon, delivering it wrapped in old newspapers to Samuel Spade, before dying in the private detective’s office—the ship is swallowed by flames on a San Francisco wharf as it sinks into the darkness of the bay. The sunken ship here is just collateral damage and not central to the plot, and yet it raises the stakes, and the excitement, as its captain adds another body to the count (which begins, at least in the film, with the death of Spade’s partner, Miles Archer). The shipwreck in The Tempest, on the other hand, starts the whole thing off and sets the stage for what follows. It is a wreck, though, in which there is not actually a wreck: a disaster that only appears to happen or that happens only as an illusion or in a dream—and yet, it is a dream and a wreck with the power to transform whole worlds and lives.

The Tempest, [Stephano on a Wine Cask) drawing by Robert Anning Bell (1863–1933), artist. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0)

A witness to the apparent disaster, fifteen year-old Miranda is tormented by what she has seen and what she believes her father, the magician Prospero, has caused:

“If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them…
…O! I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer. A brave vessel
(Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her)
Dash’d all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perishe’d.
Had I been any God of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or er
It should the good ship so have swallow’d and
…the souls within her.” (I.ii.,1–11)

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[Prospero and Miranda, in] The Tempest [Act I, Scene 2, from a set of 12 engravings], published by C. Knight (1825). Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0)

Prospero’s “art” is such that it can effect such extraordinary natural tumults as the tempest that appears to sink a ship and its crew and passengers, convincing the victims themselves that they have experienced this disaster. And yet, as we later learn, not a hair on any head was harmed in the making of the storm; and the ship is safely stowed away, its crew magicked to slumber through most of the play below deck, ship moored in hidden harbor, while the main cast of characters appears ashore, in discrete and separate groupings, in various states of uncertainty.

This is a play rich in dreams, a tribute to the powers of imagination; individuals are put to sleep, under the magician’s spell, much like a storyteller enchants her audience, and naturally they dream—and yet, in this play, it is hard to tell dream from reality.

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The above image, depicting a scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (III.iii.19), Enter several strange shapes, bringing in a banquet … inviting the King, etc., to eat, was created by artist Arthur Rackham (1867–1939); ink and watercolor drawing. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0)

Perhaps the most vivid dream, if perhaps a waking one, occurs toward the end of Act III. Conjured up by Prospero with the aid of airy spirits, a group of “strange shapes” presents a banquet to the main group of the shipwrecked, which includes Alonso, King of Naples, and Antonio, Prospero’s treacherous brother, the usurping Duke of Milan. There is solemn and unnusual music. Alonso: “What harmony is this?” Gonzalo: “Marvelous sweet music!” The strange shapes carry their feast and dance about with gentle motions and salutations, inviting the king to eat. A fantastic and mouth-watering sight. Sebastian, the evil-intentioned brother of Alonso, who would have Alonso’s throne, sums up the magical miracle:

“A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.” (III.iii.21-24)

And, as they settle to repast, licking their lips in anticipation, there is thunder and lightning and the spirit Ariel claps his wings upon the table. And the banquet vanishes. A disappointment and a kind of torment, imposed upon these men of sin, more a nightmare than a dream. They draw their swords in futile show of protest, and are mocked by Ariel and the other spirits—and then are left, “knit up in their distractions,” to be confined, shortly afterward, by magic and unable to budge, till freed by Prospero’s command.

Still there is a festive and ultimately light-hearted air. This is a play in which the central mover, the magician/artist/scholar Prospero, began, perhaps, with designs toward revenge but who finally opts for forgiveness instead: “The rare action is / In virtue than in vengeance….My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, / And they shall be themselves.” (V.i.25-32)

It’s somewhat unbelievable—how Prospero forgives—particularly such figures as Sebastian, who only moments earlier plotted to murder King Alonso, his own brother, to say nothing of Prospero’s own treacherous brother, Antonio. And yet there is a dream logic and the power of magic and a lesson of some kind, if only we can see and understand.

It’s interesting to compare Bogart’s famous line with the one used here. “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” said Samuel Spade. And, looking at the falcon, we think of treasure. Of desire. Of happiness and longing and frustrated quests and even, perhaps, illusion. But the original line, in The Tempest, is about more than desire and longing; it’s about life itself.

Prospero has given in to vanity and shown his powers to his daughter, Miranda, and her suitor, Ferdinand, son of the king of Milan; he has orchestrated a kind of wedding ceremony for them, performed by spirits and seeming gods. And then, becoming distracted, he thinks of those who would usurp him yet again, this time in his island kingdom—plotters to the island throne involve Caliban, the island’s indigenous resident; Trinculo, a jestor; and Stephano, the drunken butler. Ferdinand sees, in Prospero, “some passion / That works him strongly.” Miranda, surprised, proclaims never till this day has she seen her father touched with anger. But Prospero, registering their discomfort, and remembering his power and position, comforts them. His inclinations toward peace are irresistible; he will pull back the curtain on his powers, before closing them forever—it is time for the wizard to prepare for leaving Oz.

To Ferdinand, Prospero speaks:

You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort,
As if you were dismay’d, be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall disolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…” (IV.i.146-158)

We are such stuff. We are the subject. In the Maltese Falcon, it’s the object—the falcon, the treasure, the goal. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. In The Tempest, it is we who are the stuff. Dreams are made on us, we are made of dreams. We are made up of dreams, of the stories that we tell, and what we imagine—and the magic spells we cast. And, before and after dreams, we sleep; sleep gives birth to dreams, to life, to magic. Our life is rounded. And what gives it shape is its beginning—and its end.