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“We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.”
“Sleep, thou hast been a grandsire, and begot/A father to me; and thou hast created/A mother … Gone! they went hence as soon as they were born;/And so I am awake … and find nothing. ‘Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen/Tongue and brain not; either both or nothing;/Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such/As sense cannot untie. Be what it is/The action of my life is like it…”1
What Freud calls the “material” of dreams, Shakespeare had earlier called the “stuff,” knowing that many in his audience would recognize in this word his frequent double entendre on coital stuffing and the stuff of semen and brothel occupants. They would know these puns from many plays; for example, Timon of Athens, where Apemantus's father “in spite put stuff/To some she beggar and compounded” him; Pericles, where the Bawd describes her brothel wenches as “the stuff we have”; Much Ado About Nothing, where Beatrice who complains she is “stuffed” and “cannot smell,” meaning only that she has a cold, nonetheless has her chastity jestingly challenged by Margaret, who responds, “A maid, and stuffed!”; and Cymbeline, where the diseased “hired tomboys” with whom Iachimo accuses Post-humus of fornicating, are called “boyl'd stuff,” a pun on their being the boiled stuff of a stew, a word Shakespeare used for both a vessel for boiling and also a brothel, like the