Although sleep constitutes a third of our lives, histories of sleep have been, until recently, largely relegated to the margins of historical study. The past has been written through the hegemonic perspective of a diurnal lens, written as though all human life and culture were solely experienced in the light of day and ignoring the many spectrums of human consciousness. Historians are beginning to redress this neglect. Recently, a rise of interest in sleep has resulted in historical studies of sleep medicines, dreams, and nightmares, in addition to Sasha Handley's formative study of the socialization and material culture, Sleep in Early Modern England (2016). Yet, thus far, scholars have tended to focus more on social and cultural histories of sleep to the detriment of the importance of human biology, affect, and cognition as part of the ferment in which premodern ideologies and experiences of sleep emerged. As Nancy Simpson-Younger and Margaret Simon, the editors of Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance, and Handley argue, sleep is both biological and cultural, metaphorical and embodied, and also fundamentally social.

Simpson-Younger and Simon have sought to fill this gap in scholarship, and the result is a multifaceted and provocative collection of essays that focus on answering the pertinent question of how biocultural and literary forces combined to influence conceptualizations and epistemologies of sleep, subjectivity, and human consciousness. Through innovative studies of a variety of literary sources from the Sidney Psalms and Thomas Campion's poetry, to Shakespeare's plays, sleep is subject to a variety of approaches ranging from formalist criticism, to biopolitics, affect, and trauma theory. The result is a nuanced journey into the early modern world of sleep and the interplay between the literary or metaphorical, the embodied and the affective.

The book is structured in three parts that explore the main overarching themes: “Forming Sleep,” “Sleep, Ethics, and Embodied Form,” and “Sleep and Personhood.” In the first section, Guilio J. Pertile examines the sonnets of early modern English and European poets as a means to negotiate the complex relationship between sleep and subjectivity, to suggest that these works represent sleep and sleeplessness as both paradoxically literary and embodied. Next, Simon explores the innovative use of liminal sleep states in Thomas Campion's poetry as a means to represent and “retool the traditional formal strategies that shape the female body in verse” (52). The section on lyric form and sleep concludes with an informative essay by Simpson-Younger exploring a less-studied yet no less fascinating range of sleep states in the Psalms translated by Mary Sidney Herbert. These Psalms are used to explore the question of whether, in the wider spectrum of sleep states, we can still contemplate and access the divine.

“Sleep, Ethics and Embodied Form,” the second section of the book shifts the focus. In the first of the chapters in this section, Timothy A. Turner discusses the use of sleep deprivation as a form of torture in Shakespeare's Othello and The Taming of the Shrew to ask the question of what happens when we do not sleep. Continuing with the Shakespearean theme of sleep, Jennifer Lewin explores the dangerous vulnerability of sleepers in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the following chapter, Brian Chalk demonstrates that for early modern monarchs, represented by King Lear, sleep was a sign of weakness and of their humanity, while wakefulness was, by extension, symbolic of monarch's divine supernatural status.

The final section shifts to themes of personhood in early modern verse epic and prose treatises. Benjamin Parris addresses the neglected theme of insomnia in Spenser's Faerie Queene using Marxist theory and biopolitics to suggest that, for Spenser, the body's ability to labor and retain its natural vitality was dependent on its ability to sleep and rejuvenate. Following this, Cassie Miura examines Robert Burton's explorations of sleep disorders as representative of his attempts to break from medical treatises and align his prose more firmly with philosophical discourse and as a means to provide a secular critique of spiritual enthusiasm. The final chapter discusses the “Miltonic mind” and the way that Milton uses faculty psychology, the idea that the mind is compartmentalized and performs separate functions, to contrast the effects of sleep on human and nonhuman minds.

Overall, the work has numerous strengths. Firstly, it presents a multifaceted approach and considers sleep not as a monolithic, unchanging state, but as existing in a spectrum and acknowledging the many different states of sleep and unconsciousness. Moreover, it asks important questions about relationship between the literary and biocultural, self and consciousness, and the metaphorical and embodied, none of which are suggested to be mutually exclusive. As a whole, the strength of this collection lies above all the depth and complexity of the studies and in their treatment of sleep as a multisensory and multifaceted “ecosystem,” profoundly embodied represented by the sleeping body and yet simultaneously symbolic, metaphorical, and ontological as represented in literature.

Although the collection tends to focus on canonical works—Shakespeare, Milton, Burton, Spencer—other less-studied yet equally rich works on sleep exist outside of the English literary canon. Literary studies of sleep and sleeplessness could be further enriched by a wider foray into lesser-known yet equally rich works. Examples here could include the writings of Philip Goodwin, Thomas Tryon, and Thomas Nashe, among others. However, Forming Sleep presents itself as by no means exhaustive and will offer readers a well-crafted and researched study of literary and biocultural representations and conceptualizations of sleep.