Rather than a superhero, I argue that Morpheus is a Romantic hero bearing traces of the author’s autobiography. I maintain throughout the article that Gaiman designs Morpheus with Romantic understandings of Prospero and, drawing from the larger DC Universe of superhero motifs, how Gaiman constructs Morpheus as an alter ego.
Reading the character as metonymic in a Romantic vein, I construct a paradigm to shift current Sandman scholarship from the mythological level to the tropological level to examine its literary values and merit. I initially discuss how popular culture reconstructs possible 'selves' of Shakespeare in ways that are designed to suit particular artistic endeavours and/or modern subjectivity, and then focus on 'how' and 'why' traditional criticism identifies an autobiographical dimension in the playwright's character Prospero, from The Tempest. This article examines Neil Gaiman's Sandman as a series that invokes English Romanticism's perspectives of dreams, heroism, the virtue of storytelling and Shakespeare's source of authorship, bringing to the fore the series' relationship with the European literary canon.
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