Structures

Abstract

Of the symbol-searchers Knight, in particular, influenced, for good, those critics who expound the imagery in Shakespeare’s plays, by, as Wolfgang Clemen put it, leading us ‘to regard the imagery as expressive of a certain symbolism which, in Mr Knight’s view, can disclose to us the meaning of the play better than anything else’ (Clemen 1951, p. 16). Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery … (1935) is still an intriguing book, because of her aim, expressed in the second part of her title … and What It Tells Us. She was engaged in the quest for Shakespeare’s psyche. His imagery, she felt, properly arranged and considered, would uncover his innermost being as unconsciously revealed. She was a Romantic at heart, of course, trying to get to his soul, but this time by means of his Freudian slips, whereby we reveal accidentally what we ‘really’ feel. Figures of speech in Shakespeare, when assembled into columns and read off another way, show consistencies that Shakespeare’s genius, she assumes, was unaware of. Thus her famous generalisations about disease imagery in Hamlet or clothing imagery in Macbeth were less significant than her ‘discovery’ that Shakespeare didn’t like dogs, especially dogs who were fed bits at table: that he hated sweet things; and so on.