The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery

Wolfgang Clemen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First published in 1951. The edition reprints the second, updated, edition, of 1977. When first published this book quickly established itself as the standard survey of Shakespeare's imagery considered as an integral part of the development of Shakespeare's dramatic art. By illustrating, through the use of examples the progressive stages of Shakespeare's use of imagery, and in relating it to the structure, style and subject matter of the plays, the book throws new light on the dramatist's creative genius. The second edition includes a new preface and an up-to-date bibliography.

I

INTRODUCTION

ANYONE who will take the trouble to compare the A imagery in Antony and Cleopatra with the imagery in Henry VI or in the Two Gentlemen of Verona cannot but be greatly impressed by the vast difference between them. They lie so far apart that a connection, a transition between these two styles seems scarcely possible. But if one delves deeper into Shakespeare's dramas, and if one examines each of the plays in turn, from the earlier works to the late tragedies, it will become apparent that in the former, this art is prepared for, step by step. Here we stand before an amazing and unique development of an element of poetic expression, an evolution so striking and of such compass as is difficult to find in any other poet. It is the aim of this book to describe this in its separate phases and forms and to show its connection with Shakespeare's general development.

Anyone who has occupied himself with Shakespeare at all has at least some conception of the general development of his art. If, however, we are to study this evolution more in detail and if we are to become fully conscious of what we at first feel in a vague and general way, we shall be constrained to return again and again to the individual, concrete fact; we must fix our gaze upon separate courses of development in order to grasp the more comprehensive and the more general. Thus, for example, similar scenes and situations in the various plays must be compared with one another; we must investigate how Shakespeare manages his plot, how he characterizes his men and women, and how his description of nature, his technique of exposition, his method of preparing for a crisis, and his manner of resolving a conflict undergo changes and attain to perfection. Only from such individual investigations can we gain a definite picture of what one may term the general development of Shakespeare's art. By investigating the special development of a very important element of Shakespeare's style, this book would seek to help towards a more distinct conception of the history of Shakespeare's art in its entirety.

It must be remembered, to be sure, that every investigation of an individual development carries with it the danger of overlooking the connection of this element with the play as an organic whole. Only too easily do we forget that the distinction which we make between different elements of dramatic art is at bottom an artificial one. Delineation of character, plot, atmosphere and dramatic structure of a play do not, in fact, exist as independent spheres, distinct one from the other. Only one thing really exists: the play as a whole, as a totality. Everything else is simply an aspect which we detach from the whole in order to facilitate our investigation and make it feasible. Herein lies the final difficulty which is responsible for the problematical character of all literary investigation concerned with poetic development. It is only by means of the individual study of such isolated aspects that the total development can become tangible and clear to us. But it is just this method of isolating and cutting out that may easily destroy the living organism of the work of poetry.

Hence it must be our aim to reduce to the minimum errors due to isolating the “imagery” from the other elements of the dramatic work. This study seeks to show how manifold and various are the conditions and qualifications determining the form and nature of each image, and how many factors are to be considered in order to grasp fully the real character of the imagery of a play. It is very tempting to examine a passage from Shakespeare by itself, and it often gives us great aesthetic pleasure. But it is a method suitable only in a few definite cases. In most cases it is deceptive, because we examine the given passage from a viewpoint which does not coincide with Shakespeare's own intention. When Shakespeare wrote this passage, he wrote it for a certain particular situation, for a particular moment of his play. The special circumstances involved in this situation he kept before his mind's eye, and of them he thought while composing the passage. Sometimes, he sought by means of the imagery to lend enhanced expression to the feeling of the character concerned; at other times, it might have been his intent to give the audience a hint towards understanding what was still to come, or perhaps to provide a counterpoint to one of the central themes of the play. Before we can claim to appreciate and appraise rightly an image or a sequence of images, we must first know what particular purpose this image serves where it occurs.

An isolated image, an image viewed outside of its context, is only half the image. Every image, every metaphor gains full life and significance only from its context. In Shakespeare, an image often points beyond the scene in which it stands to preceding or following acts; it almost always has reference to the whole of the play. It appears as a cell in the organism of the play, linked with it in many ways.

It is the aim of this book to investigate these relations and connections, in order to arrive at a truly organic method of understanding the images. There are certain important questions which naturally follow from this angle of approach.

We must first of all consider the immediate context in which the image stands. How is the image, the metaphor related to the train of thought? How does it fit into the syntax of the text? Are there criteria by which we may distinguish between degrees of connection?

The further question arises, whether certain forms of dramatic speech, the monologue or the dialogue, have an influence upon the nature of the image.

As a dramatic situation, a specific motive or inducement, stands behind every image, the following questions arise: What motives are especially productive of images, out of what situations do most images grow? What is the relationship of the images to their occasion?

Each image is used by an individual character. Is the use of imagery different for each character, can any relation be discerned between the nature of Shakespeare's men and women and the way they use imagery? Are characters to be found in Shakespeare which are especially marked by speaking in images?

All these relationships point, each in its own way, to the fundamental fact that the image is rooted in the totality of the play. It has grown in the air of the play; how does it share its atmosphere or contribute to its tenor? To what degree is the total effect of the play enhanced and coloured by images? For the distribution of the images in the whole play is often very striking, and leads to an investigation of the relationships between dramatic structure and the use of imagery.

Thus imagery necessarily suggests to us the fundamental problems lying beneath the complex construction of a play. Swinburne has already pointed out “That the inner and the outer qualities of a poet's work are of their very nature indivisible” … and emphasized that “criticism which busies itself only with the outer husk or technical shell of a great artist's work taking no account of the spirit or the thought which informs it, cannot have even so much value as this….”¹ One should go even a step further and say that it is not possible to interpret stylistic peculiarities before being perfectly clear about this “thought which informs the artist's work”. Style is a word of many meanings, and hence is subject to the most varied interpretation. In the past few years there has been no dearth of attempts to raise the concept of style to a higher plane and to interpret it in a way that illuminates its real significance.² Shakespeare's style has not long ago been happily defined “as the product of the characters, the passions, the situations, which in fact are the living, driving forces behind and determining the style”.³ This book, too, attempts to view the imagery in this way and to discover the forces determining it.

The answer to all these questions will only be found when the problem is considered as one of evolution. The power to associate the imagery with the very fabric of the play, at first a mere potentiality, develops and extends, step by step, with Shakespeare's development. In Shakespeare's early plays we miss many of the functions of which the images in later plays are capable. Only little by little did Shakespeare discover the possibilities which imagery offers to the dramatist. In his hands metaphors gradually develop into more and more effective instruments: at first fulfilling only a few simple functions, they later often serve several aims at one and the same time and play a decisive part in the characterization of the figures in the play and in expressing the dramatic theme. The image eventually becomes the favourite mode of expression of the later Shakespeare. This fact, well known to the majority of Shakespeare's readers, deserves, however, investigation and explanation. Why does Shakespeare, especially in the greatest plays, repeatedly replace the direct statement by a metaphorical phrase? Why does the later Shakespeare say the deepest and wisest things through an image instead of in “plain language”? It is a superficial and unsatisfying explanation to declare that metaphorical language is “more poetical”. We must seek better answers.

As a rule, too little attention is paid to the fact that images in a play require quite another mode of investigation than, say, images in a lyric poem.¹ We are able to comprehend a lyric poem—like a painting or a statue—almost at one single glance, “immediately”; a drama, on the other hand, we can understand only through a series of impressions, “successively”. This holds equally true of the essential nature of the epic poem or of the novel, but in the case of the drama, the sequence of time, the process of the successive exposition, plays a far more important rôle.² For the action of the drama unfolds itself in one evening, visibly and audibly, before the eyes and ears of the audience; its effect depends largely upon how far the audience can be brought under the spell of this sequence of events in time, how far it experiences with the characters the course of the dramatic happenings, and lives in it during the actual performance. The dramatist himself shapes everything in his play according to this immanent law of the succession of time. His art, as Dover Wilson once put it, is one of “progressive revelation”.

In every epic poem and in every novel, we find sections which can be taken by themselves, which lose none of their significance even when we do not know their connection with the temporal course of the events. The novelist can allow himself digressions, broad descriptive passages and historical or sociological explanations; he often brings in something that has no significance for what is to come and likewise much that did not necessarily result from what preceded. Time, the progress of things and events, often seems to stand still in the novel and the epic poem; a protracted lingering occurs at some point without our being able to detect any advance. In the drama, which is subject to entirely different laws, this would be utterly impossible. The texture of the drama is of a much closer web, and the necessity of an inner continuity, of a mutual cooperation and connection of all parts, is greater in the drama than in the epic poem or the novel. This becomes clearer if we look at a play of a great dramatist (dramatists of lesser rank naturally often fail to fulfil these conditions) and examine the often apparently insignificant details which he introduces. Almost every single detail is used later on, reappears suddenly at an important point. Individual touches which seemed insignificant when they were introduced for the first time, acquire real meaning with the progress of events. In a truly great drama nothing is left disconnected, everything is carried on. The dramatist is continuously spinning threads which run through the whole play and which he himself delivers into our hand in order that, by their aid, we may understand what follows, and accompany it with greater tension and keener participation. It is one of the artistic achievements of the great dramatist to prepare in the mind of the audience a whole net of expectations, intuitions and conjectures so that each new act, each new scene, is approached with a definite predisposition. This unobtrusive preparation of our mind for what is to come is one of the most important preliminary conditions necessary for a powerful dramatic effect. For the climax of the drama does not come suddenly; we ourselves have gone the whole way and have followed the separate threads which led up to the climax.

It has been necessary to emphasize this peculiar feature of dramatic art because certain conclusions that are important for the examination of the images in a play result from it. Just as every detail has its proper place in that dramatic structure, and is only to be understood when this has been examined, so, too, each image, each metaphor, forms a link in the complicated chain of the drama. This progress of dramatic action must, therefore, be understood in order to appreciate the function of the image.

Since Aristotle men have thought and discussed again and again the nature of metaphor; what forms of thought find expression in it, what types of metaphorical expression there are and what kinds of application. Even in recent years this subject, which cannot be further pursued here, has been dealt with from widely differing angles.¹ We must refrain from applying any one of these definitions or one of the conventional systems of classification to Shakespeare's images. Such classification is alien to the vital, organic quality of Shakespeare's language, A separate treatment of comparison, simile, personification, metaphor and metonymy, would only be illuminating if there were a definite and regularly recurring relationship between these formal types and the imagery—e.g. if from the fact that an image appears in the guise of comparison, specific and similar conclusions could be drawn as to the nature and the function of the image. But that is not the case; the same formal type has manifold possibilities of application, and it is solely the context in which the image stands that can offer any information about what a particular formal type may signify “just here”.

It is an odd fact that our critical endeavours are generally satisfied when we have succeeded in classifying and cataloguing something. We believe that our perceptive faculties have reached their goal when we have divided and sub-divided phenomena of poetry and history into a system of pigeon-holes and have pasted a label on to everything. That is a curious error. Often enough such a rigid schematic system of classification destroys a living feeling both for the unity and for the many-hued iridescent richness of the poetical work. This is especially true of Shakespeare's style, which is of an incomparable variety and elasticity. The principal source of error in the statistical method of approach is that a set of statistics gives us the illusion that all the phenomena encompassed by it are equal among themselves. In reality, however, this is only seldom the case. If, for example, we state that in a certain play there are three sea-images as opposed to eight garden-metaphors, the statistical statement itself is still of very little help and may indeed be misleading. The three sea-images may be comprehensive, they may stand at important points and may have a far greater significance for the drama than the eight metaphors from the garden. The statistical method can never tell us anything about the relevancy, the degree of significance of the individual image; under the same heading it lists unimportant, mere “padding”-images together with images of the greatest dramatic import. Is it not true that everywhere great poetic art seems to begin just where statistics end—where no measuring of things is any longer possible and numbers no longer have anything to tell us? Neither the statistical method nor the systematic classification of ...