Suggestions for a New Approach to Shakespeare’s Imagery

Summary

When in 1933 L. C. Knights pleaded that “the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his plays as dramatic poems”, he was putting forward an extreme point of view, reacting against what he considered the established way of regarding Shakespeare’s plays, as studies in character. For at that time the study of Shakespeare’s imagery, concentration on the poetry rather than on the action of the plays, was a comparatively new trend in Shakespearian criticism, although notable books had been published in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s by G. Wilson Knight, Elizabeth Holmes, H. W. Wells and others. More recently, and especially since the publication of C. F. E. Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery in 1935, the volume of writings on the imagery of the plays has increased enormously. Discussion of verse and imagery appears in many books dealing mainly with other aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, and a fair proportion of current Shakespearian criticism is concerned with imagery and language alone. By 1948 A. H. Sackton could observe that

it is now becoming a commonplace of criticism that an Elizabethan play may be approached most profitably not as a study in human character, or as an expression of an individual philosophy, but as a dramatic poem.