imagery
imagery,a modern critical term for the totality of references to perceptible things and actions to be found—usually but not exclusively in such figures of speech as metaphor and simile—within a poem or play. In the 1930s it became a central concept in the redirection of Shakespearian interpretation away from dramatic action and character, towards poetic ‘theme’: the work of G. Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire (1930) and its sequels proposed that patterns of recurrent imagery not only produced the special atmosphere of each play but also indicated its deeper themes, of love, death, harmony, or chaos. In a more statistical investigation, Caroline Spurgeon's book Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells us (1935) claimed that each play was dominated by a distinctive ‘cluster’ of images, e.g. of light and darkness in Romeo and Juliet and of disease in Hamlet; and that these were clues to Shakespeare's personal mentality and...
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