Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic

Abstract

Shakespeare couples lunatic, lover, and poet as ‘of imagination all compact’ (Dream v.i.7-8); Spenser finds that Phantastes’ chamber is filled with ‘leasings, tales, and lies’ (F.Q. II.ix.51.9) and that his eyes seem ‘mad or foolish’ (F.Q. II.ix.52.7); Drayton speaks of the ‘doting trumperie’ of imagination; when men's minds become ‘inflamed', says Bacon, ‘it is all done by stimulating the imagination till it becomes ungovernable, and not only sets reason at nought, but offers violence to it’. These views of imagination and its activity, echoed in other important literature of the age of Elizabeth, hardly suggest a favorable view of the faculty assigned to the poet. The explanation of such derogatory views lies in the popular psychology of the period.