Leading Motives in the Histories

Abstract

T here is no question but that the most striking function of the imagery as background and undertone in Shakespeare's art is the part played by recurrent images in raising and sustaining emotion, in providing atmosphere or in emphasising a theme. By recurrent imagery I mean the repetition of an idea or picture in the images used in any one play. Thus in Romeo and Juliet the dominating image is light with its background of darkness, while in Hamlet there hovers all through the play in both words and word pictures the conception of disease, especially of a hidden corruption infecting and destroying a wholesome body. This secondary or symbolic imagery within imagery is a marked characteristic of Shakespeare's art, indeed it is, perhaps, his most individual way of expressing his imaginative vision. In the earlier plays these dominating images are often rather obvious and of set design, such as that of war and weapons, arising out of the ‘civil war of wits’ in Love's Labour's Lost; in the later plays, and especially in the great tragedies, they are born of the emotions of the theme, and are, as in Macbeth , subtle, complex, varied, but intensely vivid and revealing; or, as in King Lear , so constant and all-pervading as to be reiterated, not only in the word pictures, but also in the single words themselves.