Recovering Shakespeare's images

Abstract

Since the 1930s, critics and scholars have been refining their formulations about Shakespeare's imagery. In this process, hundreds of patterns of iterated words or motifs have been noted in individual plays or groups of plays, often with reference to Renaissance icons and emblems. Since the 1950s, moreover, one group of imagists has been reminding us that imagery-in-the-theatre (which combines poetry, costumes, properties, gestures, and larger configurations for the eye) can yield effects and meanings not available to the reader attending only to imagery-on-the-page. The verbal-poetic texture of Shakespeare's plays has therefore been analyzed extensively (some critics might say exhaustively), with at least some attention to the pictorial tradition outside the drama and to what happens when Shakespeare's words are bodied forth in the theatre.