WHEN Shakespeare employed imagery in his early histories and comedies, he used it, as we saw, either for decorative purposes, to intensify the expression of the emotions, or to present thoughts of a general nature in epigrammatic form. The significance of the imagery was often restricted to the situation of the moment in which it was used; only rarely did it point beyond this situation to the coming events of the drama. These images still lacked a clear relationship to their place in the dramatic structure. Hence we could quite disregard whether they occurred in the first or in the last act. The more Shakespeare becomes a conscious dramatic artist, the more he employs them for dramatic purposes. The images gradually lose their purely “poetic”, often extraneous nature and become one of the dramatic elements.
The first attempts to foreshadow coming events through images are to be found in Henry VI. But here it is still a somewhat clumsy and obtrusive form; thus in the fifth act of the Third Part, when King Edward calls attention to the approaching calamity:
But in the midst of this bright-shining day,
I spy a black, suspicious, threatening cloud,
That will encounter with our glorious sun,
Ere he attain his easeful western bed:
(C Henry VI, v. iii. 3)
Such an image1 possesses dramatic significance, but its purpose is too obvious; it is not a natural product of the conversation, but is rather set before the scene like a danger-signal. The Merchant of Venice may serve as an example to show how Shakespeare's art in the dramatic employment of images is now ripening in the middle period of his development. The first lines of the play exemplify this. Salarino is trying to give Antonio an explanation for the latter's despondency:
Your mind is tossing on the ocean;
There, where your argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer the petty traffickers,
That curt'sy to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings, (I. i. 8)
As an introduction to the whole play these images are of the greatest importance: they immediately produce the atmosphere of sea, ships and well-to-do merchants in which the play moves ; with their reference to the dangers of trading by sea, they strike the keynote of the play. Salarino's lines suggest the central theme of the action, which is to keep the audience breathless in the following acts:
My wind cooling my broth
Would blow me to an ague, when I thought
What harm a wind too great at sea might do.
I should not see the sandy hour-glass run,
But I should think of shallows and of flats.
And see my wealthy Andrew dock'd in sand,
Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs
To kiss her burial. (I. i. 22)
Here Shakespeare's art of dramatic irony becomes manifest : Salarino—first thinking of his breath with which he cools his soup—imagines what would probably happen if a storm should strike the ships on the high seas. This is spoken in passing, the picture is half-playfully executed, almost for its own sake; in the conversation it is just casually mentioned like a fantasy not to be taken seriously. For indeed the very next verses would refute it: Antonio (and it is he who is really concerned) declares that he is un-worried, and the subject is quickly changed. But these few seconds have sufficed for Shakespeare to attain his aim; the audience has pricked up its ears; upon the imagination a very definite image has impressed itself for a brief moment, and this will come to life again later on when reality demands it. Here we see Shakespeare's peculiar technique, which is to develop more and more in the great tragedies. By means of such delicate touches and hints, such vague and shadowy suggestions, often enough not understood at the moment, he succeeds in gradually preparing for something to come. It is precisely the fact that these intimations are not fully understood at the moment of their use which is important from the point of view of the dramatist: the audience has as yet no clear conception of the meaning, a residue of doubt remains, at once disturbing and a source of enhanced concentration.
When Antonio says after a few lines:
I hold the world but as a world, Gratiano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one. (I. i. 77)
his words, too, have a premonitory effect. The word sad carries us back to the first line of the play (Antonio : In sooth, I know not why I am so sad). We, the audience, do not know the reason why Antonio is so sad, nor do his friends, and he admits himself that he does not understand the cause. Thus we spectators grow more and more sympathetic and interested, even curious, as regards Antonio. And when he now employs that significant and memorable image of the world as a stage, we take it in with a certain degree of tense expectation. Nothing has as yet occurred in this first scene, but Shakespeare has guided our imagination, our curiosity and our expectation into a definite path. Now the action can commence. Shakespeare's art consists in transporting the audience in the very first scene into the atmosphere and the problems of the play without, however, disclosing the outcome. Imagery offers the best means of such indirect and concealed statement needed for this art of foreshadowing coming events. Here is another example from the Merchant of this “dramatic function” of the images: At the beginning of the sixth scene of the second act Gratiano and Salarino are waiting in the street in front of Shylock's house for Lorenzo, who has bid them here. While waiting for his arrival, they pass the time in general conversation about the transitoriness of love which, once achieved, is less ardently sought a second time. To express this Gratiano employs a simile:
All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd.
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(II. vi. 12)
We know what real relation exists between this image of the ship proudly putting out to sea and returning as a wreck, and the action of the play; for Antonio's ships are on their way, and the following act will bring the news that first one ship, then others, finally all are stranded or have been wrecked. Thus Shakespeare consciously takes advantage of this almost inconsequential and casual conversation to slip in his images. We, the audience, may take this little street-conversation of the minor characters as merely a neat and pretty incident which is shown us before the play begins. But somehow or other that vivid image of the ship upon the high seas will make us pause a moment; we will remember Antonio's ships out there on the ocean, and thus we retain a slight premonition, a trace of anxiety, as to what will happen. The unhappy ending, the threatening doom which overshadows the early acts and which colours the words and images of the characters—all this is something truly Shakespearian. Romeo and Juliet contains far more examples of this foreshadowing of a tragic end at the very beginning of the play. Romeo's well known
my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars (I. iv, 107)
is only one of these passages, and, as Professor Spurgeon has shown, the images of swift-flashing and as swiftly quenched light, the quick flash of gunpowder,1 are symbolical hints of what is to come.
In King John we may perceive how these ill-boding, fateful powers, already sensed by the characters before the advent of the catastrophe, take shape and come to life through the imagery. As early as the third act such a suggestive and significant image is placed in the mouth of the Bastard:
Some airy devil hovers in the sky
And pours down mischief. (III. ii. 2)
“withhold thy speed, dreadful occasion!” cries the King to the inevitable course of events, and he gives expression to his feeling of the power of the catastrophe overwhelming him by means of the image of the flood-tide:
Bear with me, cousin; for I was amazed
Under the tide: but now I breathe again
Aloft the flood, (IV. ii. 137)
The words of the Bastard at the end of the fourth act, however, are the most forceful expression of this premonitory sensation of a lurking impending doom:
and vast confusion waits,
As doth a raven on a sick-fall'n beast,
The imminent decay of wrested pomp,
Now happy he whose cloak and cincture can
Hold out this tempest. (IV. iii. 152)
In the dramatic structure of the play, too, these images of the Bastard have an organic function: before the final act, which will bring with it the worst turn of fortune, that character who possesses a deeper and more critical insight than all the rest is qualified to view the situation, apart from the dissension of the individuals concerned, as the tragic lot of the country itself. By the agency of these images pregnant with doom, the Bastard paves the way for the events of the next act. The image of “vast confusion” awaiting like a raven the imminent decay is of further significance, as it shows that Shakespeare now replaces the earlier premonitory imagery, mainly based on the traditional omens, by a new type in which abstract forces are called into being. Thus, we can trace in Shakespeare's work, step by step, how Romeo's “consequence yet hanging in the stars” takes on symbolic form. In the later tragedies it will produce more complex series of premonitory imagery awakening in our imagination the presentiment of coming catastrophe.
But in yet another respect King John shows how the reality of the later events is prepared for by the recurrence of certain words and images. Bloodshed is one of the main themes of the play, and the whole action leads up to the great battle in the fifth act as if under some compelling force. From the very beginning, by means of various figures and phrases, this conception of bloodshed, blood-atonement, and of the blood-thirsty, revengeful boiling of one's own blood is deliberately awakened. Thus what is later to become deed, already lies in the thoughts of men, and in the form of the imagery the future is made to pervade the present. In the first scene of the second act alone, for example, blood is mentioned seventeen times and generally in very characteristic phrases;1 it wanders from the mouth of the one into the thoughts of the other, and every mention of it breeds another image. We shall see how the art of indirectly referring to coming events and of employing imagery with dramatic irony attains its height of perfection in the tragedies.
1 The image cited above belongs to the “tempest-imagery” which has been traced by G. Wilson Knight through the whole of Shakespeare's work. The tempest-images often have such a premonitory function. (G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest, Oxford, 1932.)
1 Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 312. Important in this dramatic respect are Juliet's verses in which she calls the new bond of love
too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say “it lightens”. (II, ii, 118)
and also Brother Lorenzo's famous lines in the same act: “These violent delights have violent ends …” (II. vi. 9).
1 The idea of blood-shedding, of blood-spouting, of blood-spilling, is frequent (II. i. 48, 256, 334); likewise the image of wading in blood (II. i. 42, 266); swords and hands are stained with blood (II. i. 45, 322; IV. ii. 252), even the sun appears covered with blood; this is a particularly important effect of such an image-complex: “The sun's o'ercast with blood: fair day, adieu!” (III. i. 326). We find characteristic expressions, such as: “Here have we war for war and blood for blood” (I. i. 19); “Blood hath bought blood and blows have answer'd blows” (II. i. 329). When King John and King Philip face each other in angry challenge, the Bastard enthusiastically cries out:
Ha, majesty! how high thy glory towers,
When the rich blood of kings is set on fire! (II. i. 350)
and in the next act this feeling of blood set afire finds utterance in the words of the kings themselves when they call out to each other:
JOHN:France, I am burn'd up with inflaming wrath;
A rage whose heat hath this condition,
That nothing can allay, nothing but blood,
The blood, and dearest-valued blood, of France.
PHILIP:Thy rage shall burn thee up, and thou shalt turn
To ashes, ere our blood shall quench that fire: (III. i. 340)