The plays or groups that we have already considered1 have shown how seemingly incompatible subject-matter may be shaped into dramatic form, a supreme work of art winning a victory, where least expected, by transcending the normal limitations. But victory of this kind on the grand scale is rare, and there are less remarkable triumphs over limitation which are made possible by skilful and unobtrusive technique. These are almost all matters of detail rather than of basic structure and generally work by extending the scope through suggestion and implication without modifying the presentation of the matter. Imagery and prosody, together with certain bold conventions and even devices of setting, serve in various ways to overcome the disadvantages of that brevity which is essential to the concentration and immediacy of drama. A play in which any or all of these are richly used conveys an impression both of magnitude and of subtlety, while the dramatist who uses fewer of them must (like Ibsen in the social dramas) compensate the resulting austerity by some other means, such as the power and skill of the architecture. It is hardly necessary to point out that the average sound theatre play, whether of the present age or of any other, does neither; its potency is thus commensurate with its necessary dramatic brevity; it may be effective in the theatre, but it will not grow in the mind as will a great imaginative work of art.
Of these ways of deepening the imaginative significance of a play without increasing its length or bulk, imagery is perhaps at once the most simple and the most powerful.
In approaching this question we take almost inevitably as our point of departure the finest poetic drama; such as that of Shakespeare's maturity, in which the imagery seems to be entirely functional. Such imagery, that is to say, is an integral part of the play, just as is the theme or the structure; it is there, just as they are, because it is essential to the play, because it has a function belonging to nothing else but imagery, because without that imagery the play would be the poorer from whatever aspect we regarded it. At the other extreme from this there are admittedly plays (which perhaps qualify but doubtfully for the title ‘poetic’) in which such imagery as there is is wholly or partly decorative and not an integral part of the play. There are also many plays, probably the greater number, in which the relation between the whole work of art and the imagery occupies a position intermediate between these two, in which the imagery is at times an aspect of the whole and at other times only incompletely related. But unless we are concerned mainly with the historical side of the subject, with tracing the development of this relation, our interest will almost certainly turn first to those plays in which the functional value of imagery is most fully revealed.
When we speak of imagery in this way we generally find that we are using the term in that stricter and somewhat limited sense which recent writers have tended to adopt when considering Shakespeare,2 taking it, that is, either as co-extensive with metaphor or at most with the figures closely allied to metaphor. This is, I believe, advisable, even though, in the special case of drama, there are sometimes reasons for extending it to include the frontiers of symbolism, description, or even, it may be, the setting itself, when, as in much modern drama, the playwright relies upon that to express a part of his intention.3
Can we, then, within these limits, describe what are or have been some of the functions by which imagery helps drama to overcome the limitations inherent in its brevity?
All imagery that has a functional relation with a play increases dramatic concentration. In common with all genuine metaphorical expression, it reveals a significant and suddenly perceived relation between an abstract theme and a subject closer to the experience of the senses in such a way as to transfer to the rightly apprehending mind the shock, the stimulus with which the union of these two stirred the mind of the poet himself. Strong emotional experience is stored in the brief space of an image, and its release illuminates powerfully the emotions, the reflections, the inferences which it is the purpose of the passage to evoke. There is thus an artistic economy in imagery hardly to be equalled by that of any other kind of verbal expression, with the possible exception of irony; in each the potency comes from the high charge of implicit thought or feeling. Moreover, dramatic imagery tends to be the most strongly charged of all kinds; the concentration natural to drama impressing itself upon the imagery, just as the imagery in its turn enables the drama to increase its native concentration.4
A play which contains little or no imagery is not necessarily shorter than a play which carries a high charge of it. The concentration of imagery in a poetic play operates rather by enabling the play, without overrunning its brief form, to extend its scope and strengthen its texture. Lacking the leisure and the digressive privileges of the narrative and reflective forms, drama is sometimes in danger of poverty of implication or detail. This is true even of the finest type of drama, which maintains severely its proportioning and the magnitude of its theme. Even here, without the support of functional imagery, there is danger of thinness of character, absence of suggestive comment and lack of passionate significance in spite of richness of event. More often than we should readily believe, we find the presence or absence of imagery to be the immediate technical explanation of those differences in content, in fullness and in amplitude in plays otherwise similar in dimension, theme and structure.5
Imagery, as we have said, has certain functions which can compensate drama for the heavy liabilities inherent in its form. Without losing the intensity and compactness which is its virtue, the poetic drama of Aeschylus, of Shakespeare or of one of the modern poetic dramatists, such as Synge, depends largely upon functional imagery for its breadth and scope, for our awareness of a wider setting than that in which the actual events occur. Again, while still preserving its rapidity of pace, drama may, by virtue of the charge carried by its imagery, achieve some of the fullness and elaboration of detail in the revelation of character or of thought which, in narrative or reflective verse and prose, can be revealed at leisure by the descriptive method.
These several functions may be seen at work in the Greek drama as in that of the Elizabethans, at intervals in the drama of the Continent down to the present day and in England again since the revival of the poetic drama in the twentieth century.
Imagery, in such drama, often reveals the presence of a surrounding or accompanying universe of thought or experience which cannot otherwise be included, however essential to its poetic purpose, without forfeiting the rapidity and compression in which the artistic strength of drama chiefly lies. This is often also effected by symbolism, setting or incidental description,6 but imagery, in the strict sense of metaphorical speech, is a more powerful means; more passionate than symbolism, more flexible than setting, more concentrated than descriptive disgression.
This function of imagery may be traced in many of Shakespeare's plays, where the vastness of the issues involved, of which the action that is shown us is but a part, is kept constantly before us by the imagery. As early as Romeo and Juliet the vastness of love is illuminated for a moment by an image whose revelation remains with us throughout the sequent action:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep.
Just so, the universal, all-enveloping horror of Macbeth's crime, its unutterable and inescapable consequence, is borne in upon us, not only by the pitiless relation of cause and effect revealed in the action, but by images that light up, by potent analogy, the nature of the deed:
This my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red.
Macbeth's mind, in which ‘function is smothered in surmise’, is a microcosm of the ‘state’ whose ordered processes are, by the consequences of his deeds, as surely smothered. He thinks instinctively of ‘the seeds of time’ and ‘Nature's germens’, thus flashing before us in single images the surrounding universes of time and causality through which the events move.
In Timon's mind the themes of disease, misgeneration, and robbery image themselves in the elements; the earth, the sea, and the great process of nature. We are never long without this reminder of the universal nature of calamity and evil:
The sun's a thief and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thing
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
In Troilus and Cressida again there is constant reference out from the affairs of man, in which the action consists, to the surrounding universe of being to which they transfer and from which they derive their sickness. The polity of man mirrors the order or disorder of the cosmos, and universal disjunction and disintegration are there imaged with a rapidity and power that could not be compassed in long passages of descriptive analysis. Much of the tempest imagery in Lear has a like function.
In Antony and Cleopatra there is brought before us by the imagery first the world-wide power of Rome and of Antony, ‘the triple pillar of the world’, and later the presence of the infinity of time and space which dwarf that world. For Cleopatra there is
Nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
while, in the memory of Antony,
His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres.
Her longings are ‘immortal’, and Charmian has leave to play till doomsday.7
If we look for a modern parallel to these we may find something similar in Synge's peculiar use of nature imagery, especially in his later plays, in which it suggests the world surrounding the action but not directly presented in it. This is especially noticeable in The Playboy of the Western World, where it reveals the background of the characters and their actions. Synge does not attempt, like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, to reveal a vast, surrounding world of being. He contents himself with using it (most precisely) to reveal an accompanying, but separate part of the experience of his characters.8 Its presence is an essential part of the natures of the people and of their conduct. That they are, unlike the people in Riders to the Sea, unaware of the moulding power of the world outside Flaherty's shebeen, adds subtlety and significance to the functional power with which Synge invests their unconscious references and images. The dialogue is full of brief pictures, either in description or in metaphor, of the empty, isolated, and yet beautiful countryside of Mayo. Inside the bar are the drunken peasant farmers with their dreary lives and their starved but inflammable imaginations. The desolation of the country has crushed their enterprise, its beauty has kept their imaginations living. Out of the conflict comes their aptitude for intoxication, whether by the liquor of Kate Cassidy's wake or by the saga of Christy Mahon's heroic exploit. Synge has presented in the setting of the play the inside of the shebeen, only one of the two worlds they live in. He has thrown upon the imagery and allusions the entire function of revealing a world outside, by which this has been conditioned.
But these are only various forms of one function of imagery, that which reveals the relations between the world of the play and a wider surrounding world or universe. Far more frequent in poetic drama are those functions by which imagery enriches the content and implications that lie within the play itself. And of these perhaps the most frequent is that which reveals or keeps in mind the underlying mood. This not only knits the play together but emphasizes by iteration — and by iteration whose appeal is always to the emotions — the idea or mood which had guided the poet's choice of theme and shaping of form. It may be urged that this second function of imagery must always be at work in any poetic drama which has become a complete work of art; the main preoccupation of the poet's mind must be revealed in greater or less degree by all the aspects of a play that is the issue of that preoccupation. And it is true that iterative imagery, the peculiar function of which is to keep the dominant mood of the whole before us throughout the succession of parts, may be found, in some degree, in any work in which the poet's expression has issued in full artistic expression. But this, in special cases, becomes so clear as to form a continuous and recognizable undertone throughout the play; the undertone of moonlight and woodland in A Midsummer Night's Dream, of light and darkness in Romeo and Juliet, of sound and movement in Much Ado About Nothing.9
The function here is clear. A play is fuller and richer in significance because we are continually in the presence of certain elements in nature, themselves the reflection of the mood in which the play is written. This kind of imagery is distinct from, though it may harmonize with, setting or its Elizabethan equivalent, incidental description. For though the subjects of the images may seem to reproduce the setting, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, much of their potency derives from the fact that they are images, called forth not by the immediate need to represent a scene but primarily in response to the poet's perception of a fundamental identity between them and his theme. When Lorenzo exclaims, ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!’ we recognize it as a direction to the Elizabethan audience to imagine the setting that could not be presented; it is perhaps hardly more significant than the finest of modern moonlight effects. But when Othello says,
It is the very error of the moon.
She comes more near the earth than she was wont
And makes men mad,10
the passage is suffused with a spellbound bewilderment, half of enchantment, half of nightmare, like that which sometimes follows the awakening from deep unconsciousness into the strange radiance of moonlight. Othello's mind is revealed to us in one brief piece of metaphorical illumination, the moon linking his vision of oncoming madness with the familiar, cognate physical experience in which it is imaged. In just such a way, the iterative imagery of moonlight in A Midsummer Night's Dream has, because it is imagery, the power to release associations of far fuller content than could be achieved by a long expository analysis. The picture of virginity, ‘Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon’, illuminates with its implications and charged associations a play whose central action is a tangle of cross-purposes and apparent frustrations in love.
Closely related with this service, that of qualifying and enriching each part of a play by continually recalling the moon or preoccupation from which all derive, are certain functions whereby imagery helps to amplify, to make subtler and more detailed the nature or relation of events, the bases of character, the content or processes of thought, which might else suffer impoverishment from the rapidity and compression of the dramatic form.
In the opening scenes of a play in which events are to move swiftly we often find a kind of anticipation, not only of the mood of the subsequent action, but of the very events themselves; some hint, in the subject of an image, of the course of the action, which, though we may not notice it consciously, sinks into the mind and prepares us to accept more rapidly some series of events which is to follow. This is a genuine dramatic function; imagery, that is to say, which is thus used in drama is functional to a high degree.
One of the Jacobean poetic dramatists, John Webster, seems to have developed almost consciously this function of imagery; we may notice that the action of his plays is of precisely that copious and rapid kind which most needs such aids as this if it is to maintain depth and significance. In the first scene of his Vittoria Corombona, where the fate of Lodovico reveals in miniature the passions and forces at work on the main action of the play, the speeches are shot with imagery that is prophetic not only of those passions, but of the kinds of events which they may (and in fact do) draw down:
Fortune's a right whore:
If she gives ought she gives it in small parcels,
That she may take away all at one swoop.
This is a not unusual Elizabethan image and it is only one of many that might have satisfied Lodovico's hatred of fortune, but it is not insignificant that one of the first words that rings out distinctly in this scene is ‘whore’, which is to be bandied to and fro around Vittoria through the rest of the play and sums up one interpretation of the main part of the action. And the swoop of destruction is the fit image of the sudden turns of fortune and of the final catastrophe. Fortune in the later part of this image has already become in part a bird or beast of prey. In the next lines Lodovico's ‘great enemies’ become ‘your wolf’, the fitting embodiment of the predatory and ruthless figure of Flamineo, who guides and twists the action to his ends, only himself to founder in swift-moving destruction. ‘An idle meteor’, Gasparo calls Lodovico, to be ‘soon lost i' the air’; and we have another image of the later action, in the brilliant and blazing careers of Vittoria, Brachiano, Flamineo, which vanish into sudden extinction, ‘driven I know not whither’. And the images from knives, swords, and daggers here, ‘I'll make Italian cut-works in their guts’, ‘Great men sell sheep thus to be cut in pieces’, point on with sinister precision to the details of the final havoc.11
Sometimes a still subtler form of this use may be found in Shakespeare's works. In the first and third scenes of Cymbeline there is a series of images connected with or spoken by Imogen, which unobtrusively conveys her isolation, her exposure to the pricks of malice and of evil eyes,12 and does this more quickly and more fully than would much direct comment from other characters. By helping to convey her position, it helps also to convey the balance of the situation, the hostility surrounding her, upon which much of the subsequent action depends.
Closely akin to this use, though probably more usual and possibly more powerful, is the aid given by imagery to the rapid and significant revelation of character. How much more impressive and vivid are the brief imagistic summaries of character given at the beginning of The Duchess of Malfi than, for instance, Ben Jonson's lucid and often exquisitely balanced character analyses in Cynthia's Revels. How much deeper, indeed, than the impression made by these intellectual expositions is that of the imaginative picture of Ben Jonson's own Volpone?
A fox
Stretched on the earth, with fine delusive sleights,
Mocking a gaping crow.
This, or some part of the picture called up by it, stays in the memory for the rest of the play and guides us, quicker than pages of character study, to the right interpreting of Volpone's character in the action which immediately follows. Just such is the function of the image, in the Duchess of Malfi, which introduces the Cardinal and Ferdinand; they are ‘plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and o'er-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies and caterpillars feed on them’.
In all these the function of revealing character has fallen upon the associations of the subject in which it is imaged. But there is another and sometimes subtler use of image which occurs also in a large number of the Jacobean dramatists. In this the characters reveal themselves by their instinctive choice of subjects in which to image their thought and often also by the form of the image, by the relation, that is, between subject and theme. The work of Webster, Tourneur, and Shakespeare is full of imagery which has this profoundly dramatic function.13 Shakespeare's later characters, and in some degree those of his middle period, have their individual imagery. It is related inevitably to the underlying mood out of which the play is, like the characters, generated, but is yet subtly distinguished, within the limits of that character's relation to the whole. Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude; Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Ross, and even the murderers have their own trend of imagery in subject or in form or in both; so again have Timon, Lear, Edmund, Antony, Cleopatra, Prospero.14
The imagery of Claudius and Gertrude furthers, without our necessarily being aware of the means, our understanding both of their characters and of their relationship. Indeed, certain of the ‘problems’ of the play might with advantage be referred to the findings of a detailed analysis of these two significant groups. A brief indication of their function may perhaps serve here to indicate the value of the direct and unobtrusive revelation of character which can be made by imagery. The imagery of Claudius's public speech differs from that of his speech in private, though there are some fundamental resemblances. On formal occasions it is brief, superficial, and commonplace; illustrating his statements in a clear, efficient way that is hardly ever imaginative. The subjects of the images are homely, drawn from everyday life, frequently from warfare or military life, and sometimes from the operations of justice. He seldom surprises us by revealing anything beneath this surface, though he can sometimes, as in endeavouring to conciliate Laertes, become inept.15 In private life, when he is alone, with Gertrude whom he can deceive easily or with certain courtiers such as Polonius whom he deceives hardly less easily, it is more vigorous and reveals more and more of the obsessions against which he struggles. It is still simple and generally homely, the index of a mind that is astute and practical rather than speculative or imaginative. But it is no longer superficial or perfunctory. The disturbance and sickness of his mind betrays itself in ever-recurring images of pestilence, infection, poison, and disease, especially hidden disease that feeds on the ‘pith of life’, to reveal itself suddenly. The habit of concealment and the dread of discovery find their release in images of painting and false colouring like that of the ‘harlot's cheek’; sin is ‘rank’ and ‘smells to heaven’.
In Gertrude's speech there are remarkably few images, and those generally colourless and drawn almost entirely from commonplace themes. They have little vigour and hardly ever call up a vivid picture: the images of a mind that has never received sharp or deep impressions, that is, in fact, incapable of any imaginative effort. Some light is perhaps thrown upon the boundaries of these two natures and of the place at which they meet by even a cursory glance at the mental habits revealed by the images.
Most, as I have suggested, of the characters of Shakespeare's maturity will be found to have in some degree their native imagery. The contrast between that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is too clear to justify a brief examination; a full study of each character could, like Miss Spurgeon's picture of Falstaff, be built up from the images alone. Even in subsidiary characters or in those which closely resemble each other, some traces of individual imagery can be found, contributing, whether we recognize it or not, to our quicker apprehension of their distinctive qualities; in the speech of Regan there is a slight preponderance of images drawn from calculation, wealth contrasted with poverty; in that of Goneril a similar preponderance of images drawn from passion and the uncurbed experience of the senses. In the speech of Edmund, images from disease and maiming conflict (especially at the beginning of the play) and alternate with those drawn from the elemental energies of nature, and both are crossed again by others, from the exercise of skill, of adroit and successful manipulation. With him, as with Claudius, the native strain is stronger in solitude and subdued or disguised in public.
The same poetic revelation of character and mental preoccupation may be traced in dramatists of far more limited range than Shakespeare, who are also, within their limits, capable of nice distinctions in this field. One of the most consciously precise of his contemporaries is Cyril Tourneur, whose Atheist's Tragedy offers a group of characters all differentiated by this means. In spite of Tourneur's conscious psychological exposition, a great part of our understanding of the characters is actually due to our largely unconscious assimilation of what is revealed by their images. D'Amville's character, the most potent and virile in the play, is revealed in outline by his actions and his cogent and fiery commentary; but in the last analysis it is mainly to the subjects and the form of his images that we owe an impression of a character in which power of imagination has been deliberately balanced by the playwright against a scientist's approach to and treatment of fact. Brief but highly charged poetic images are followed by the lucid, often sustained illustrative or intellectual imagery in which Tourneur delighted.16 In marked contrast with D'Amville's is the imagery of Sebastian in the same play; plain, pithy, and with excellent relating of theme to subject, but the imagery of a shrewd and energetic practical mind. In marked contrast again is that of Levidulcia, which, in addition to being voluble and commonplace, shows a loose linking of subject and theme, not in a single instance and to indicate a momentary uncertainty, as with Claudius, but so constantly that we realize it as the very habit of her mind. Her conduct throughout the play testifies to a slipshod mental process; the structure of her own images reflects it.17
This, which is one of the most important of the dramatic functions of imagery, is frequent in the Elizabethan drama. It can be traced in much other poetic drama, whether in verse or prose, but falls into abeyance, as does all living imagery of whatever function, in prosaic and naturalistic drama. It returns, as do those other kinds, with the revival of poetic drama in our own century, though the absence of live metaphor in the common speech of our time has an inevitable reaction upon the language of our drama and upon the playwright's choice of themes and characters. A conscious and deliberate use of imagery to fulfil this and other cognate functions is to be found in certain kinds of analytical drama, in expressionist drama, especially when this approaches surrealist technique, and in plays of specific psychological theme. But even in these it is less abundant, I think, than in the drama of the great poetic period; Strindberg, Kaiser, and O'Neill (to instance only a few) do not use it so amply as the Elizabethans.
There is yet another function of dramatic imagery which, though less usual than those we have already considered, is still of great service in giving fullness of content despite dramatic compression; that in which imagery does the work of argument or reflection. A discussion or process of deduction may appear full or complete without the tedious and undramatic dilution that we should at once observe if it were in fact complete. In Hamlet's soliloquies imagery, rather than abstract terminology, is generally the medium for the expression of reflection, and when he speaks of ‘the native hue of resolution’ as ‘sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought’, we apprehend in two brief lines a condition of mind which would need many lines or indeed speeches were it to be expounded. And so, throughout the soliloquy, moods and states of mind are revealed by single images or groups and related to each other by the apposition of the images and the transitions from one to another. The effect of a long psychological diagnosis is thus given in one speech, without diluting the dramatic concentration.
In certain other passages in Shakespeare's plays18 the way in which the images are placed in relation to each other implies a train of thought linking image with image which is, upon analysis, found to be itself an argument. The original train of thought is thus started afresh in the minds of an audience who can catch the successive implications of the images, so that at the end of the speech they have experienced the equivalent of a long argument in the compass of a relatively brief speech, simply by virtue of the power with which imagery is charged to stimulate and to illuminate the imagination. Almost the whole of the conversation between Achilles and Ulysses (Troilus and Cressida, II. iii) is of this kind; imagery is used by both speakers (but chiefly by Ulysses) not only to express single reflections but also to imply the relationship between a sequence of reflections. This is perhaps most clear in Ulysses' central speech (III. iii. 145–90), where the transition from image to image — from the oblivion caused by ungrateful Time to perseverance which ‘keeps honour bright’, from past virtue, which is ‘to hang Quite out of fashion’ to the fierce competition of the narrow way of honour — give by the shock of their juxtaposition, the stimulus which stirs the imagination not only to apprehend the image but to apply the inferences to which these deliberately contrasted images are designed to lead us. Though this function appears perhaps most frequently and most powerfully in Troilus and Cressida, that play is by no means alone in this respect. Parts of Hamlet and much of Measure for Measure on the one hand and of Timon on the other depend for their effect upon this function.
In reflective and in religious poetry we often find images used not only (as in Hamlet's speech) to express an idea, but also to reveal spiritual experiences which, it would appear, could not have been expressed (or not by that writer) in the language of abstract statement. When Wordsworth says,
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep — and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil,
we are in the presence of imagery of this kind. Sometimes, but not often, drama enters this territory, and when it does we often find that it is to imagery that the poet turns as the quickest and most potent — sometimes, it may be, the sole — means of expressing a thought impossible to convey in disquisition or in action unless these were intolerably and undramatically extended. When Chapman's Byron in the hour of death reflects that he is seated ‘betwixt both the heavens’, he takes leave of the world in a series of pictures which attempt to image the approaching disintegration of the mind in death, an experience which neither Chapman nor his hero would have found easy to expound or to analyse in abstract terms:
Wretched world,
Consisting most of parts that fly each other,
A firmness breeding all inconstancy,
A bond of all disjunction; like a man
Long buried, is a man that long hath lived;
Touch him, he falls to ashes: for one fault,
I forfeit all the fashion of a man.
Why should I keep my soul in this dark light,
Whose black beams lighted me to lose myself?
Shakespeare's Troilus, revealing to Ulysses his conception of his state, uses imagery in the same way; his need is in fact even more imperative than Byron's, for, though our imaginations receive his meaning readily enough through the medium of the image, it is hard to give either a clear account of the subject apart from the theme or a statement in abstract terms of his precise conception of the relations between the various aspects:
Oh madness of discourse,
That cause sets up with and against itself;
Bifold authority! Where reason can revolt
Without perdition, and loss assume all reason
Without revolt.
In just such a way as this Mr T.S. Eliot, in The Family Reunion, leaves to imagery the function of revealing much of the thought or of the spiritual experience which would else prove well-nigh inexpressible within the limits of dramatic form. But the function of the imagery here is even more vital than in either of the two other cases, for these thoughts and these experiences are the main stuff of the play, sometimes its sole action. Here, then, is a play in which this peculiar function of imagery is exercised so fully that it would be hard to find a parallel outside the narrative or reflective poetry of mystical experience; yet it is an integral part of the action and thus essentially dramatic in function:
There are hours when there seems to be no past or future,
Only a present moment of pointed light
When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand
To the flames. They only come once,
Thank God, that kind. Perhaps there is another kind,
I believe, across a whole Thibet of broken stones
That lie, fangs up, a lifetime's march. I have believed this.
This is not incidental description or commentary; it is the centre of the action because it is the central experience of the chief characters; it is the subject of the play.
The functions of imagery which we have here considered19 are among the most rapid and potent means of deepening the imaginative significance of a play and thereby helping to transcend the natural limitations of the form. Metaphor, being almost inseparable from poetic expression, must find some place in poetic drama and thus, as the art matures, be drawn into closer and closer functional relation. The functions I have tried to indicate here will, I believe, be found to exist whenever poetic drama rises to a height in any way comparable with that of the Greek and of the Elizabethan. (Nor do I doubt that there are other functions that I have not yet discerned in the drama that I have studied and have been unable to experience in that which I have not.) Many, as I have suggested, are already reappearing today in the poetic drama of Europe and America, and their presence there appears to indicate the operation of a fundamental law of dramatic aesthetics.
Indeed, that this should be so is not improbable, since the history of dramatic form is in one sense a history of its conflict with its own inherent limitations. That imagery should be one means of circumventing these is, it would appear, as inevitable as that certain technical devices, to be examined in detail in the following chapter, should be evolved for a similar purpose. The conflict of dramatic form with its potential content calls into being the peculiar functions of imagery that have been indicated here. The conflict between content and medium leads to the various devices which must now be considered.
1 This refers to Chapters VII and VIII of this volume, and to one on ‘Samson Agonistes and Religious Drama’.
2 This, as I interpret them, is the view of H.W. Wells, Middleton Murry, SJ. Brown, Elizabeth Homes, C.F.E. Spurgeon, G.W. Knight, and Wolfgang Clemen, among others.
3 A familiar instance is the work of H. Lenormand in the present century.
4 Moreover, as Mr Robert Nichols has recently pointed out to me, a high proportion of the imagery in Shakespeare's plays is dynamic and is distinct in this from that static imagery of the sonnets. Here again is reciprocity: action, which is characteristic of Elizabethan drama, is reflected as movement in the functional imagery of that drama.
5 An example or two may help to make this clear. Ibsen largely (though by no means entirely) discards imagery (as distinguished from symbolism) in The Pillars of Society and the succeeding social plays. But he achieves strength of texture by that close interlocking of event and character that cost him so many revisions. Mr Eliot, in The Family Reunion, to take an opposite case, derives great extension of scope from a specialized use of imagery, Galsworthy's Strife appears to separate the two functions, obtaining a certain strength of texture by methods not unlike Ibsen's and a certain enriching of meaning by the images of a few of his characters. But in Shakespeare's work both scope and texture are served by imagery, and the plays would be knit together by it even if the structure were unsure.
6 We may remind ourselves here of the recurrent symbolism of Ibsen, Strindberg, or Maeterlinck, the fragmentary allegory and personification in the early Elizabethans, and the dreams and visions in the work of some of the Jacobeans (notably of Webster and Tourneur); of the expressionism of Strindberg and the succeeding German school, represented in our own day by Toller and Kaiser; of the setting which itself becomes an image of a mental state in parts of Macbeth, Lear or Timon, or in such contemporary plays as Mr O'Neill's Emperor Jones, M. Lenormand's Simoun, A L'Ombre du Mal and, somewhat similarly, in Le Temps est un Songe and L'Homme et ses Fantômes. (A detail similarly used to excellent ironic effect in our own realistic drama is the firescreen at the beginning of Galsworthy's Strife.) We may finally notice how incidental description plays this part in many of the early Elizabethans, most gracefully perhaps in the work of Peele. All these fulfil the function of extending the experience of the reader beyond the actual events, passions, and thoughts presented in the play to include a wider experience equally necessary to a full understanding of what is contained within the play.
7 These images are not incidental or scattered, as may be suggested by so brief an indication, but constant and frequent, forming, in all these plays and in many others, continuous motives or undertones. (C.F.E. Spurgeon notices, to take a specific case, that in Antony and Cleopatra there are no fewer than forty-two recurrences of the word ‘world’ in the imagery. See Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 352.)
8 See, on Synge's nature imagery and its functions, my Irish Dramatic Movement, Chapter VIII.
9 This has been revealed by the full and lucid analysis of Professor Caroline Spurgeon, to whom I am indebted for the summaries above. See ‘Shakespeare's Iterative Imagery’ (British Academy Proc., 1931) and Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, 1935), especially Part II, ‘The Function of Imagery as Background and Undertone in Shakespeare's Art’.
10 It may be questioned whether this is strict imagery. Whether it is or not must depend upon the extent to which we credit Othello with a literal belief in the influences of the heavenly bodies upon human destiny. If we assume in him the qualified belief common to many Elizabethans, the ‘influences’ would already have become half allegorical and the words therefore metaphorical. It is so that I take them.
11 These are only a few of the images that are, I think, charged with this power of anticipating by pictures or associations the nature of the events that follow. The same functional use can be found in the opening scene of Webster's second play, The Duchess of Malfi, in both of Tourneur's (especially the Revenger's Tragedy) and, in an elementary form, as early as Marston's Antonio and Mellida. It was, I think, well understood (though not necessarily consciously understood) among many of the dramatists of the early Jacobean period.
12 ‘Evil-eyed’, ‘tickle’, ‘wounds’, ‘hourly shot of angry eyes’, ‘gall’, ‘a pinch …more sharp’, ‘a touch more rare’, ‘needle’, ‘prick’, ‘sharp as any needle’, ‘gnat’, etc.
13 C.F.E. Spurgeon has made a detailed analysis of the imagery of Falstaff, showing in what ways and to what extent it reveals his character (Shakespeare's Imagery: Appendix VII). It will be seen in this examination that the character could be reconstructed from the images alone, with their revelation of the content of the mind.
14 I have instanced here only a few out of many characters. Upon some of these, and upon others that I have not cited, see Wolfgang Clemen: Shakespeares Bilder, especially pp. 149–51, 176–9, 207–11, 222–4.
15 The great love the general gender bear him;
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces. (IV. vii.)
This is the result of an over-anxious effort to persuade and convince. And Shakespeare had doubtless observed that this effort sometimes causes even so astute an intelligence as Claudius's to lose itself in words. Claudius seldom uses extended metaphors, and I know of no other passage in which he has constructed one whose two sides are not aptly related. The changing of wood into stone by a petrifying spring is a highly unsuitable picture of the transforming of Hamlet's punishment into additional grace or charm by the affection of the people. If it says anything, it says the opposite of what Claudius would have it mean — the inflexible stone replacing the live and flexible wood is a process the reverse of that by which the encumbering fetters add to Hamlet's graces.
I have examined this one passage in some detail because, taken in conjunction with the rest of Claudius's imagery in public speech — plain and straightforward as it usually is — this is a delicate indication of the fumbling uncertainty of his mind in this scene.
16 Special reference may be made to certain passages: The Atheist's Tragedy, II. iv. 104–8, 203–4, IV. iii. 244–58, and V. i. 94–100. For a fuller analysis of Tourneur's imagery in a somewhat different connection, see my article, ‘The Imagery of The Revengers Tragedie and The Atheist's Tragedie’. The Modern Language Review, July 1935, and for his use of imagery to reveal character, mood, and temperament see my Jacobean Drama, pp. 160–1.
17 This culminates and is best illustrated in the soliloquy before her suicide, where the confusion between the various rivers, fountains, and oceans and their relation to the passions and deeds that they are called upon to image defy elucidation. There is, of course, no question but that Tourneur's art here is conscious and deliberate.
18 Upon a cognate but slightly different use of imagery as a general medium for reflection in Shakespeare see Wolfgan Clemen: Shakespeares Bilder (Bonn, 1936), Section II, ‘Reflexion in Bildern’. ‘Bilder’, according to Clemen, ‘werden mehr und mehr zu einer Hilfe der Gedanken der Menschen, zu einer bedeutsamen Kristallisation ihres Nachdenkens’ (p. 105). And see also Section III, especially pp. 131–2, 149–51. Clemen's book was revised and translated as The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1951).
19 Like all students of this subject, I have a considerable debt to the clear thought and the imaginative analyses of Dr Clemen's study of Shakespeare's imagery. The functions I have considered are not always those to which he attaches most importance and my categories differ somewhat from his, while sometimes overlapping. For his interesting and exhaustive examination of Shakespeare's early imagery, the reader is referred to the first part of his book (Shakespeares Bilder), especially to pp. 30–1, 46, 50, 52, 57, 62, 71, 73, 82, 85–6, 105; for the analysis of the imagery of the great tragedies, to the later parts, especially Sections III and IV.