Imagery, symbolism, myth

Abstract

The final plays — Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest — were first established as a group in the 1860s, but it was about seventy years before they began to attract the sustained, even reverent attention long given to Shakespeare’s tragedies. One reason for this was a marked change in critical method. The dominant approach to Shakespeare studies, based largely on the tragedies, had been the character criticism which culminated in the work of A.C. Bradley (1904). In the mid-1930s this gave way to a new awareness of the importance of language and imagery. Caroline Spurgeon finds in the imagery of The Winter’s Tale a repeated idea of ‘the common flow of life through all things’, likening ‘human and natural processes and characteristics’ (1958, pp. 305–6). She calls attention to the importance of disease imagery, and also to images of growth and development. Wolfgang Clemen approaches the role of imagery more systematically, taking account of its relation to dramatic action and of the importance not just of word painting but of visual effects on the stage. He points out the wide range of imagery in The Winter’s Tale, and the way it works ‘to create a complex, round and full picture’ (1977, p. 195). That picture includes images not only from disease but from the growth and colour of the natural world, even in the play’s first half; and, in the second half, images from mythology. He suggests that this blending and interweaving is apt to a play which marries court and country (pp. 203–4).