Saturday, May 2, 2020




SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGERY

Caroline Spurgeon (1869-1942)

Ms. Spurgeon was an English professor at the Bedford College in London when she began wondering what kind of person Shakespeare actually was.  So she developed a plan to find out.  She read all of his works as well as the plays, essays and poetry of other Elizabethan authors and created a set of categories into which she placed the metaphors, similes and personifications that she had found in their writings.  7040 images were gleaned from Shakespeare's works and these were compared/contrasted with images from Francis Bacon and twelve other Playwrights, including Marlowe, Kyd, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Dekker and Jonson.

Most of the imagery from Shakespeare had to do with nature or domestic and household affairs, and this was distinctly different from the average references found in the works of the other authors, so that an early picture began to develop of what sort of a person William really was, in contrast as it were.  Bacon liked marine associations and discussed gardening a lot.  He was concerned with sicknesses also, and with science to a lesser extent.  Marlowe had a penchant for classical imagery and often referred to the stars and planets and the cosmos.  Kyd had a fondness for river images and wrote about the law quite a bit. Lyly was a chief proponent of euphuism, a sort of double punning and multi-allusional way of writing, meant to be amusing and titillating.  And so forth.

Ms. Spurgeon first of all analyzes Shakespeare's history plays, pointing out that images of growth and gardening are followed by descriptions of corruption and rotting vegetation, are utilized to indicate the moral and ethical decay of the principal adversaries.  "All the horrors suffered by England under the civil wars, shaken and frighted as she was by murders and battles, scheming and treachery, by the putting up and putting down of kings, by waste and misrule, have translated themselves into the pictorial imagination of the country playwright as the despoiling of a fair 'sea-walled garden
 full of fruit, flowers and healing herbs, which ignorance and lack of care have allowed to go to seed, to rot and decay;  so that now in spring time, instead of all being in order and full of promise, the whole land is, as the under gardener says, "full of weed;  her fairest flowers choked up, her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruin'd, her knots disorder'd, and her wholesome herbs swarming with caterpillars."  Punning is occasionally used to describe some of the characters.  Richard Plantagenet "is described as a 'sweet stem from York's great stock'. 

The comedies are also analyzed, being replete with references to stars, the moon, the passing of time and the river, and descriptions of the dawn:  "Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red, opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, turns into yellow gold his salt green streams."

Ms. Spurgeon continues relating the actions of the rest of the plays to descriptions of the countryside and the various surrounds adhering to the actions, as the characters dance, hunt, plot, and romance their ways through his inventive scenes. 

The portrayal of Shakespeare's character, as a result of the above comprehensive analysis, is of a slender, active sort of person, with a ready wit and an irrepressible curiosity about everything around him.  He was a light eater and drinker, and had a distaste for dirt and slovenliness.  His accurate instincts about the motivations of how and why people do the things that they do were unparalleled, and he had a preternatural perception of what was happening around him.  Plus he liked what he was doing and was apt to overwork himself when in the throes of creation.

It's difficult to say how much i enjoyed this book.  Ms. Spurgeon's accreditations are impeccable and she writes superbly.  Her keenness and acuity in ferreting out solutions and answers to textual problems is admirable and she has the gift of communicating her enthusiasm to the reader.  I literally couldn't put this book down, at times.  highly recommended!

16 comments:

  1. What an immensely valuable project. I added this book to my TBR after you referenced it over on my blog. Thank you!

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    1. i really hope you enjoy it! i certainly did... i know it's kind of a switch from what i've recently posted about, but i couldn't resist...

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    2. I don't blame you one bit, I could not resist either - as though I need more books on my TBR! It looks fantastic, and I will never turn down a chance to dig deep into the Bard's works.

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  2. This sounds really good! My impressions of Shakespeare have been mostly lukewarm, but a book like this might help me appreciate him more (I love symbolism when done well). Adding to my to-read list...

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  3. you might like it! i don't think you'd dislike it because it's written in an approachable style... Ms. Spurgeon was pretty well known at the time as a Shakespeare expert... later in life she moved to Arizona and was one of the artistic types that lived around Taos...

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  4. Oh wow, this one sounds great and so interesting. I've been reading Oliphant's commentaries on Shakespeare's plays as I read them and his commentaries seem much more insightful and even sensible than many of the modern commentaries (and very different too!). Now I'm very curious as to how close Spurgeon got to Shakespeare's true character. I'll guess I'll have to ask God, lol!

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    1. if you're at all interested in Shakespeare, you'll really like this book! She studied the plays and other works for ten years before she published her conclusions... there's actually more information in it than i could possibly ever remember and it's all interesting, i thought... tx for the comment, Cleo; i see you got it figured out; congrats!

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  5. This sounds like a very interesting book. It also sounds very clever. With that, I am a bit skeptical of the methods. I wonder what would happen if they tried this with a living author it poet who they could verify some of the personality traits with.

    Either way, Shakespeare’s imagery and metaphors were sublime.

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    1. i probably didn't describe Ms. Spurgeon's researches very well... they made a lot of sense while i was reading the book and i did finish with the feeling that she had widened my understanding of Shakspeare quite a bit...

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  6. What a project! I can relate to the work she did and the brilliance of the idea. I began to read some of the plays a couple years ago. There were novels coming out from Hogart Press in Great Britain, that were adaptations of his plays. So I would read the play, then the novel. I was struck by his perceptions of human behavior and how timeless they are. I liked his sonnets in high school and in fact, those got me reading poetry. Not many have matched his skill in that genre.

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  7. i think an edition of his works would be my desert island choice... i've read most of his writing, some of it several times, and it has a depth and character unlike anything else i've ever read.. interesting about the Hogarth Press; i just have Chas. and Mary Lamb's stories of the plots... at least i think i do, i'll have to look

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  8. As I am a sucker for all things about Shakespeare, I’m thrilled to read your intro to someone new to me. Thanks! Pls note new address (again) ....
    https://beyondeastrodagain.blogspot.com/

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  9. What an interesting thing to research. Of course you still have to form your own conclusions, but I think you could glean a lot about somebody this way.

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    1. it was definitely an unusual approach, but it worked for me... i feel like i got feeling for the man that i never had before...

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  10. That must have been the work of a lifetime & what a great idea!

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