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Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us
Caroline Spurgeon's pioneer study of the imagery of Shakespeare's plays shows how much light can be thrown on Shakespeare's own mind and thought and on the themes and characters of the plays by a detailed examination of his imagery. At the same time she contrasts Shakespeare with other dramatists of his time, including Marlowe, Bacon, Ben Jonson and Dekker.
444 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 1935
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 25, 2008
This is such a cool book! It changed the way I will read Shakespeare forever. The author counted and categorized all of S's images and draws conclusions about what they tell us about Shakespeare himself. His plays are filled with images and metaphors about gardens, nature, birds, seasons, animals, daily homekeeping life,etc., which infuses his work with movement, and grounds his almost untouchable themes in beautiful reality.
February 6, 2013
I'm one of those people that finds something mysteriously magical in the works of Shakespeare, yet, when I try to identify what the essence of this magic is, I am at a loss.
This book helps me to see some of the reasons behind the uses of some words, in the orders, groupings, and clusters. It talks about the imagery of one extended metaphor being connected through the word choices, for example, in this passage from Macbeth he makes use of horse-riding imagery with "spur", "vaulting" and the leaping and falling actions, which injects vividness and remarkableness:
...I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th' other.
And even the imagery of a whole play revolving around a particular topic or idea to express things, such as in Romeo and Juliet and the many uses of light and darkness, through personification and more, to express feelings and ideas:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
And also, when Romeo is about to poison himself, he speaks of all light in the world being extinguished.
Spurgeon also talks about the possibilities of experience in Shakespeare's life, what activities he might've partaken in, and how we can speculate from the accuracy of his description. The reasoning is that by studying the uses of the words, it becomes clear how involved the writer was in the activities by how skillfully, and precisely to reality, he's able to manipulate them in his works. It's suggested that he had a much less lavish upbringing than a lot of his literary contemporaries, from his descriptions of a household that has many of the aspects of relatively lower-class living.
It also talks briefly about the attack that was tossed by Robert Greene and the implication found in "Johannes Factotum", or "Jack of all trades", which suggests that he was a man of many endeavors and pursuits.
The most intriguing or interesting aspect of this book, I find, is that it gives an insight into a land largely uncharted previously - that of Shakespeare's mind - which continues to beckon, engross, mystify, delight, and always amaze me.
In the duration of this exploration Mrs. Spurgeon has the wonder and excitement of someone who truly loves what they do, along with the insight of a person who knows what they're doing too. The fact this book is somewhat a condensed seven or eight year study also gives reason to read this; you get so much information through the filter of someone who is extremely knowledgeable, and has thought a great deal about the things they speak of.
This book helps me to see some of the reasons behind the uses of some words, in the orders, groupings, and clusters. It talks about the imagery of one extended metaphor being connected through the word choices, for example, in this passage from Macbeth he makes use of horse-riding imagery with "spur", "vaulting" and the leaping and falling actions, which injects vividness and remarkableness:
...I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th' other.
And even the imagery of a whole play revolving around a particular topic or idea to express things, such as in Romeo and Juliet and the many uses of light and darkness, through personification and more, to express feelings and ideas:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
And also, when Romeo is about to poison himself, he speaks of all light in the world being extinguished.
Spurgeon also talks about the possibilities of experience in Shakespeare's life, what activities he might've partaken in, and how we can speculate from the accuracy of his description. The reasoning is that by studying the uses of the words, it becomes clear how involved the writer was in the activities by how skillfully, and precisely to reality, he's able to manipulate them in his works. It's suggested that he had a much less lavish upbringing than a lot of his literary contemporaries, from his descriptions of a household that has many of the aspects of relatively lower-class living.
It also talks briefly about the attack that was tossed by Robert Greene and the implication found in "Johannes Factotum", or "Jack of all trades", which suggests that he was a man of many endeavors and pursuits.
The most intriguing or interesting aspect of this book, I find, is that it gives an insight into a land largely uncharted previously - that of Shakespeare's mind - which continues to beckon, engross, mystify, delight, and always amaze me.
In the duration of this exploration Mrs. Spurgeon has the wonder and excitement of someone who truly loves what they do, along with the insight of a person who knows what they're doing too. The fact this book is somewhat a condensed seven or eight year study also gives reason to read this; you get so much information through the filter of someone who is extremely knowledgeable, and has thought a great deal about the things they speak of.
March 10, 2026
3.5 stars. Not sure how convinced I am about the argument of being able to determine a writer's personality from what they write about most often (says something possibly concerning about, say, crime novelists) and some of it borders on Bardolatry (she does in fact call him "Christ-like" at one point), but it's certainly well argued. Most of the analysis is quite good and the sheer breadth and rigor of Spurgeon's scholarship is astonishing. I can't imagine how you'd do a corpus analysis pre-computers but Shakespeare scholars might just be Like That™️. I particular enjoyed her subjectivity as well (her fondness for Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra came through very strongly), even when her opinions differed from mine.
Actually quite helpful in understanding some common Shakespearean references that we have no context for now (I didn't realize "Ay, there's the rub" was a reference to bowls, or, indeed, that there was a popular game at the time called "bowls"). A truly foundational text - I get now why every book/article I was reading ended up citing this one at some point.
Actually quite helpful in understanding some common Shakespearean references that we have no context for now (I didn't realize "Ay, there's the rub" was a reference to bowls, or, indeed, that there was a popular game at the time called "bowls"). A truly foundational text - I get now why every book/article I was reading ended up citing this one at some point.
March 21, 2025
I liked it. If I was familiar with more Shakespeare, I probably would have enjoyed it more.
December 12, 2025
Epigrams
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. - Virginia Woolf, Orlando, pp 189-190 (The Hogarth Press, 1928).
The real revelation of the writer (as of the artist) comes in a far subtler way than by ... autobiography; and comes despite all effort to elude it; ... For what the writer does communicate is his temperament, his organic personality, with its preferences and aversions, its pace and rhythm and impact and balance, its swiftness or languor ... and this he does equally whether he be rehearsing veraciously his own concerns or inventing someone else's. - Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words, p. 109.
L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit être comme Dieu dans l'univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part. - Flaubert (Correspondance, 1852, vol. 11, p. 155).
Chapter I (Introductory): The Aim and Method Explained
"In the case of a poet, I suggest it is chiefly through his images that he, to some extent unconsciously, 'gives himself away'." p. 4
"My experience is that this works out more reliably in drama than in pure poetry, because in a poem the writer is more definitely and consciously seeking the images; whereas in drama, and especially drama writers red-hot as was the Elizabethan, images tumble out of the mouths of the characters in the heat of the writer's feeling or passion, as they naturally surge up into his mind." pp 4-5
"I use the term 'image' here as the only available word to cover every kind of simile, as well as every kind of what is really compressed simile - metaphor. I suggest that we divert our minds of the hint the term carries with of visual image only, and think of it, for the present purpose, as connoting any and every imaginative picture or other experience, drawn in every kind of way, which may have come to the poet, not only through any of his senses, but through his mind and emotions as well, and which he uses in the forms of simile and metaphor in their widest sense, for purposes of analogy. ... I am at present primarily concerned with the content rather than the form of images[.] ... we all know fairly well what we mean by an image. "p. 5, 8, 9
"But these pictures do more than give us a swift illumination in the round - background, atmosphere, appearance, emotion - of the incident described, they tell us also that the writer of them have almost certainly seen and sympathized with schoolboys straying from school, that he winced at the thrust of lightning and had roamed the countryside at night-time, that he was sufficiently observant and interested in birds to note and register the peculiar characteristics of the small owl's flight, and had watched an idle or weary laborer at treating time, and that he had, in all probability, at some period lived near a river where he would often have seen the meadows covered with the unprepossessing slime it leaves behind when it has overflowed its bank in spring.
"It is this latter aspect of the images in which I am here primarily interested, that is in their stuff, and what this stuff or content tells us, and I use them from this point of view as documents, first as helping to reveal to us the man himself, and secondly as throwing fresh light on the individual plays." p. 11
Chapter II: Shakespeare's Imagery Compared with that of Marlowe and Bacon
"[W]e are justified, I suggest, in assuming that a poet will, in the long run, naturally tend to draw the large proportion of his images from the objects he knows best, or thinks most aout about, or from the incidents, among myriads he has experienced, to which he is sensitive, and which therefore remains within his knowledge." p. 12
"[W]ith Shakespeare, nature (especially the weather, plants and gardening), animals (especially birds), and what we may call everyday and domestic, the body in health and sickness, indoor life, fire, light, food and cooking, easily come first; whereas with Marlowe, images drawn from books, especially the classics, and from the sun, moon, planets and heavens far outnumber all others." p. 13
"There between the sea images of [Shakespeare and Bacon] is the exact contrary of that between their nature images: Shakespeare's are the more general, Bacon's the more concrete and particular. Shakespeare's sea images are (i) chiefly of storms and shipwrecks. ... [With Shakespeare] the movements of the cruel, ruthless, raging sea are frequently as symbol for the passions and emotions of men. ... Shakespeare's other most constant sea images are (ii) the ebb and flow of tides, (iii) the actions of currents, (iv) a tide rushing through a breach, (v) ship being dashed on the rocks, and (vi) the infinite size, depth, and capacity of the ocean (generally likened to love). These last three I never find in Bacon. But the great and constant difference between the sea pictures of the two writers is that Shakespeare's are chiefly concerned with the general character, quality or aspect of the sea, usually in storm, as it might be viewed by a landsman, whereas Bacon's are noticeably vivid little pictures of episodes or incidents on the sea as experienced by a man in a ship or boat." pp. 24-26
"Clearly Bacon, ... holds that time, far from revealing truth, blurs and obscures it, passing on to us only that which is popular and superficial, while drowning that which is substantial and profound. Shakespeare, on the other hand, consistently thinks of time's function in quite opposite terms ..., and pictures time as sorting out the important from the trivial, as a revealer and disentangler of truth, whose glory is 'to unmask falsehood and bring truth to light' (Luc. 940)." pp. 28
"[B}ehind these two sets of writings, not one mind only, but two highly individual and entirely different minds." p. 29
Chapter III: Imagery of Shakespeare and Other Dramatists Compared
"There is ... one point in these images in which Shakespeare practically stands alone, and that is in the evidence of his sympathy with the animal hunted or snared, and in his understanding and feeling for teh orse and his movement and response. It is he alone who suggests that kindly persuasion may achieve more than the use of a spur, and that if you give a good horse the rein and 'let her run, she'll not stumble'; he alone who thinks of the point of view of the 'poor bird' fearing the net and lime, the pitfall and the gin, of the falcon mewed up, and of the bear tied to the stake." pp. 32-33
"In this large group ['classes'] from types of men and women, we at once see reflected Shakespeare's love of humanity, his observation and his quick eye for an oddity. We see also very markedly his sympathy with the under dog, as nearly half these images are drawn from the poor and oppressed, from prisoners, idiots or madmen, from gipsies, beggars, pedlars and slaves. Even in this little handful, from give plays only, we sense the writer's sympathy with 'the poor and broken bankrupt', with the inhuman treatment of teh insane, with the village idiot and with the 'poor prisoner in his twisted gyves'. In this respect-the number of his images from the poor and the width of his sympathy-he differs from all the other writers here analysed." p. 33
Chapter IV: The Subject-Matter of Shakespeare's Images
"[M]ere references are quite different from images ... [.] A writer refers to a thing in quite a different mood and with quote a different poetic impulse from that which produces a simile or metaphor, which, in the case of Shakespeare certainly, comes usually with great spontaneity and under stress of heightened feeling. If a poet, then, continually draws upon certain classes of things, certain qualities in things and certain aspects of life, for his illustrations, we are justified, I suggest, in arguing that those qualities and those aspects specially interested him and appealed to him." pp. 43-44.
"Of the large animal group, the outstanding point is the great number drawn from birds. If we except the human body, its parts, movements and senses, Shakespeare's images from birds form by far the largest section drawn from any single class of objects. ... I doubt if it has been noticed that the special aspect of their life which attracts him is their movement.
"Not primarily their song, or their shape, or their colour, or their habits; but their flight, and their swift, accurate, easy movements when free; their flutttering strugglign movements when imprisoned; the soaring of the eagle and of the hawk, the 'fell swoop' of the kite, the wild geese flocking together or 'severed', 'scattered by winds and high temptestuous gusts', 'lagging before the northern blast', the plummed estridges (goshawks) that 'wing the wind', the swift flight of the swallow, the confident flight of the falcon, 'towering in her pride of place', the hunry eagle 'shaking her wings' or fluttering the dovecote, the turkey-cock swelling ad jetting 'under his advanced plumes', the peacock sweeping his tail, stalking up and down 'a stride and a stand', the fairy-light hop of bird from briar, the tiny wren fighting the owl to protect her young, the terrified dove pecking the hawk, the 'new ta'en sparrow' 'fetching her breath' shortly, the woodcock struggling in the gin, the imprisoned bird in a cage or on a silken thread, hopping a little from his lady's hand, the cock strutting 'up and down', the Barbery hen swaggering, the lapwing running 'close by the ground', the dive dapper peering through a wave, the swan with bootless labour swimming against the tide." pp. 48-49
"[E]ven allowing for these, the proportion of Shakespeare's body images to the whole is considerably larger than that of any of the other dramatists examined. ... No one of the other dramatists approaches Sheakespeare in the number and vividness of his images drawn from quick nimble action, such as jumping, leaping, diving, running, sliding, climbing and dancing." pp. 49-50
"The more we study these groups of images which constitute the greatest part of Shakespeare's imagery, the clearer it becomes that there is one quality or characteristic in them all which overpoweringly attracts him throughout, and that quality is movement: nature and natural objects in motion.
In other words, it is the life of things which appeals to him, stimulates and enchants him, rather than beauty of colour or form or even significance. ... [O]ne of his outstanding characteristics is the way in which by introducing verbs of movement about things which are motionless, or rather which are abstractions and cannot have physical movement, he gives life to the whole phrase[.]" pp. 50-51
Chapter V: Shakespeare’s Senses
Sight
"...[W]hat attracts him supremely are changes and contrast. His delight in shifting, changing colour is another manifestation of his delight in movement and life, and one would expect to find evidence of it all through his nature descriptions, but this is not so. He notices it almost exclusively in two phenomena only, which have apparently no relation to one another, yet which he constantly links together. These are the colour quickly coming and going in the human face, with the emotions it denotes, and the glory and changing colours of the rising sun.
"Shakespeare's intense interest in the human face has never, I think, been adequately noticed: its frowns and wrinkes, smiles, and tears, the tint and shape of the nose, the tension of the nostrils, the eye, its colour and character, 'in flood with laughter', sparkling, sun-bright, quick, merry, fiery, mistful, dim, lack-lustre, heavy, hollow, modest, sober, sunken or scornful; the peculiar beauty of the eyelid, the betrayal of the gnawing of a nether lip, the dimples on a child's chin, and, above all, the way in which he continually makes us see the motions of his characters by the chasing changes of colour in their cheeks." p. 58
"One has the feeling all through Shakespeare's use of colour that he is more interested in tone, contrast, character and emotion than in the colour itself." p. 68
Hearing
“The general impression one gets on looking at Shakespeare’s sound images, apart from his general delight in music and extreme sensitiveness to the human voice, is that he associates the purest emotion and the most spiritual condition known to man with music and with harmony, the most perfect earthly setting he can conceive is the hushed stillness of a summer day…[.] He definitely thinks of happy human love as music … [.] On the other hand, the things which Shakespeare hates, or intends his characters to convey to us that they hate, are constantly thought of in the terms of discord and clamour.” pp. 74-75
“[T]he action of war is clearly associated in his mind chiefly with noise, …[.] It is equally noticeably how often it is the sound Shakespeare seizes on as abhorrent. … In Shakespeare’s time and earlier, hell is commonly thought of as a place of torment, as a very hot or a very cold or a very dark place …, but the torment rarely takes the form of its being pictured as a very noisy place.” pp. 76-78
Smell
“Shakespeare clearly has a very acute sense of smell, and is peculiarly sensitive to bad smells; the two he specially names and dislikes being the smell of unwashed humanity and of decaying corpses… to his imagination sin and evil deeds always smell foully …Shakespeare seems more sensitive to the horror of bad smells than to the allure of fragrant ones.” pp. 78-80
Touch
“Shakespeare is fond, as are most of the Elizabethan dramatists, of similes drawn from the texture of substances, flint, iron, steel, wax, sponge and so on, but one has only to compare their-mostly-very obvious comparisons with his, to see how sensitive and delicately discriminating he is in matters of touch. … He is very conscious of and responsive to the feeling and quality of various substances: the smoothness of ice and oil, the cold hardness of stone, the stickiness of blood and of slime, the soft furred surface of moss, the peculiar roughness of bark, the malleability of wax when warm, the smooth imperviousness of marble, and the pleasant, soft feeling of rain.” p. 82
Taste
“Shakespeare is especially sensitive to the feeling of revolt and the dulling of the palate on eating too much of any one thing, however good … just as with smell, his strongest feeling is reserved, not for sweet scents and fragrance, but for evil smells, which arouse in him a shudder of antipathy.” p. 85
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. - Virginia Woolf, Orlando, pp 189-190 (The Hogarth Press, 1928).
The real revelation of the writer (as of the artist) comes in a far subtler way than by ... autobiography; and comes despite all effort to elude it; ... For what the writer does communicate is his temperament, his organic personality, with its preferences and aversions, its pace and rhythm and impact and balance, its swiftness or languor ... and this he does equally whether he be rehearsing veraciously his own concerns or inventing someone else's. - Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words, p. 109.
L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit être comme Dieu dans l'univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part. - Flaubert (Correspondance, 1852, vol. 11, p. 155).
Chapter I (Introductory): The Aim and Method Explained
"In the case of a poet, I suggest it is chiefly through his images that he, to some extent unconsciously, 'gives himself away'." p. 4
"My experience is that this works out more reliably in drama than in pure poetry, because in a poem the writer is more definitely and consciously seeking the images; whereas in drama, and especially drama writers red-hot as was the Elizabethan, images tumble out of the mouths of the characters in the heat of the writer's feeling or passion, as they naturally surge up into his mind." pp 4-5
"I use the term 'image' here as the only available word to cover every kind of simile, as well as every kind of what is really compressed simile - metaphor. I suggest that we divert our minds of the hint the term carries with of visual image only, and think of it, for the present purpose, as connoting any and every imaginative picture or other experience, drawn in every kind of way, which may have come to the poet, not only through any of his senses, but through his mind and emotions as well, and which he uses in the forms of simile and metaphor in their widest sense, for purposes of analogy. ... I am at present primarily concerned with the content rather than the form of images[.] ... we all know fairly well what we mean by an image. "p. 5, 8, 9
"But these pictures do more than give us a swift illumination in the round - background, atmosphere, appearance, emotion - of the incident described, they tell us also that the writer of them have almost certainly seen and sympathized with schoolboys straying from school, that he winced at the thrust of lightning and had roamed the countryside at night-time, that he was sufficiently observant and interested in birds to note and register the peculiar characteristics of the small owl's flight, and had watched an idle or weary laborer at treating time, and that he had, in all probability, at some period lived near a river where he would often have seen the meadows covered with the unprepossessing slime it leaves behind when it has overflowed its bank in spring.
"It is this latter aspect of the images in which I am here primarily interested, that is in their stuff, and what this stuff or content tells us, and I use them from this point of view as documents, first as helping to reveal to us the man himself, and secondly as throwing fresh light on the individual plays." p. 11
Chapter II: Shakespeare's Imagery Compared with that of Marlowe and Bacon
"[W]e are justified, I suggest, in assuming that a poet will, in the long run, naturally tend to draw the large proportion of his images from the objects he knows best, or thinks most aout about, or from the incidents, among myriads he has experienced, to which he is sensitive, and which therefore remains within his knowledge." p. 12
"[W]ith Shakespeare, nature (especially the weather, plants and gardening), animals (especially birds), and what we may call everyday and domestic, the body in health and sickness, indoor life, fire, light, food and cooking, easily come first; whereas with Marlowe, images drawn from books, especially the classics, and from the sun, moon, planets and heavens far outnumber all others." p. 13
"There between the sea images of [Shakespeare and Bacon] is the exact contrary of that between their nature images: Shakespeare's are the more general, Bacon's the more concrete and particular. Shakespeare's sea images are (i) chiefly of storms and shipwrecks. ... [With Shakespeare] the movements of the cruel, ruthless, raging sea are frequently as symbol for the passions and emotions of men. ... Shakespeare's other most constant sea images are (ii) the ebb and flow of tides, (iii) the actions of currents, (iv) a tide rushing through a breach, (v) ship being dashed on the rocks, and (vi) the infinite size, depth, and capacity of the ocean (generally likened to love). These last three I never find in Bacon. But the great and constant difference between the sea pictures of the two writers is that Shakespeare's are chiefly concerned with the general character, quality or aspect of the sea, usually in storm, as it might be viewed by a landsman, whereas Bacon's are noticeably vivid little pictures of episodes or incidents on the sea as experienced by a man in a ship or boat." pp. 24-26
"Clearly Bacon, ... holds that time, far from revealing truth, blurs and obscures it, passing on to us only that which is popular and superficial, while drowning that which is substantial and profound. Shakespeare, on the other hand, consistently thinks of time's function in quite opposite terms ..., and pictures time as sorting out the important from the trivial, as a revealer and disentangler of truth, whose glory is 'to unmask falsehood and bring truth to light' (Luc. 940)." pp. 28
"[B}ehind these two sets of writings, not one mind only, but two highly individual and entirely different minds." p. 29
Chapter III: Imagery of Shakespeare and Other Dramatists Compared
"There is ... one point in these images in which Shakespeare practically stands alone, and that is in the evidence of his sympathy with the animal hunted or snared, and in his understanding and feeling for teh orse and his movement and response. It is he alone who suggests that kindly persuasion may achieve more than the use of a spur, and that if you give a good horse the rein and 'let her run, she'll not stumble'; he alone who thinks of the point of view of the 'poor bird' fearing the net and lime, the pitfall and the gin, of the falcon mewed up, and of the bear tied to the stake." pp. 32-33
"In this large group ['classes'] from types of men and women, we at once see reflected Shakespeare's love of humanity, his observation and his quick eye for an oddity. We see also very markedly his sympathy with the under dog, as nearly half these images are drawn from the poor and oppressed, from prisoners, idiots or madmen, from gipsies, beggars, pedlars and slaves. Even in this little handful, from give plays only, we sense the writer's sympathy with 'the poor and broken bankrupt', with the inhuman treatment of teh insane, with the village idiot and with the 'poor prisoner in his twisted gyves'. In this respect-the number of his images from the poor and the width of his sympathy-he differs from all the other writers here analysed." p. 33
Chapter IV: The Subject-Matter of Shakespeare's Images
"[M]ere references are quite different from images ... [.] A writer refers to a thing in quite a different mood and with quote a different poetic impulse from that which produces a simile or metaphor, which, in the case of Shakespeare certainly, comes usually with great spontaneity and under stress of heightened feeling. If a poet, then, continually draws upon certain classes of things, certain qualities in things and certain aspects of life, for his illustrations, we are justified, I suggest, in arguing that those qualities and those aspects specially interested him and appealed to him." pp. 43-44.
"Of the large animal group, the outstanding point is the great number drawn from birds. If we except the human body, its parts, movements and senses, Shakespeare's images from birds form by far the largest section drawn from any single class of objects. ... I doubt if it has been noticed that the special aspect of their life which attracts him is their movement.
"Not primarily their song, or their shape, or their colour, or their habits; but their flight, and their swift, accurate, easy movements when free; their flutttering strugglign movements when imprisoned; the soaring of the eagle and of the hawk, the 'fell swoop' of the kite, the wild geese flocking together or 'severed', 'scattered by winds and high temptestuous gusts', 'lagging before the northern blast', the plummed estridges (goshawks) that 'wing the wind', the swift flight of the swallow, the confident flight of the falcon, 'towering in her pride of place', the hunry eagle 'shaking her wings' or fluttering the dovecote, the turkey-cock swelling ad jetting 'under his advanced plumes', the peacock sweeping his tail, stalking up and down 'a stride and a stand', the fairy-light hop of bird from briar, the tiny wren fighting the owl to protect her young, the terrified dove pecking the hawk, the 'new ta'en sparrow' 'fetching her breath' shortly, the woodcock struggling in the gin, the imprisoned bird in a cage or on a silken thread, hopping a little from his lady's hand, the cock strutting 'up and down', the Barbery hen swaggering, the lapwing running 'close by the ground', the dive dapper peering through a wave, the swan with bootless labour swimming against the tide." pp. 48-49
"[E]ven allowing for these, the proportion of Shakespeare's body images to the whole is considerably larger than that of any of the other dramatists examined. ... No one of the other dramatists approaches Sheakespeare in the number and vividness of his images drawn from quick nimble action, such as jumping, leaping, diving, running, sliding, climbing and dancing." pp. 49-50
"The more we study these groups of images which constitute the greatest part of Shakespeare's imagery, the clearer it becomes that there is one quality or characteristic in them all which overpoweringly attracts him throughout, and that quality is movement: nature and natural objects in motion.
In other words, it is the life of things which appeals to him, stimulates and enchants him, rather than beauty of colour or form or even significance. ... [O]ne of his outstanding characteristics is the way in which by introducing verbs of movement about things which are motionless, or rather which are abstractions and cannot have physical movement, he gives life to the whole phrase[.]" pp. 50-51
Chapter V: Shakespeare’s Senses
Sight
"...[W]hat attracts him supremely are changes and contrast. His delight in shifting, changing colour is another manifestation of his delight in movement and life, and one would expect to find evidence of it all through his nature descriptions, but this is not so. He notices it almost exclusively in two phenomena only, which have apparently no relation to one another, yet which he constantly links together. These are the colour quickly coming and going in the human face, with the emotions it denotes, and the glory and changing colours of the rising sun.
"Shakespeare's intense interest in the human face has never, I think, been adequately noticed: its frowns and wrinkes, smiles, and tears, the tint and shape of the nose, the tension of the nostrils, the eye, its colour and character, 'in flood with laughter', sparkling, sun-bright, quick, merry, fiery, mistful, dim, lack-lustre, heavy, hollow, modest, sober, sunken or scornful; the peculiar beauty of the eyelid, the betrayal of the gnawing of a nether lip, the dimples on a child's chin, and, above all, the way in which he continually makes us see the motions of his characters by the chasing changes of colour in their cheeks." p. 58
"One has the feeling all through Shakespeare's use of colour that he is more interested in tone, contrast, character and emotion than in the colour itself." p. 68
Hearing
“The general impression one gets on looking at Shakespeare’s sound images, apart from his general delight in music and extreme sensitiveness to the human voice, is that he associates the purest emotion and the most spiritual condition known to man with music and with harmony, the most perfect earthly setting he can conceive is the hushed stillness of a summer day…[.] He definitely thinks of happy human love as music … [.] On the other hand, the things which Shakespeare hates, or intends his characters to convey to us that they hate, are constantly thought of in the terms of discord and clamour.” pp. 74-75
“[T]he action of war is clearly associated in his mind chiefly with noise, …[.] It is equally noticeably how often it is the sound Shakespeare seizes on as abhorrent. … In Shakespeare’s time and earlier, hell is commonly thought of as a place of torment, as a very hot or a very cold or a very dark place …, but the torment rarely takes the form of its being pictured as a very noisy place.” pp. 76-78
Smell
“Shakespeare clearly has a very acute sense of smell, and is peculiarly sensitive to bad smells; the two he specially names and dislikes being the smell of unwashed humanity and of decaying corpses… to his imagination sin and evil deeds always smell foully …Shakespeare seems more sensitive to the horror of bad smells than to the allure of fragrant ones.” pp. 78-80
Touch
“Shakespeare is fond, as are most of the Elizabethan dramatists, of similes drawn from the texture of substances, flint, iron, steel, wax, sponge and so on, but one has only to compare their-mostly-very obvious comparisons with his, to see how sensitive and delicately discriminating he is in matters of touch. … He is very conscious of and responsive to the feeling and quality of various substances: the smoothness of ice and oil, the cold hardness of stone, the stickiness of blood and of slime, the soft furred surface of moss, the peculiar roughness of bark, the malleability of wax when warm, the smooth imperviousness of marble, and the pleasant, soft feeling of rain.” p. 82
Taste
“Shakespeare is especially sensitive to the feeling of revolt and the dulling of the palate on eating too much of any one thing, however good … just as with smell, his strongest feeling is reserved, not for sweet scents and fragrance, but for evil smells, which arouse in him a shudder of antipathy.” p. 85
June 29, 2020
Ordinarily at this time of year I would be re-reading those of Shakespeare's plays which I would be going to see at the Utah Shakespeare Festival on my vacation; but this year the Festival has been cancelled due to COVID-19. Perhaps there is a certain fitness or irony in a Shakespeare Festival being shut down, as the Elizabethan theaters so often were, by a plague. (And am I the only one who finds it telling that everyone has implicitly agreed to use the neologism "pandemic" instead of the exactly synonomous English word "plague"? See Newspeak.) As a substitute, I am reading a few secondary works on Shakespeare.
Caroline Spurgeon's book was as far as I know the first to attempt a statistical analysis of the images in Shakespeare's plays (and a few of his contemporaries, for comparison). It is interesting, although perhaps more for its method than its conclusions.
Caroline Spurgeon's book was as far as I know the first to attempt a statistical analysis of the images in Shakespeare's plays (and a few of his contemporaries, for comparison). It is interesting, although perhaps more for its method than its conclusions.
November 27, 2020
An in-depth analysis of Shakespeare's figurative language and its imagery.
Want to Read
June 22, 2025Have only read through Chapter 1: The Aim and Method explained.
June 14, 2016
I was far more interested by the beginning of this book than by the rest of it. In short, Spurgeon suggests that a study of the type and frequency of images in Shakespeare's plays can inform us on two fronts: it allows us to deduce something about Shakespeare the man (his interests, his habits, what his life was like), and also exposes the inner workings of the plays themselves, in which repeated imagery and kinds of imagery together form a kind of emotional picture we might not otherwise be aware of.
The problem, for me, is that although I do have a passing interest in Shakespeare the man, I don't really believe that his personality or life matters all that much, and I'm far more interested in what this method of analysis can do for the plays themselves; Spurgeon, however, seems to look at things the other way. She tells us a lot about what she thinks Shakespeare is like, and why, and why he's better than other playwrights of his day -to which I don't really think she offers all-too-compelling an answer - and then tells us a little bit about her observations on the plays from her (admittedly meticulous) research. She covers every play, which is in itself somewhat tiresome; I'm very familiar with Hamlet, pretty good on Lear and Much Ado, maybe Macbeth, but she doesn't sustain her observations on any play for very long, and you end up reading a lot about plays that, unless you're in academia, you probably don't know all that well. However, I will say that her method is actually very interesting, and where she does have something to say about a play, she's often very penetrating and her observations are compelling. It's a mix, is what I'm saying: worth a read for the method, and the little bits on whatever plays you happen to know, but reading the whole thing probably isn't worth it.
The problem, for me, is that although I do have a passing interest in Shakespeare the man, I don't really believe that his personality or life matters all that much, and I'm far more interested in what this method of analysis can do for the plays themselves; Spurgeon, however, seems to look at things the other way. She tells us a lot about what she thinks Shakespeare is like, and why, and why he's better than other playwrights of his day -to which I don't really think she offers all-too-compelling an answer - and then tells us a little bit about her observations on the plays from her (admittedly meticulous) research. She covers every play, which is in itself somewhat tiresome; I'm very familiar with Hamlet, pretty good on Lear and Much Ado, maybe Macbeth, but she doesn't sustain her observations on any play for very long, and you end up reading a lot about plays that, unless you're in academia, you probably don't know all that well. However, I will say that her method is actually very interesting, and where she does have something to say about a play, she's often very penetrating and her observations are compelling. It's a mix, is what I'm saying: worth a read for the method, and the little bits on whatever plays you happen to know, but reading the whole thing probably isn't worth it.
July 12, 2016
Thank God for used bookstores! Picked this up for 5 bucks. Amazon lists it for over $50. No thanks.
Although an imprint of Cambridge University Press it doesn't read like an academic tome. That makes it not only an informing read but a highly enjoyable one. Nothing dusty, gaseous or self satisfied to it. Spurgeon collates all the imagery found in Shakespeare's work and then categorizes them to give a picture of his primary figurative tropes. She also compares them to those of other Elizabethan playwrights as well as Bacon. Ultimately, beyond sensitizing you to his figurative language, it gives a picture of the man behind the work. This is a brilliant book.
On a very interesting side note, Spurgeon was the first woman to teach English literature at the university level in England.
Although an imprint of Cambridge University Press it doesn't read like an academic tome. That makes it not only an informing read but a highly enjoyable one. Nothing dusty, gaseous or self satisfied to it. Spurgeon collates all the imagery found in Shakespeare's work and then categorizes them to give a picture of his primary figurative tropes. She also compares them to those of other Elizabethan playwrights as well as Bacon. Ultimately, beyond sensitizing you to his figurative language, it gives a picture of the man behind the work. This is a brilliant book.
On a very interesting side note, Spurgeon was the first woman to teach English literature at the university level in England.
March 22, 2013
من أهم الكتب التى صدرت عن تحليل الصور البلاغية عند شكسبير ، واستخلاص نتائج تحليلية شعرية منها .
وقد صدرت طبعات كثيرة من هذا الكتاب ، وقد قرأته أكثر من مرة
وأى كتاب نقدى عن أحد الشعراء يستلزم النظر فى هذا الكتاب ومحاولة الاستفادة من منهجه للتطبيق على الشاعر المدروس
وقد صدرت طبعات كثيرة من هذا الكتاب ، وقد قرأته أكثر من مرة
وأى كتاب نقدى عن أحد الشعراء يستلزم النظر فى هذا الكتاب ومحاولة الاستفادة من منهجه للتطبيق على الشاعر المدروس
November 4, 2012
it's a nice book...
Helped me a lot...
Helped me a lot...
May 20, 2009
very absorbing - learnt a lot from this
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