SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGERY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 768, 9 April 1954, Page 12

SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGERY

THE SHAKESPEAREAN TEMPEST, by G. Wilson Knight; Methuen, English price 21/-. ‘PHIs is a re-issue of a book published as far back as 1943, when one of the controversies worrying the scholars was Who Wrote Shakespeare? We have fortunately settled down into a period when we all believe that the man who

wrote Shakespeare’s plays was not a collection of minor Elizabethan playwrights but (strange as it may seem) plain William Shakespeare. Relics of that controversy are still to be seen in this volume and they wear an oldfashioned air. The major portion of the book is concerned with Shakespeare’s imagery, a topic that has received a great deal of attention since the thirties. Mr. Knight has attempted to bring his book up to date by adding a long prefatory note in which he defends his point of view and finally produces a two-page chart of "Shakespeare’s various values and symbolic powers" which he offers (and I quote his own words) as "a simple chart devised to form a kind of vade mecum for the Shakespearian expert." All I can say is that, if this is the clue to Shakespeare, then I have never understood him and it is unlikely I ever shall. Which is a pity, since I have read every play written by Shakespeare several times, and many of them many times, and have even had the effrontery to lecture to students on the assumption that I understood what they were about. I doubt if I have read so much nonsense about Shakespeare as is contained in Mr. Knight’s first and last chapters. Between these two chapters, however, is a great deal of sympathetic and understanding interpretation of Shakespeare’s imagery, though it is all rather long drawn out and laboured. The central thesis is simple enough and easily acceptable, that Shakespeare’s meaning is not contained merely in the simple meanings of the words he writes but also in the magnificent imagery he uses. "Winter" to Shakespeare is not just winter, frost and cold noses. It is a poetic symbol. It is old age, it is death, it is the end of love, it is sorrow, it is human tragedy, as the context demands. Which is only another way of saying that Shakespeare is a poet. Mr. Knight*analyses in 300 pages the images associated with "Tempest" and makes a case for the tempest-theme as Shakespeare’s dominant image. It is disorder, both public and private; it is the sea that separates lovers and child from parent; it is the force of evil that combats the brightness of human life. The whole thing is most plausible, until one remembers that with time, a copy of the complete plays, and a good cardindex system plus a one-track mind, one (continued on next’ page).

BOOKS (continued from previous page) could do the same tor many other recurrent Shakespearian images. It has been done often in the last few years. Indeed, it has been done on at least four other octasions by Mr. Knight.

I.A.

G.