Reviews of the Week

Shakespeare's Imagery

THE translation in a revised and augmented form of Professor Wolfgang Clemen's Shakespeares Bilder (Bonn, 1936) is heralded by Dr. Dover Wilson with the adjectives, " lovely, sensitive and penetrating." Such praise upon the lips of such a man should ensure satisfactory sales. Dr. Dover Wilson ,is an enthusiast - a veteran ever generous in his encouragemeht of new tillers, binders and gleaners in the Shakespearian field. To some readers his editorial prefaces suggest that like the Athenians he is eager to hear and tell some new thing, and it may be that Dr. Clemen's study seems to him newer than it is. Shakespeare'i'stSfle was neglected as a sub- ject for two centuries, and, although the Romantics recognised that the poet bore the Aristotelian hall-mark of mastery of metaphor, Matthew Arnold hastened to warn the disciples of Keats that Shake- speare's gift of expression led him astray, that it degenerated into irritability of fancy and tortured curiosity of language. The last three decades have witnessed the publication of lectures, pamphlets, articles and a few more extended studies which have achieved much in righting the wrong done to Shakespeare the poet. All these Dr. Clemen has thoroughly mastered and he pays due tribute to them ; thus if we were to take away from his book what Richard Altick has written on Richard II, Caroline Spurgeon on Hamlet, Bradley on Lear, Wilson Knight on Othello, S. L Bethell on The Winter's Tgle, E. M. W. Tillyard on The Tempest and Granville Barker on Cym- beline, the residue might prove a little meagre. Nor is the book very happily proportioned. Some 70 pages (about one third) cover Shakespeare's development up to Hamlet, including only twelve on " the middle period." The great tragedies have 90 pages, the three romances 40. Henry V, All's Well, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and -(most strangely) Measure for Measure are virtually omitted ; and of the tragedies Macbeth nas no section to itself. Dr. Clemen anticipates objections on this score, but does not seem to recognise how misguided it is to omit all reference to the Sonnets and Poems. The rivalry between Shakespeare the poet and Shakespeare the dramatist in its various phases of alliance and antagonism—some readers of The Tempest say that the poet won the final round— must be related to the " sugred " sonneteer, the " mellifluous and honey-tongued " author of Venus and Adonis and the rhetorician of that " graver labour," the Lucrece.

Dr. Clemen considers the recurring image, the cosmic image, the structural image, the ambiguous image, as he goes on his way from Titus Andronicus to Timon and The Tempest ; he rightly warns us that the word " development " must not be too strictly applied, that Shakespeare does not mount the rungs of a ladder to perfection. But he hardly attempts to relate metaphor and artifice and individual { word to the cadence and tempo and framework of the blank-verse line and paragraph, or to the grammatical order and idiom. On these, as Granville Barker illustrated again and again, with the speaking voice of the actor in his ears, everything depends. To use Shaw's distinction, Dr. Clemen examines the libretto rather than the score.- The book is not a long one, and inevitably there are generalisations which provoke dissent or doubt, and detailed analyses which languish before they have borne fruit. " Why," Dr. Clemen asks, " does the later Shakespeare say the wisest and deepest things throughr image instead of in plain language 7," The truth is that Shakespeare from first to last is the most figurative of writers, whether it be in 1596,

"The quality of mercy is ,not strained, It droppeth as,the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath."

or ten years later,

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more."

Whether it be the hyperbole and amplification of:

"Ills delights-

Were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above

The element they liv'd in ; in his livery

Walk'd crowns and crownets, realms and islands were

As plates dropp'd from his pocket." - Or a single concentrated line eight years earlier, "And unregarded age in corners thrown." Nevertheless when directness is required-in the last period we have it:

"Kneel not to me.

The power that I have on you is to spare you. The malice toward you to forgive lou. Live And deal with others better." c.

"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all 7 " ‘44-tralt Or "Though with their high wrongs 1 am struck to the quick, Yet with my noble reason 'gainst my fury Do I take part: the rare action is In virtue than in vengeance."

Dr. Clemen's investigations are sometimes confused and cursory.

We may profit by seeing Macbeth's apostrophe to sleep side by side with that of King Henry IV, but Dr. Clemen hardly tackles the audacity with which Shakespeare suggests that the butcher of three innocent men could quote Sidney or Daniel as it were—an Eliza- bethan sonnet convention—with the blood dripping from his hands. Bellona's bridegroom was a poet, and thus we can take from him " Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow " without disbelief or disquiet Romeo was a poet in a very different sense from that in which Othello was a poet.

If, however, Dr..Clemen has bitten off more than he .can chew, plenty remains on the -bill of fare to feed the hungry and tempt the surfeited. But his book, pace Dover Wilson, is useful rather than lovely, thoughtful rather than sensitive, more synthetic than pene- Or