Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us

 Dr. Spurgeon spent ten years sifting through the entire Shakespeare canon and pulling out every metaphor and simile she could find. Then, she organized them into like groups. This offered her, and us through her writing, an insight into Shakespeare's creative genius. With evidence in hand, Dr. Spurgeon explored how Shakepeare's mind actually worked; she uncovered his patterns of creative thinking. His abundant use of garden and household images and his relatively few uses of classical or scholarly images show us a writer more in touch with the real everyday world. His childhood homelife, the images one tends to carry throughout one's life, become crystal clear when set side by side in this fashion. In Spurgeon's book, we clearly see that the works of Shakespeare had to have been written by Shakespeare, who was born in small town Stratford, and not the works of a university trained dramatist or a member of Queen Elizabeth's court. It is fascinating to see Shakespeare's images compared and contrasted to those of Marlowe, Dekker, and Johnson. Each writer thought and created images in a unique manner. Seeing and understanding the differences, as expertly explained by Dr. Spurgeon, gives one a deeper insight into and appreciation of one of the greatest minds of all time.

Caroline Spurgeon's "Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us" is one of the books you'll most definitely find on the Shakespeare students' bookshelf, and for good reason: nobody outlines the visual images, themes, and motifs in Shakespeare's plays as well as Spurgeon does.

Furthermore, Spurgeon doesn't outline themes on a play-by-play basis; instead, she takes a particular image and tells us about ALL of the ways it appears in ANY of the plays. Example: she outlines dream imagery in Richard II, Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and Romeo and Juliet. This may sound a little confusing, and indeed can be, but it allows a real glimpse into Shakespeare's mind, and allows the reader to see common threads in all of the plays.

Also intriguing are the detailed charts in the back of the book that give a visual reference of how prevalent certain images are in Shakespeare's plays: for instance, one chart shows how prevalent sickness, disease, and medicine are in each of the plays.

Spurgeon did an amazing amount of work in order to complete this book, and it shows--it's one of the most thorough references available, and it is invaluable to the Shakespeare student, teacher, or scholar. Spurgeon didn't cover EVERYTHING--who could?--and a true scholar might find himself noting what's absent at times. Also, the reading can be a bit boring at times, but it always picks back up quickly, and it really highlights the machinations of Shakespeare's mind.