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216 Theory of Literature
expresses disillusionment and that this must be Shakespeare's
own. 57 He could not have written so great a play had he not been
sincere, i.e., writing out of his own mood. Such a doctrine runs
counter to the view of Shakespeare urged by E. E. Stoll and
others which emphasizes his art, his dramaturgy, his skillful pro-
vision of new and better plays within the general pattern of pre-
ceding successes: e.g., Hamlet as a follower-up of The Spanish
Tragedy; The Winter's Tale and The Tempest as a rival
theater's equivalents to Beaumont and Fletcher.
Not all studies of poetic imagery, however, attempt to catch
the poet off guard or to pursue his inner biography. They may
focus, rather, on an important element in the total meaning of
a play—what Eliot calls "the pattern below the level of plot
and character." 58 In her 1930 essay, "Leading Motives in the
Imagery of Shakespeare's Tragedies," Miss Spurgeon herself is
primarily interested in defining the image or cluster of images
which, dominating a specific play, acts as tone-giver. Samples of
her analysis are the discovery in Hamlet of images of disease,
e.g., ulcer, cancer ; of food and the digestive apparatus in
Troilus; in Othello, of "animals in action, preying upon one
another. . . ." Miss Spurgeon makes some effort to show how
this substructure of a play affects its total meaning, remarking
of Hamlet that the disease motif suggests that the Prince is not
culpable, that the whole state of Denmark is diseased. The posi-
tive value of her work lies in this search for subtler forms of lit-
erary meaning than ideological generalization and overt plot
structure.
More ambitious studies of imagery, those of Wilson Knight,
take off, initially, from Middleton Murry's brilliant pages on
Shakespeare's imagery (The Problem of Style, 1922). Knight's
earlier work (e.g., Myth and Miracle, 1929, and The Wheel of
Fire, 1930) is exclusively concerned with Shakespeare ; but in
later volumes the method is applied to other poets as well, e.g.,
Milton, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth. 59 The earlier work, clearly
the best, keeps to studies of individual plays, studying each in
terms of its symbolic imagery, giving particular attention to
imagistic oppositions like "tempests" and "music," but also sensi-
tively observing stylistic differentiations between play and play
as well as within a play. In the later books, the extravagances