Caroline Spurgeon is quite a bit harder on Arthur Brooke (the writer of The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), which was probably Shakespeare's only source for Romeo and Juliet) in her classic work of criticism, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us from 1935, than even I was the other day when I contrasted Shakespeare's philosophical sophistication with Brooke's heavy-handed moralizing. In giving credit for the fact that Shakespeare took from Brooke the idea of using recurring images of light and darkness, she wrote the following: "He took the idea from the last place we should expect, from the wooden doggerel of Arthur Brooke, and the germ of it is in the sing-song line in which Brooke describes the attitude of the lovers: 'For each of them to other is as to the world the sun.'" I'm not sure I find that line, or Brooke's writing overall, quite as bad as Spurgeon does, but it is surprising to realize that Shakespeare didn't necessarily require a good source (i.e. an excellent writer such as Plutarch, for example) from which to fashion a masterpiece.

In her essential text, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us from 1935, Caroline Spurgeon thoroughly examines the causes and effects of Shakespeare's visual references. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, he keeps returning to images of light and darkness: "In Romeo and Juliet the beauty and ardour of young love are seen by Shakespeare as the irradiating glory of sunlight and starlight in a dark world. The dominating image is light, every form and manifestation of it: the sun, moon, stars, fire, lightning, the flash of gunpowder, and the reflected light of beauty and of love; while by contrast we have night, darkness, clouds, rain, mist and smoke."

Re-reading the play with this statement in mind is an enjoyable experience, and it led me to another understanding: It's for this reason that many of the most powerful Shakespeare performances that I've seen have been done on thrust stages (like the Globe, of course), with no scenery or backdrops of any kind, except for the mental ones provided by the poetry.

One of the most important books in the history of Shakespeare criticism, Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us, first published in 1935, contains many enlightening observations. One of the most telling is her comparison of Shakespeare's use of recurring image patterns with the illustrations found in the illuminated poetry of William Blake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake#Illuminated_books). First, she gives an astonishingly accurate description of these unique masterpieces, and in particular the illustrations found in them: "These are not, for the most part, illustrations in the ordinary sense of the term, the translation by the artist of some incident in the narrative into a visual picture; they are rather a running accompaniment to the words in another medium, sometimes symbolically emphasising or interpreting certain aspects of the thought, sometimes supplying frankly only decoration or atmosphere, sometimes grotesque and even repellent, vivid, strange, arresting, sometimes drawn with an almost unearthly beauty of form and colour."

She then brilliantly relates Blake's work to Shakespeare's by comparing the effect of these illustrations to the one created by poetic image patterns in the plays: "Thus, as the leaping tongues of flame which illuminate the pages of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell show the visual form which Blake's thought evoked in his mind, and symbolize for us the purity, the beauty, and the two-edged quality of life and danger in his words, so the recurrent images in Macbeth or Hamlet reveal the dominant picture or sensation - and for Shakespeare the two are identical - in terms of which he sees and feels the main problem or theme of the play, thus giving us an unerring clue to the way he looked at it, as well as a direct glimpse into the working of his mind and imagination." Tomorrow, I'll summarize some of Spurgeon's thoughts on the imagery of Romeo and Juliet.