Extollager
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- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
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In my comment #79 above there are a couple of things I should have said better.
"And films of the plays inadvertently support his notion" should be "And films of the plays inadvertently support this notion."
The thing about Caroline Spurgeon's book that I wanted to point out is that she finds, in various plays, that a way that Shakespeare unifies a given work is by using a pattern of imagery or concepts. You don't need a technical knowledge of poetry to pick up on this key feature of poetic craftsmanship. Check her index. Here are some examples:
Romeo and Juliet -- light and forms of light
Julius Caesar -- animals
Love's Labour's Lost -- war and weapons
The Tempest -- words relating to sound are common
Hamlet -- disease, an ulcer
All's Well That Ends Well -- astronomy, stars, astrology
A reader doesn't need to obsess about this, worry himself or herself about whether a given expression qualifies or not; the point is just to notice that Shakespeare does this kind of thing and that, whether we are conscious of it or not, it may help the play to come across to us as a unified poetic construction. Shakespeare often doesn't concern himself with the famous Aristotelian unities of time and place, but his works exhibit artistic unity in other ways, and that can be part of our pleasure in reading them.
"And films of the plays inadvertently support his notion" should be "And films of the plays inadvertently support this notion."
The thing about Caroline Spurgeon's book that I wanted to point out is that she finds, in various plays, that a way that Shakespeare unifies a given work is by using a pattern of imagery or concepts. You don't need a technical knowledge of poetry to pick up on this key feature of poetic craftsmanship. Check her index. Here are some examples:
Romeo and Juliet -- light and forms of light
Julius Caesar -- animals
Love's Labour's Lost -- war and weapons
The Tempest -- words relating to sound are common
Hamlet -- disease, an ulcer
All's Well That Ends Well -- astronomy, stars, astrology
A reader doesn't need to obsess about this, worry himself or herself about whether a given expression qualifies or not; the point is just to notice that Shakespeare does this kind of thing and that, whether we are conscious of it or not, it may help the play to come across to us as a unified poetic construction. Shakespeare often doesn't concern himself with the famous Aristotelian unities of time and place, but his works exhibit artistic unity in other ways, and that can be part of our pleasure in reading them.