A Historico-Critical Reappraisal toward a Holistic Shakespearean Criticism: Rereading the Imagery-Analysis of Macbeth

Abstract

William Shakespeare(1564-1616) is quintessentially a poet and all his plays are basically poems written in mostly unrhymed iambic pentameter. His plays are full of images, myths, and symbols. We can find various imagery patterns in Macbeth: babies and breast-feeding, sickness and medicine, blood, sleep and sleeplessness, order and disorder, light and darkness. Without any proper analysis and interpretation of imagery clusters in Macbeth, we cannot say that we can understand and appreciate Macbeth fully. The purpose of this essay is to discuss and appraise the merits and demerits of the so-called poetic school of Shakespearean criticism. Our discussion includes major representative imagery critics such as Caroline Spurgeon, G. Wilson Knight, and Cleanth Brooks. It is, however, also necessary that we should duly regard Shakespeare's plays as dramatic works with their own rules and conventions. Macbeth has dual aspect of both drama and poem. We need to revitalize the dynamic powers of drama and poem in Shakespeare's works for the holistic interpretation of Shakespeare as poetic dramatist, and dramatic poet as well. After the age of postmodern theory including poststructuralism, deconstructionism and New Historicism, we need to go back to the old New Critical School of Imagery Criticism in Shakespearean studies to balance and check the rampant sway of theoretical conflicts and contradictions. This essay aims to reach to the critical wisdom that could harmonize and synthesize the old and new ways of reading Shakespeare in the twenty-first century.