Traditionally the image has been seen as an essential element of poetic language. An image might take the form of a direct, vivid description ( ‘Light thickens and the crow/ Makes wing to the rooky wood’) or a striking comparison, in the form of either a simile (‘Pity, like a naked new born babe’) or a metaphor (‘Life’s but a walking shadow’). In literary criticism the term imagery has been extended to cover not only mental pictures but also any use of language which appeals directly to the senses, and not just similes and metaphors but a host of other poetic devices, including rhythm, onomatopoeia and assonance. Central to all these aspects of ‘the image’ is the transformation of abstract ideas into concrete, vivid, sensory experience.

In Shakespearean drama images are often used to establish setting and atmosphere without resource to props, backdrops or lighting (‘Look how the floor of heaven/Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold’). And staging is an important non-verbal aspect of all of his images. A striking image need not depend on linguistic brilliance. To anyone who knows Hamlet , the words ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, not in themselves remarkable, will conjure in the mind one of the play’s iconic images – Hamlet, probably dressed in black, standing beside a grave and gazing at the skull of his father’s long- deceased jester. Many of the play’s themes come together in this image. The sustained ‘mirror’ motif, dealing with the realities which underlie appearances, ends with the discovery of Yorick’s skull. In the skull we have the embodiment of the final truth: all life must come to this. (A few dramatic minutes later, Hamlet, Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude will all be dead.) But even while gazing at Yorick, and realising that this is the jester’s final grim joke, Hamlet’s words shift to another painful obsession: the frailty of women. We have chosen these words, rather than ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ ,  as one of our greatest images:

Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick,  to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.

Hamlet, still gazing at the skull, says this with bitter irony. Is he mocking courtly women in general, with their attempts to cover blemishes and signs of ageing with their make-up? or is he referring directly to his mother, whose second marriage has so disgusted him? Perhaps to both. Momentarily we have an image of a woman gazing at herself in her glass and seeing no pretty picture but the skull. (The image on our cover). Hamlet’s meditation on death is given its final twist moments later when we discover that the grave is being prepared for the ‘fair Ophelia’, the young girl he once professed to love.

Several commentators have seen Shakespeare’s use of images as the key to his plays, noting how ‘meaning’ is often conveyed through an accumulation of images which illustrate the abstract ideas at the heart of each play (light versus darkness in Romeo and Juliet, disease and corruption in Hamlet etc.) Our book builds on this tradition by relating individual images to plot, character and theme.

Readers may find that some of our chosen ‘images’ are – out of context – somewhat bewildering. But all, as a part of the dramatic structure of the plays from which they have been taken, have great resonance.