Knight - Imperial Theme: Wilson Knight

G. WILSON KNIGHT
COLLECTED WORKS

G. WILSON KNIGHT
COLLECTED WORKS

VOLUME I

THE IMPERIAL THEME

Further Interpretations of Shakespeares Tragedies Including the Roman Plays

First published 1931 by Oxford University Press

This edition published 2002 by Routledge

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ISBN 978-0-415-27896-6 (Set)
ISBN 978-0-415-29070-8 (Volume I) (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-60661-5 (Volume I) (pbk)

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The Imperial Theme

FURTHER INTERPRETATIONS OF S HAKES PEARES TRAGEDIES INCLUDING THE ROMAN PLAYS

BY

G. WILSON KNIGHT

Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of Leeds Formerly Chancellors Professor of English, Trinity College, Toronto

Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme.

MACBETH, I. iii. 127.

Look down, you gods,

And on this couple drop a blessed crown!

For it is you that have chalkd forth the way Which brought us hither.

THE TEMPEST, V. i. 201.

METHUEN & CO. LTD

11 NEW FETTER LANE, EC4

T HIS, my second main Shakespearian volume, was first published in 1931 and went out of print some ten years later. In re-issuing it I shall not preserve the original preface, which was unnecessarily burdened by references to other writers of the moment, not, for the most part, as acknowledgments, but prompted rather by the desire to feel my own investigations as part of a general movement. I have, however, been since forced to realise that they constituted a more lonely statement than that preface suggested, and one which is even now subject to a number of misunderstandings. It may therefore be as well, from a later perspective, to attempt a general clarification of their relationship to the work of others.

As I have recently suggested in my prefatory note to the enlarged re-issue of The Wheel of Fire, these investigations can be considered to lie directly in the tradition of A. C. Bradleys Shakespearean Tragedy, which is too often wrongly supposed to have been limited to the minutiae of characterisation. But they also offered something new, particularly in what might be defined as the willingness, or even will, to find in great literature significances that may best, to challenge the opposition and avoid all misunderstanding, be called mystical. The new patterns unrolled with suddenness and inevitability; but it is right to record here that the thought-atmosphere in which this happened may be related to the early writings of Middleton Murry, and in retrospect I subscribe to the general acknowledgment made on the appearance of my first published workexcept for articlesMyth and Miracle (1929; afterwards incorporated into The Crown of Life). The reading of the Final Plays presented in Myth and Miracle was itself new, and had before that been searching, without success, for recognition; but Mr. Murrys general approach and militant support during those years of what might be called the religious content of great poetry served as a stimulus and an encouragement, if not more. Indeed, my final understanding of the positive impact of Antony and Cleopatra owed something to an article of his in The Times Literary Supplement; and my stress on its theme of loyalty to an essay in Discoveries (see pp. 264, 326 below). There were, however, certain serious divergences, and these quickly appeared. I favoured a new precision in the handling of imagery and symbol that was repellent to the more romantically minded, who felt that I was in danger of reducing mystery to dogma. I have on occasion wondered that my insistence on the unity of the Shakespearian play has not been criticisedespecially where the theory of production is the argumentas an attempt to turn a romantic dramatist into a writer of classic form. But, though intellectual in technique, my work was never so in either origin or purpose. It has, it is true, been sometimes associated with what is often, if inexactly, called the Cambridge school of literary criticism, headed by such names as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards and, later, F. R. Leavis, if writers so different may be grouped together; and my first main volume enjoyed the favour of Mr. Eliots introduction. I would, however, emphasise once again that poetic interpretation, as I see it, is to be firmly distinguished from criticism. The critic is, and should be, cool and urbane, seeing the poetry he discusses not with the eyes of a lover but as an object; whereas interpretation deliberately immerses itself in its theme and speaks less from the seats of judgement than from the creative centre. It deliberately aims to write of genius from the standpoint not of the reader, but of genius itself; to write of it from within. So, while the critic stands on his guard against the lure of the unknown and prefers not to adventure too far from home, interpretation, it must be confessed, is happiest among the vast open spaces of what is, nevertheless, a severely disciplined speculation.

Such a work of disciplined speculation was Colin Stills book on the symbolism of The Tempest called Shakespeares Mystery Play (1921; revised and re-issued under the title The Timeless Theme, 1936), which remains today a too little recognised land-mark in Shakespearian studies. Stills book was brought to my notice by himself on the appearance of Myth and Miracle in 1929, and thenafter it remained part of my general equipment. Years later I found among my papers a jotting on a review of its first appearance; so his thesis, at least in outline, had apparently been in my mind yet earlier. I would take this opportunity of again drawing attention to a neglected study.

My present remarks are prompted by fear of misunderstanding. Mr. Stanley Hyman, writing in The Kenyon Review for Winter 1948, has recently been at pains to argue that my work from The Imperial Theme onwards owed much to the imagistic studies of Caroline Spurgeon. As I pointed out in my reply (Winter 1949), this was never so. Her pamphlet Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeares Tragedies appeared in the same year, 1930, as The Wheel of Fire, followed by another, Shakespeares Iterative Imagery, balancing The Imperial Theme in 1931. Though I should probably have preferred not to, it seemed a duty to read her work as it appeared, and whenever any detail of her discovery lay within the area of my own rapidly unfolding interpretations, I tended to see itas, variously, on pages 176, 208 and 244 belowas a debt. This was the more natural since our relations were most friendly. She had written to me on the publication of