Imagery in King Lear

The study of imagery is a potential meeting ground, but also too often a dividing line, between literary and psychoanalytic scholarship.1 To Caroline Spurgeon,2 a nose is a nose and, as an organ of smell, may indicate Shakespeare's preference for flowers and the aroma of good cooking; to Ernest Jones,3 it is uncompromisingly phallic. The discovery that the idea of “dog” suggests to the dramatist the licking of sweets provides an opportunity for a spontaneous word-association test not only of the author but of the critic, who justifiably sees a natural metaphor for false flatterers, and of the psychoanalyst, who equally justifiably suspects a fellatio phantasy.

Neither the common-sense nor the poetic nor the sexual meanings need to be right or wrong or mutually exclusive. Images are stratified, patterned and convey multiple implications which are the very essence of their origin and function. Unfortunately, literary scholar and psychoanalyst have too often been equipped to respond to and develop only one aspect of these implications and have shown indifference or even antagonism to another. This may well relate to the respective aesthetic and psychological interests involved as well as to the ambiguity of the image itself, which invites attention to a surface meaning while recessively suggesting another. Obviously, the over-all significance can be derived only from a full survey of all facets of the image—and indeed of the image pattern of the work—better still, of all the author's works, supplemented by all we know of the author; (cf. Henry James', “The Figure in the Carpet”). Ultimately, the image, like the drama of which it is part, is rooted in time, place and person.

“King Lear” lends itself in various respects to such a task. It is remarkably rich in imagery. Shakespeare himself has made mental processes, in their breakdown and recovery, the subject of the play. It is the dramatist himself who introduces the clinical viewpoint into a work of art, and the literary