ABSTRACT
Language imagery may be considered under two heads, 'literal' imagery and 'figurative' imagery. Figurative imagery here means the auxiliary metaphors and similes which are tied to literal statement or literal image. Literal means fictive-literal. This chapter calls attention to the literal imagery of Shakespeare's plays, primarily to the interplay of the imagery-discourse with the stage imagery, what the spectators hear the actors speak with what they see on the stage. Elizabethan dramatic art is stage-conscious, audience-conscious; it does not try to conceal the actors' working space with realistic illusion, nor sharply differentiate the performance and audience by theater construction and lighting. Editorial punctuation, often a semihidden form of emendation, may conceal the meaning of a passage through misapprehension of the implicit stage imagery. In all of Shakespeare's dramatic scripts, stage imagery has important implications of meaning and delight for the reader as well as for the hearer-observer-participant in the theatre.
