ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's plays enact stories and may be reduced to 'tales', but the stories that they enact are not the sole repositories of the dramatist's meaning. The significance of a Shakespearian play, as this book has attempted to show, is the sum of its parts, and derives from a complex pattern of contrast and analogy that emerges as the drama unfolds. Relationships are set up between linguistic modes, stage spectacles, strands of action, groups of characters, and levels of apprehension, while the degree of distance between play and spectator is exploited for specific effects. Shakespeare's method, in short, is essentially a poetic one, not simply because his principal medium is blank verse, but because the significance of his work is a product of a fusion between vehicle (or form) and tenor (statement), and is thus incapable of paraphrase. Though what happens to the central figure in a Shakespearian drama is obviously crucial, the disposition of characters around him is far from random, while the minor incidents that accompany his progress enlarge the significance of his experience. The quest for Shakespeare's meaning therefore involves an appreciation of design, and the student embarking upon it will find his progress facilitated by the cultivation of a heightened awareness of the spatial structure of drama (i.e. of the relationship between the elements that make up the composition).
