ABSTRACT
George Wilson Knight (b. 1897) was a pioneer in the now familiar method of interpreting Shakespeare's plays by tracing the patterns of repeated metaphors, symbols, and other motifs that are peculiar to each. The systematic tabulation of image-clusters in Shakespeare's plays was first employed and documented by Caroline Spurgeon in her Sheakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935) and G. Wilson Knight has acknowledged the value of this work, and Professor Spurgeon's earlier reports on her research, for his own criticism. Knight, however, had started working on these lines quite independently, and there is no doubt that he made better critical use of the method than did Professor Spurgeon. His first books, The Wheel of Fire (1930) and The Imperial Theme (1931) were brilliant and original essays in interpretation which contributed decisively to the decline of that nineteenthcentury tradition of Shakespeare criticism, culminating impressively in A. C. Bradley's Shakespeare's Tragedies (1904), which discussed Shakespeare's characters as if they were characters in realistic fiction, if not real people_ And the method employed by Knight has been successfully applied by later critics to other kinds of literature, notably the novel.
