ABSTRACT
Discussion of Shakespeare’s concept of the imagination usually takes its cue from Theseus’s familiar speech in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream about ‘antique fables’ and ‘fairy toys’, the subject matter of Spenser’s recently published Faerie Queene. By the exercise of enargeia, according to Quintilian, a rhetor can describe something so graphically that the audience responds as though it were actually appearing before their eyes. In another play, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare once more calls upon enargeiac speech to bestow identity upon a fallen creature. Enargeiac speech exceeds the vividness of accurate description and ventures into the compelling realm of emblematics. In the several plays Shakespeare manifests his respect for the enargeiac power of language. Repeatedly, Shakespeare points to the importance of the imagination in human affairs, and several times he demonstrates the enargeiac power of language to activate it.
