ABSTRACT
The imagery in Macbeth appears to me to be more rich and varied, more highly imaginative, more unapproachable by any other writer, than that of any other single play. The ideas in the imagery are in themselves more imaginative, more subtle and complex than in other plays, and there are a greater number of them, interwoven the one with the other, recurring and repeating. There are at least four of these main ideas, and many subsidiary ones. One is the picture of Macbeth himself. Comic actors know this well-Charlie Chaplin, for instance-and it is by means of this homely picture that Shakespeare shows us his imaginative view of the hero, and expresses the fact that the honours for which the murders were committed are, after all, of very little worth to him. Other subsidiary motives in the imagery, which work in and out through the play, insensibly but deeply affect the reader's imagination.
