Abstract: After discussing the image in Plato, Aristotle, W. J. T. Mitchell and others, the article examines Shakespeare’s use of images in his text or word pictures, a feature that has long been observed as part of his power as an artist. Henry Norman Hudson, G. Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon, Wolfgang Clemen and others did important early work in this field. Rather than trace this way of looking at Shakespeare past 1977, the article analyzes Shakespeare’s use of the word “image,” sometimes in connection with images of art, reflection and the theatre. Image and text are something Plato and Aristotle thought about deeply and Horace considered an important part of poetry—the relation of picture to word, painting to poetry. Poetry, for Philip Sidney, moves people through its images to virtue. Shakespeare, in his narrative poetry, sonnets, comedies, histories and tragedies, uses the word “image” in such ways in his text that it calls attention to a larger imagery in the poetry or on the stage. These images then are particulars of a wider nexus, a double image at least, in which the verbal and the visual reinforce each other. What the article is doing that is different from earlier studies of Shakespeare’s images, as best exemplified by Spurgeon and Clemen, is to look at the use of “image” itself as a verbal sign related to the visual. In the poems and plays, Shakespeare associates the word “image” with love, lust, painting, art, mimesis, appearance and reality, death, reflection and much else.

Key words: image, text, Shakespeare, words, poetry