By means of the confession manual – a catalogue of sins, developed in the 15th century, that is oriented towards the Ten Commandments and prepares for confession – for the first time an autobiographic ‘personality’ emerged which, at that time, was imagined as a composition of single virtues and sins.
Nevertheless, this certainly cannot be compared to today’s definition of ‘individuality’ – namely “a single person […] as distinct from a group; a person of a particular kind; striking or unusual, original; an independent or unusual person” (Oxford English Dictionary (2012), p.369, individual) – but can, at most, be interpreted as a first attempt of indicating a person’s individual character traits due to good and bad attributes.
Undoubtedly, the contemporary psychology – which traced the diversity of characters back to the physiological conditionality of the inner life, the power of affects as well as the temperaments – provided the impetus for Shakespeare’s realistic, individualizing depiction of the character Macbeth (Unterstenhöfer, p.49, l.15-20).
5. Imagination and Its Significance for Shakespeare
First of all, the ambiguous term ‘imagination’ shall be explained; afterwards, its concrete significance for Shakespeare will be set out. The term covers a wide field and can be interpreted in various ways.
According to the Oxford English dictionary (1989), the term was first attested in the English language in 1340, even with today’s common meaning: “The action of imagining, or forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses […]; the result of this process, a mental image or idea.” (Oxford English Dictionary (1989), p.669, imagination). A splitting of ‘imagination’ into a reproductive and productive variant was also first mentioned in that year. Thus reproductive imagination signifies “that faculty of the mind by which are formed images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses, and of their relations (to each other or to the subject)”. Productive imagination, on the other hand, implies “the power which the mind has of forming concepts beyond those derived from external objects” (Oxford English Dictionary (1989), p.669, imagination).
In philosophic epistemology, imagination – derived from the Latin ‘imaginatio’ (‘imagination’; ‘imaginery’; ‘fancy’; ‘fantasy’ ) – is generally defined as any inner conception without the real presence of an object (Fröhlich, p.150, Einbildung).
Psychologically, imagination is generally defined as the ability to think pictorially. It is a conscious mental process in which visions or images of objects, events, relationships, or procedures arise in the mind that are not present and that the affected person does not have to have experienced or perceived ever before. Therefore it is mostly directed towards the future. This power of imagination outlines the individual manifestation-degree of the ability to develop views or perceptions that exceed memories and realistic ideas – for instance in dreams, visions or hallucinations (Fröhlich, p.151, Einbildungskraft).
In dreams or hallucinations, the imagination takes over the role of the senses. As for Macbeth, this becomes especially evident in the form of Banquo’s ghost (see Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, ll.44-106), whom, out of all people present, only he can see since only his conscience is burdened with two murders at this point and, consequently, now projects these gruesome images before his eyes.
What follows now is a short philosophical-intellectual history outline of the conceptual history, whereby the main focus is directed at the Elizabethan era in England (1558-1603). In this time, a period within the Renaissance, imagination was generally perceived as rather negative, even dangerous – as a possible ‘enemy’ of reason – and possibly fatal. “The conception of imagination suggested by [various] passages in Shakespeare is but the expression in literature of a notion one finds everywhere in psychological treatises.” (Anderson, p.28, l.5-7). Therefore, imagination is “the Source of all our Evils, our Confusions and Disorders, our Passions and Troubles; […]“ (Charron, p.179, l.26-28). Herein the Elizabethan writers agree with Charron, but he even goes one step further by stating that imagination “is a perfect Incendiary in the State, looks out all the Fools, and disaffected in the Soul, and blows them up into Sedition; raises the Mob, that is, the Passions, and sets all in an Uproar and Confusion […] and not submitting the Matter to the Understanding […].” (Charron, p.194, l.1-8).
Despite the fact that Sir Philip Sidney, one of the most important figures of English (Renaissance) literature, connected the negative factor of imagination with both definitions and – conforming to the predominant Elizabethan understanding – talks of sinful fantasy, Plato’s applied hierarchy of the terms1 prevailed in the 18th century.
Thus W. Duff refers to this imagination, which is uncontrolled and gives shine to the worthless, as “fancy”, while J. Beattie describes “fancy” as “trivial” and “imagination” as “solemn”. Other authors, in contrast, identify “fancy” as blurred, arbitrary and passive, while calling “imagination” clear, ordered and active (Ritter, p.217, Imagination).
Sir Francis Bacon, who, in his work The Division of Poesy, divides the human science into three sections that respectively relate to one feature of the human mind, assigns poetry to imagination. Nevertheless, unlike Sidney – to whose Defence of Poesy Bacon’s work refers – he does not grant it a high rank. Under the influence of imagination, poetry produces unnatural combinations of memory contents, hence chimeras and phantoms, and, in order to conform to the human mind’s love for greatness, it falsifies the reports of history (Renner, p.107, The Division of Poesy). Similar to today’s understanding of the term, imagination is first referred to as the counter-pole to “raison” (reason) and “bon sens” (common sense) by René Descartes (see Ritter, p.219, Imagination).
According to Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, the earnings for the most detailed and profound analysis2 of imagination and its correlate, the imaginary, belong to Jean-Paul Sartre.