A history of the creative imagination from Plato to Shakespear

This study presents an overview of the history of the imagination, from the Classical period to the middle of the seventeenth century, and focuses on the ways in which poets and philosophers come to terms with the emerging idea of imagination as creativity. The dissertation is divided into two parts: the first examines the historical and philosophical background of the imagination, beginning with Plato and ending with Hobbes; the second explores the expression of the creative imagination in the works of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare.;One consistent element in the long history of imagination is the distrust with which it is viewed by philosophers. Because imagination is linked to appearance and therefore liable to errors in perception, it must be controlled by reason. Yet simultaneously, there exists the belief that another intangible--not reason--produces poetry. From the tentative probings of Plato to the writings of the Church Fathers, a theory of the creative imagination begins to emerge. In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon applies his scientific methods of inquiry to the study, while Thomas Hobbes turns to the Classics for the basis of his theory. However different their approaches, both men move imagination closer to its modern definition.;Of the poets in this study, only Sidney writes specifically about the imagination, identifying "the idea of fore-conceit" as the source of creativity. Writing prose as a Christian moralist and poetry as a Romantic forerunner, Sidney allows the wholly imaginative to have free rein in his sonnets because it serves a moral purpose.;For Spenser, imagination is an ordering agent. In response to the cosmic decay he witnesses, he confronts the vagaries of fortune and mutability. By controlling change and chance with rituals that anchor human behavior--processions, dances, and masques--he creates order in Fairy Land.;The dissertation ends with Shakespeare and with a discussion of the role of ghosts and witches in Macbeth and Hamlet. By referring to contemporary moral philosophy, the study demonstrates the ways Shakespeare uses common knowledge concerning the imagination and the supernatural to create the complicated characters of his greatest plays.