higher education. Chaucer reception Spurgeon's 1911 Paris doctoral dissertation, Chaucer devant la critique en Angleterre et en France depuis son temps jusqu' nos jours, which she published in three volumes in English in 1929, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, secured her a lasting place in the history of scholarship on the Middle English author. The study made available to her colleagues the rich tapestry of the reception of the father of English poetry. Shakespeare's imagery In 1935, Spurgeon wrote the pioneer study on the use of images in William Shakespeare's work, called Shakespeare's Imagery, and what it tells us. It has been reprinted several times. In it she analyses the different types of images and motifs that he uses in his plays. She also shows that there is a "cluster", or there are several "clusters", of images in each of the major plays, for instance, illness and injury images in Hamlet, and light and darkness images in Romeo and Juliet. Some examples may here suffice: sea images: e.g. "Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, the sighs ... will overset thy tempest-tossed body" (Romeo and Juliet) clothing images: e.g. "Why do you dress me in borrowed robes" (Macbeth) colour images: "this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red." (Macbeth) gardening images: "Hang here like a fruit, my soul, till the tree die." (Cymbeline) The study of imagery can, apart from helping to understand the meaning of the play, give some insight into the poet's mind, because it shows what ideas come to his mind when in need of poetic expression, thus giving some clues as to his background, his upbringing, his social position, and so on. It can also often help to distinguish his style from that of other authors, and thus is an instrument in debunking the theory that Francis Bacon may be the author of Shakespeare's plays, since a statistical comparison between the fields of imagery in both authors shows revealing differences. Fredson Bowers complained that Spurgeon, in her study of Shakespeare's imagery, did not take into account "that some of the images she uses as evidence for her thesis are editorial emendations and not necessarily Shakespeare's words—and that she did not attempt to assess the purity of the evidence she was collecting by using an edition that would show her what was editorial and what not." References