the shadow of a shade
According to the OED, "the shadow of a shade" was a well-used idea and phrase by Gilbert's day. This usage is listed among the definitions for "shadow":
II. 5. b. "fig. An unsubstantial image of something real; an unreal appearance; something that has only a fleeting existence, or that has become reduced almost to nothing; = SHADOW sb 6. Now only poet. or rhetorical. Also, with strengthened hyperbole, the shadow of a shade."
Similar phrases are found in
- Walter Scott's 1815 Guy Mannering; Or, The Astrologer: "I am a member of the suffering and Episcopal Church of Scotland -- the shadow of a shade now, and fortunately so" (xxxvii).
- Shakespeare's 1602 Hamlet: "The very substance of the Ambitious is meerely the Shadow of a Dreame" (II, ii, 265).
- Kingsley's 1855 Westward Ho: "That eternal world, whereof all here is but a shadow and a dream" (I, xix).
A shadow of a shade, then, is the shadow of something insubstantial like a ghost. Victorians read Plato and knew the allegory of the cave, in which Plato compares the reality we experience with our senses to shadows cast on a wall by a flickering fire. He says, that is, that what we think of as reality is a shadow cast by unsteady light; "reality" is what the shadow is of, not the shadow itself.
Gilbert's expression here, as with the others cited above, suggests that the shadows we think are real are shadows not of reality but of something as insubstantial as the shadows themselves. They're even less reliable, the phrase suggests, than usual.
In particular, the schoolgirls are wondering if the glory of the treasures of the world is less substantial even than shadows, maybe the shadows of something ghostly and already dead.
Gilbert isn't so much referring to Plato here, or to Platonic ideas, as he is to the popular conceptions of Plato typical of his day. His isn't a scholarly reference to Plato but a popular one.
This discussion is based on the Oxford English Dictionary, which requires a little explanation.
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Last update: 13 April 1998.