Metaphor and Shakespearean drama
Subtitle: unchaste signification
By: Maria Franziska Fahey
Series: Early modern literature in history; Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780230251878
Subjects: Style; Metaphor in literature; Textual Criticism; English language
Description: Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama explores the fruitful and potentially€disorderly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama. Borrowing its title from Henry Peacham's 1593 warning that 'there be no uncleane or unchast[e] signification contained in the Metaphore, ' it explores the worry expressed in Elizabethan rhetoric books that a metaphor might beget illegitimate meanings. Shakespeare's plays demonstrate that a metaphor can indeed generate€unruly meanings which, once uttered, have the power to transform a community. Analyses of Othello, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, King Henry IV Part 1, Hamlet, and The Tempest demonstrate various aspects of metaphoric performance. These€include metaphor's power to import discourses into speech communities; metaphor's sacrificial nature; the relationship between metaphor and equivocation; metaphor's carnivalesque qualities; dead metaphor's ability to haunt living speech; and metaphor's€ability to circulate unacknowledged collective fantasies.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: "Unchaste signification": Classical, Elizabethan, and contemporary theories of metaphor; title: Proving Desdemona haggard: Metaphor and marriage in Othello; title: "Martyred signs": Sacrifice and metaphor in Titus Andronicus; title: Imperfect speech: Equivocation and metaphor in Macbeth; title: "Base comparisons": Figuring royalty in King Henry IV part 1; title: "Ears of flesh and blood": Dead metaphors and ghostly figures in Hamlet; title: "Strange fish": Transport and translation in The tempest.