Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama

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.