Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780230251878)

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.

Author: M. Fahey
ISBN-10: 0230251870
ISBN-13: 9780230251878
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 08/31/2011
Pages: 192
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.60w x 0.80d