Section on the Metaphoric Language of Shakespeare
1. Shakespeare's Language
Before I deal with the various issues pertaining to Shakespeare's metaphoric style, it is important to start with a brief description of the main distinctive features of his language. Given the international acclaim and status of the Bard, I was surprised to read Tolstoy's comment on the "Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language, in which (…) no living man ever has spoken or does speak." (1906: 39) For Tolstoy, not only is the Shakespearean language "inflated", and "empty" (ibid: 40), but also full of "unnatural expressions with which the speeches of all the characters in all Shakespeare's dramas overflow." (ibid) If that was the case indeed, then one might start to wonder why “Shakespeare remains the most celebrated author in world literature” (Nordlund 2007: 4) until the present time? Regardless of the critical pros and cons that accompany Tolstoy's perspective and the critical responses it has triggered ever since it was voiced out, evaluating the language of Shakespeare requires a study of its main characteristics and influence on the English language and culture and on other languages across the world.
For a start, I would like to deal with the feature of universality in Shakespeare’s language because it was considered a main factor behind his international popularity. The Shakespearean language is considered universal in the sense that it deals with topics and concepts that are shared by all human-beings, regardless of the restrictions of time and place. The case for Shakespeare’s universality goes back to the eighteenth century with Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare (1765). When Shakespeare talks about love, anger, jealousy, hatred, kings, or ordinary people, he reflects on his topic from the perspective of man, rather than that of the English man. In Shakespeare’s plays, ‘man’ is not categorized in line with the values and conditions of his/her own cultural environment at the expense of the human dominating nature. Shakespeare’s characters are represented from the inside out in a multi-dimensional, rich simulation that reflects the human complexity; hence their words speak for us and tell our stories in a way we start to identify with them and feel they are speaking for us.
However, the fact that Shakespeare speaks a universal language shared by all members of the human species does not mean that this language is nowhere near English. Shakespeare the universal is also Shakespeare the Englishman. “His Greeks and Romans, his Britons and Italians, all became, in one sense, Elizabethan Englishmen, and, in another, what for lack of a better term we can only call "Universal Man." (Goddard 1951: 4) From a stylistic point of view, Shakespeare's language fits adequately within the cultural context it emerged in; namely, the Elizabethan era, and it is not divorced from the time or place of his contemporary men. There is no doubt that Shakespeare’s universality was inspired by the universal heritage of great sources of literature such as classical mythology (see Root 1903), and the Bible (see Marx 2000); yet, he dressed up his characters as Englishmen, located them on the Elizabethan stage, and let them speak Renaissance English which is by no means in conflict with the nature of their universality. If we go back to the literature of the Elizabethan time, we will notice that it is, by and large, characterized by addressing universal topics like those dealt with in Shakespeare’s plays. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s prolific use of imagery is a top Elizabethan quality shared by all renaissance writers .Therefore; one can very confidently say that Shakespeare is universal in terms of being Elizabethan and Elizabethan in terms of being metaphoric:
“Though Shakespeare is for all time, he is part and parcel of the Elizabethan drama. If his plays are Elizabethan in their defects and limitations, such as their trivial puns and word-play, their overcrowded imagery, (…) they are Elizabethan also in the qualities of their greatness, their variety of subject, their intense interest in the portrayal of character, the flexibility and audacity of their language, their noble and opulent verse, the exquisite idealism of their romantic love, and their profound analysis of the sources of human tragedy.” (Nielson 1927: 34)
The discrepancy lies, however, not in Shakespeare’s language being either universal or Elizabethan, but in his “expressive genius” (Rhodes 2004: 211) which is considered “not as a distinctively English achievement” (ibid). In certain cases and under certain considerations, Shakespearean language is not ranked as English for different reasons. First, it is said to be dominated by a “double voice” that slides “between the different stylistic registers marked by Latin and English” (ibid: 64) “mixing high and low, combining genres” (ibid). In addition, despite being the subject of academic scholarly research, the Shakespearean text is not set as “a model of academic rectitude” (ibid: 210). There are arguments that Shakespeare’s language lacks the stylistic features of academic English because it comes out in a colourful gown rather than a “full academic dress” (ibid: 211). However, despite being described as the “language of the heart” (Rhodes 2004: 226), Shakespeare’s language is commended for its influence on the mind and this could be related to its flexibility in switching between the literal and the metaphoric in a harmonious dualism , as explained in the following paragraph:
“There is a fundamental philosophic problem in admitting 'metaphoric' save in relation to 'literal'; but more than that, Shakespeare has an exceptional sense of the dynamic relations between the two, hence of the impress of language upon the human mind. Everyone is familiar with the idea that a single word may express multiple possibilities. So indeed it may, but at the heart of this is Shakespeare's sense of the ineradicable dualism of language, the reciprocity of metaphor and literal.” (Berry 1978: 5)
Talking about the literal/metaphoric duality takes me to the main subject of this section, namely, Shakespeare’s metaphoricity. Although metaphoric representation is one of the unique qualities in Shakespeare linguistic artistry, the metaphoric component of Shakespeare’s language has received little more than a modest attention from scholars and literary critics alike, with an inconsistent rise and fall in the number, scope, and density of studies that dealt with the subject as extensively as it deserves. Although "the metaphorical quality of Shakespeare’s language in the 17th and 18th centuries was either ignored or even depreciated" (Pietrzykowska 2003: 153), the first, serious attempt to research Shakespeare’s metaphoric language came with Walter Whiter’s 1794 edition of Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare which is considered “notable for its anticipation of much that is regarded as modern in the criticism of Shakespeare’s language and imagery.” (Bell 1967: 83) After Whiter’s study, research on Shakespeare’s imagery remained in a state of slumber until the modern interest in the topic was revived in the first half of the twentieth century with Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and what it Tells us in 1935. Following Spurgeon’s research, there were a number of studies that proved to be less comprehensive in scope, and that marked the time when research on Shakespeare’s metaphoric language became noticeably steady and less exuberant than ever before. In the following review, I will tackle the main works that have dealt with Shakespeare’s figurative language starting with Spurgeon’s research until the present time.
2. Historical Review
I would like to refer to two contributions that review the works on Shakespeare’s metaphoric language throughout the twentieth century: McDonald's Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (2001), and Pietrzykowska’s "The Shakespearian Metaphor" (2003). Both McDonald and Pietrzykowska provided a critical analysis of modern Studies on Shakespeare's metaphoric language acknowledging the contribution of those studies to the subject and describing Spurgeon’s (1935) Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells us as a “breakthrough” (Pietrzykowska 2003: 153) in the study of Shakespeare’s imagery. However, McDonald criticized the early studies for dealing with the thematic function of metaphors leaving out their linguistic, contextual, and cultural properties. For McDonald, “this isolation of a figure risks diminishing the play to a single dominant theme. It also obscures those counter-currents that create semantic and poetic multiplicity, qualities which more recent critics have seen as vital to Shakespeare’s work." (2001: 71) On the other hand, Pietrzykowska was critical of the previous studies on Shakespeare’s metaphoric language for failing to maintain a balance between the two parts of metaphor: the 'vehicle' and the 'tenor' which could eventually lead to isolating “the metaphor from its social and historical function." (2003: 157) In the following account, I will shed light on this criticism trying to present a historical analysis of the most prominent works that dealt with the issue at hand. My aim, in this regard, is to make use of what those studies have achieved while trying to cover what they could have missed, bearing in mind the utility of each study for the framework of my research and the distinctiveness of what is researched.
Spurgeon initiated her work on Shakespeare's imagery with an article entitled "Shakespeare's Iterative Imagery" (1933) in which she introduced her research method that started by familiarizing herself with Shakespeare’s taste for pictorial thinking then collecting and classifying the images succinctly, hoping to provide a future a database for further research on Shakespeare. Spurgeon suggested that there was a link between what she called an “undertone” (ibid: 258) or “undersong of imagery within the limits of a single play” (ibid: 259), and a group of thematic units that gather to reflect a single topic in that same play. In other words, every play is dominated by an atmospheric mood which is the result of a whole set of human emotions such as anger, despair, parental love, pride, greed and hatred in King Lear. Those emotions intensify gradually in the form of images creating a wave of feelings which come together to bring about a controlling ‘tone’. In that sense, the images generate ‘undertones’ because they function as a backdrop that underlies the play's atmosphere and enriches its themes. For Spurgeon, conducting a statistically-supported analytical study of imagery was a main factor in drawing certain conclusions about the authorship of certain Shakespearean texts. Believing that "a poet's imagery reveals his own idiosyncrasies, not only the usages of his period" (Spurgeon 1935: 43), the writer summarized the method adopted in her autobiographical study under the title of "iterative imagery":
"Iterative imagery (…) is a marked characteristic of Shakespeare’s art; indeed, it is, I think, his most individual way of expressing his imaginative vision. It is quite clear that it is his habit of mind to have before him, as he writes, some picture or symbol, which recurs again and again in the form of images throughout a play, and (...) that these leading motives (…) are born of the emotions of the theme, and shed considerable light on the way Shakespeare himself looked at it." (Spurgeon 1933: 255)
Spurgeon presented further explanation of her term "iterative imagery" in Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells us (1935: 213-215). This book is a main contribution to the function of imagery in Shakespeare and an indispensible reference for any research that needs to be informed of the results of the voluminous data gathered and classified in what could be described as the largest database of imagery in Shakespeare’s works. It was the fruit of a long-term project that consumed years of hard work and research that helped the writer collect all the images or pictures she came across in the form of similes and metaphors (Spurgeon 1933: 256) and then she classified them into patterns by the theme they tended to reflect:
"Modern study of imagery and metaphor took a variety of forms, from the discovery of patterns by Caroline Spurgeon and Wolfgang Clemen to the isolation of the image by the descendants of the New Critics, and so compelling was their work that at mid-century the study of figuration occupied the centre of the critical enterprise." (McDonald, 2001: 70)
Spurgeon's classification of imagery in Shakespeare is very useful for the purpose of my research because it is based on a comprehensive approach covering every single image she could have come across, regardless of the arguments about the definition and classification of figurative language. However, although this study contributes a lot to any study that aims to deal with Shakespeare's metaphoric language, it was criticized for dealing with the subject matter of the image, leaving the object or the ‘vehicle’ aside. In that sense, Spurgeon's classification of images was considered limited (ibid: 72) due to extracting metaphors by their source domain only yielding fixed-form patterns of the type ‘THE WORLD IS A STAGE’ without dealing with the interaction between the Source Domain, the "WORLD, and the Target Domain, " STAGE". This results in skipping the extension of some basic metaphors to metaphoric patterns like "PEOPLE ARE ACTORS".
Critics of Spurgeon's patterns assumed that if we were to take the metaphor as a fixed Source Domain pattern rather than a two-sided interactive model, we will miss a great deal in researching the metaphoric material. In our example, the pattern of 'THE WORLD IS A STAGE' does not necessarily lead to the extension 'PEOPLE ARE ACTORS' because the pattern, according to Spurgeon's method, reflects the writer's attitude towards the Source Domain, 'THE WORLD’, regardless of how it interacts with the Target Domain and develops yielding new metaphoric extensions. The Shakespearean way of drawing metaphors targets ‘multiplicity’, as explained before, and this multiplicity cannot be reflected by focusing solely on the source domain of the metaphor. In order to reflect the thematic multiplicity of metaphors, our classification should cover a more comprehensive pattern of the kind (SD↔TD), which is flexible and accurate for a practical methodology in dealing with metaphor: