Metaphors In Shakespeare's Sonnets

Shakespeare is a leading authority of English literature as well as the world literature. The literary value and esthetic value of his plays and sonnets is always the focus of scholars from home and abroad. Either in plays or sonnets, Shakespeare favors to use metaphors. The study of metaphors in Shakespeare's plays has been booming since the"metaphoramania"these years. While for metaphors in sonnets, there are only a little amount of works on just one sonnet or on several sonnets. The overall study on all the 154 Shakespeare's sonnets and the conclusion of Shakespeare's preference of metaphor in his sonnets are still the virgin land to explore. Such kind of study can reveal the mystery of metaphor use and let the readers all over the world have a better understanding and interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets.The research question to be addressed in the study is to find out Shakespeare's metaphor use preference in his sonnets. Metaphor theories of famous metaphor researchers like Aristotle, I. A. Richards, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are comprehensively considered to identify metaphors in Shakespeare's sonnets. After all the metaphors were identified in Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, they were classified into several categories according to their different target domains. There are metaphors on"love", metaphors on"human being", metaphors on"life", metaphors on"beauty", metaphors on"time"and metaphors on other target domains which have low frequency in Shakespeare's sonnets. To make the study more explicit, there are several tables appearing in this thesis, summarizing different metaphor expressions of all the metaphors with the same target domain in a table, and each metaphor was deeply analyzed.The findings to answer the research question are as follows: there are in all 611 metaphors in Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, nearly 4 metaphors in one sonnet on average. The metaphors are mainly about"love","human being","life","beauty"and"time"."Plant"is the source domain which is used most frequently in the sequence and"treasure"is the source domain which is the most pervasive. What is more, Shakespeare likes to use"metaphor group", which means two or three metaphors can be found through one metaphor expression. The most distinct"metaphor group"is LIFE IS A FEAST & LOVE IS APPETITE & BEAUTY IS FOOD.