The Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Shakespeare’s Narrative Poem: The Rape Of Lucrece

Metaphor has long been a hot research topic at home and abroad. Traditionally,metaphor has been viewed as a pure linguistic phenomenon and rhetoric deviceindependent of human cognition. With the influence of conceptual metaphor theoryfrom cognitive perspective emerging from the1980s, people’s understanding ofmetaphor rises to a record-high level. Contemporarily, metaphor is viewed as a matterof human action and thought and a way of cognition, which is pervasive in our dailylives and languages, is embodied in nature and plays a fundamental role in organizinghuman being’s conceptual system.Shakespeare is a leading authority of the world literature, who wrote37plays,154sonnets, two long narrative poems and many lyrics in his lifetime. The literary value andesthetic value of his plays and sonnets is always the focus of scholars from home andabroad. In his works, he favors to use metaphors. The studies of metaphors inShakespeare’s plays have been booming since the emergence of cognitive linguisticsfrom the1980s. While for metaphor studies in his poetry, there are some studies on hissonnets and the studies on his two narrative poems are comparatively less, let alone thestudies of metaphors in his narrative poems from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics.Based on the theory of the conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff&Johnson,this thesis is expected to explore metaphors with the two protagonists as the targetdomains in one of Shakespeare’s two narrative poems—The Rape of Lucrece. In thisstudy79metaphorical expressions with the female protagonist as the target domain and69metaphorical expressions with the male protagonist as the target domain arerespectively collected and classified according to the source domains they belong to.Then the basic conceptual metaphors are respectively abstracted on the basis of theirsource domains. Then the study puts the conceptual metaphors which are used to depictthe same trait of the character into the same category. The conceptual metaphors aboutthe female protagonist are used to portray her mainly in the four aspects: her appearance,moral character, disposition and position, and the conceptual metaphors about the maleprotagonist are used to portray him mainly in the three aspects: his disposition, moralcharacter and position. Through the categorization of the conceptual metaphors, thestudy shows how these metaphors are used to portray different traits of the two protagonists to provide the readers a better understanding of the protagonists and thewhole poem and how these metaphors reflect Shakespeare’s views and attitudes towardsthe two protagonists and thus demonstrate his humanistic ideology.The study has found that the narrative poem is full of creative and systematicmetaphors and that the choice of metaphors can help portray the characters morecomprehensively to provide the readers a better understanding of the characters and thewhole poem, from which we can see Shakespeare is a master of metaphors. Also thechoice of metaphors can demonstrates Shakespeare’s affection and sympathy forLucrece but disgust to Tarquin, which further shows Shakespeare’s humanistideology—opposing feudal autocracy and pursuing freedom, equality, and morality. Italso finds that almost all the source domains of the metaphors about the protagonists inthe poem are familiar ones closely related to our concrete experience of the physicalworld helping readers understand the two unfamiliar figures without difficulty, whichfurther demonstrates that metaphors are not arbitrary and are grounded in our bodilyexperience and daily knowledge. The study also reflects that the metaphors areinfluenced by the Greek culture and Christianity, which provides evidence for culturalvalues of conceptual metaphors reflecting some peculiar characteristics of certaincultures. All these findings provide the readers a better understanding and interpretationof this narrative poem and also contribute to a better understanding of the important roleof metaphor in the narrative poem to reinforce some views claimed by the conceptualmetaphor theory. Hopefully these findings are useful to the students of literature,English teachers and researchers of literature and metaphors.