ABSTRACT
By the time that pupils have to read Shakespeare in any depth or detail they are expected to know what similes and metaphors are. The former are almost invariably easy to spot, but the latter may provide some difficulties, especially if they are, as often in Shakespeare, not decorative, not easily detachable from their contexts, but intrinsic to thought and feeling, constitutive rather than illustrative of what is said. Sometimes the metaphors are touched on so lightly they may be hardly noticed, at others they are developed at length, in language of great complexity which makes grasp of the metaphor difficult.
