Shakespeare and the Irony of Early Modern Disease Metaphor and Metonymy

During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the term metaphor had only been newly introduced into English, circa 1477, while metonymy was still more recent, having appeared in 1543. ¹ Metaphor and metonymy neatly described the system of analogies which governed early moderns’ classically-based worldview with its interlocking harmonies inherent to the scala naturae, the Aristotelian scale of nature, the Ptolemaic universe, and Galenic humoral theory. According to David George Hale, the “analogy between society and the human body … is used more than any of the correspondences which compose the ‘Elizabethan world picture.’” ² Jonathan Gil Harris concludes that micro-macrocosm analogies become the dominant conceptual and discursive form of the age, a phenomenon that he calls the body-centered episteme. ³ This way of understanding the world established a place, as well as a hierarchy, for everything on the earth and in the heavens. In its natural state, micro- and macrocosmoses obeyed this hierarchy, and harmony and ease reigned supreme; however, when this order disintegrated, discord and disease prevailed. As a result, at this time and in this context, disease was a far more generalized term than it is in twenty-first century English.