SOURCE: Freeman, Donald C. “‘The rack dislimns’: Schema and Metaphorical Pattern in Antony and Cleopatra.” Poetics Today 20, no. 3 (fall 1999): 443-60.

In the following essay, Freeman uses the theory of cognitive metaphor to evaluate the figurative language found in Antony and Cleopatra.

Any approach to metaphor hoping to enhance centuries of scholarship on Shakespeare's dramatic language faces an onerous burden of proof, the more so when the play under discussion is Antony and Cleopatra. The play's lushness of figurative language has attracted hosts of both New Critics and traditional philologists. Many have commented on the play's vast compass—one made possible in large part by the cosmic imagery that Shakespeare so frequently employs.

The great German Shakespearean Wolfgang Clemen (1962 [1951]: 160), for example, remarked more than sixty years ago that Antony and Cleopatra summons “to our minds again and again the image of the wide ocean and of the immeasurably vast...