Shakespeare

To understand Nabokov in his published lectures on Proust, delivered to students he taught at Cornell University from 1948 to 1958, I had to  better understand metaphor which provided a detour from my readings of The Search for Lost Time that took me through some of Shakespeare's figures of speech and 19th century studies of them.  I would venture that more has been written about Shakespeare than any other English author; but current thinking on metaphor, and even on Shakespeare, lacks, as judged by what Amazon.com offers in print.  Many important views of Elizabethan rhetoric are in books whose copyrights have long expired and now reside in the public domain.

History is forgotten as there is not much profit in it; you find yourself, before a monitor, in the archives of Project Gutenberg, which specializes in the past, spending nothing but time.

Note: If I can find Macbeth, read rather than dramatised, on Audible.com I will buy it, and Hamlet too.  Let me experience the emotion from Shakespeare's words first-hand and not have it performed or translated for me by actors of different understandings.

Oh, and by the way, I still have sheep; they finance my literary avocations for which I am grateful.

As an instance of the simile and the metaphor together, take the following from King Lear, iv. 3, where the Gentleman describes to Kent the behaviour of Cordelia on hearing of her father's condition:

                                     You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like: a better way,—those happy smilets
That play'd on her ripe lip seem'd not to know
What guests were in her eyes which parted thence
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd.

William Shakespeare

From Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters, Volume I. Henry Norman Hudson, New York: Ginn and Co., 1872

Similes: 1.) Sunshine and rain like smiles and tears 2.) parted thence As pearls from diamonds dropp'd

Metaphors: 1.) —those happy smilets That play'd on her ripe lip 2.) What guests were in her eyes