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Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Key Examples in The Winter's Tale
Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—Cuckoldry:
In Act 1, Scene 2, Leontes articulates his paranoia about his wife's fidelity through the extended metaphor of the cuckold's horns. In Shakespeare's day, men with adulterous wives were often depicted in art and literature with ram's horns and were subject to mockery for being deceived by their wives. Throughout this scene, Leontes's language describes the metaphorical growth of cuckold's horns on his head as his belief in his wife's infidelity cements itself.
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Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—Facial Proof:
Multiple characters in The Winter's Tale use metaphors to compare a child's face to a printed copy of the father. These metaphors suggest that a child's face or physical resemblance to their father is proof of their mother's fidelity.
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Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—Imprisonment:
Hermione's conversation with Polixenes in Act 1, Scene 2 features an extended metaphor that jokingly compares staying in someone else's home as a guest to imprisonment. Encouraging Polixenes to stay longer in Sicilia, Hermione says, "Force me to keep you as a prisoner, / Not like a guest, so you shall pay your fees / When you depart and save your thanks." When Polixenes responds that he would rather be her guest than her prisoner, Hermione declares she will not be his "jailer," but rather his "hostess." Despite the playful tone of this exchange, this metaphor not only reveals that the threat of imprisonment or darker political consequences is always close at hand in the Sicilian court, but also foreshadows Hermione's own, actual imprisonment by Leontes later in the play.
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Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—The Body Politic:
The aristocratic characters of "The Winter's Tale" often use an extended metaphor, applying political language to members of the family unit. As monarchs, Leontes and Polixenes must preserve their families in order to ensure that they produce heirs who will rule their respective kingdoms in the future. Therefore, their use of this metaphor highlights the way in which their social position makes domestic and political matters inextricable from each other.
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Act 2, Scene 1
Explanation and Analysis—Diseased Opinions:
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare uses an extended metaphor to compare male mistrust of their wives to a disease. In Act 1, Scene 2, Camillo calls Leontes's growing distrust of his wife a "diseased opinion" and warns that it is "most dangerous." Later, he extends this metaphor when he tells Polixenes, "There is a sickness / Which puts some of us in distemper, but I cannot name the disease, and it is caught / Of you that yet are well." Camillo's language suggests that the disease of Leontes's mistrust is a contagious one originating in Polixenes, even though the latter is "yet...well" because he is not mistrustful himself.
In Act 2, Scene 1, Leontes's metaphor of a spider in his drink similarly identifies his distrust of his wife to the effects of consuming venom:
Unlock with LitCharts A+There may be in the cup
A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected; but if one present
Th’ abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.
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Act 4, Scene 4
Explanation and Analysis—Flowers:
In Act 4, Scene 4, Perdita eschews "streaked gillyvors" because they are "nature's bastards"; that is, they are not naturally occurring and require human intervention to create. Perdita suggests that the production of these flowers entails "an art which in their piedness shares / With great creating nature." In other words, manipulating nature to create unnatural life forms such as the streaked gillyvor is like the sin of playing God. However, Polixenes responds that such artifice is not unnatural:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean.
So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
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Explanation and Analysis—Proserpina and Dis:
In Act 4, Scene 4, Perdita alludes to figures from classical mythology while selecting flowers for the Shepherdesses: "O Proserpina, / For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall / From Dis’s wagon!" Perdita's allusion to the myth of Proserpina, who was abducted by the god of the underworld, Dis, and returned to the earth after six months, foreshadows her own return from Bohemia to her home in Sicilia.
Perdita also goes on to allude to Phoebus, the Roman name for Apollo, who is the source of the play's central prophecy:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] pale primroses,
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids
