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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Plum Trees:
In Act 1, Scene 1, after an interaction with Ferdinand and the Cardinal, Bosola uses a simile to describe his impression of the brothers. He has recently been released from prison and finds that being in proximity to the brothers is intense because of how wealthy they are. The audience eventually comes to understand how drawn Bosola is to wealth and power because of his lower-class upbringing, he craves the stability that they could provide. Nonetheless, in this scene he criticizes their tawdry display of abundance. After the Cardinal exits, Bosola meets Delio and Antonio. At Delio’s prompting, he says:
He and his brother are like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and o’erladen, stagnant with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them.
These lines come at the beginning of a longer speech in which Bosola criticizes the brothers further and vows not to engage with their riches because of his current sense of desperation. His simile allows him to preface his judgements with descriptive language that characterizes the brothers as keepers of wealth and corruption. The excess of their wealth causes men, like pests, to swarm to their company. The crows, magpies and caterpillars in Bosola’s simile are therefore those seeking wealth and an improvement in their material circumstances through proximity to the brothers. Though Bosola swears that he’d like to avoid the brothers, he is ultimately caught in the glamor of their influence, and becomes like those very men he criticizes in this speech.
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