When We Talk of Horses: Or, what do we see when we see a play?

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Notes

¹In ‘love is a battlefield’ the metaphor comes second, whereas in ‘David Tennant is Hamlet’, as I'm construing it, the metaphor comes first. This would make ‘David Tennant is Hamlet’ an unusual though not impossible verbal construction, akin to Brecht's Galileo declaring ‘unhappy the land that needs a hero’ (1972: 85), where ‘unhappy’ is a metaphorical description of the land. Max Black in Models and Metaphors (1962) suggested that in metaphor there is an ‘interaction’ between the two compared elements, such that light is shed by each on the other. (We might observe that David Tennant's performance invites us both to think differently of Hamlet and of David Tennant.) This interaction would allow for the curiously reversed construction.

²An influential contemporary reading of metaphor would dispute that there is such a thing as a special metaphorical ‘is’. John Searle (1979) and Donald Davidson (1985) have both argued forcibly that metaphors work by saying things that are literally untrue (‘Juliet is the sun’) which force the listener to look elsewhere for the meaning of words, either in a judgment of the particular speakermeaning (Searle) or in one's own productive attention to the two meanings juxtaposed (Davidson). If they are right, the route by which I have come to this conclusion is false, though the conclusion itself need not be. After all, it may be that ‘David Tennant is Hamlet’ is metaphorical for the reasons they, and not I, give. It may, however, not be metaphorical at all.

³I'm grateful to Milija Gluhovic (University of Warwick) for giving me this interesting example.

⁴This article has been previewed at a number of different conferences and research seminars, so I must thank Janelle Reinelt, Simon Shepherd, Jen Harvie, Steve Bottoms and Leigh Wilson for inviting me to speak on this subject. Adam Mills has been an invaluable source of information and advice and a pugnacious sounding board (to mix my metaphors). Joe Kelleher, Chris Dymkowski, Colette Conroy, and Juliet Rufford have all been very generous in offering their thoughts on previous versions of the paper. Greg Currie was kind enough to answer some questions by email for which I'm very grateful.