Having just watched a highly entertaining football match (or, as it's better known to my fellow North Americans, soccer, a derivation of "association football"), the fact that the sport's first mention in print occured in King Lear came to mind. It comes as a result of the first meeting of Kent and Oswald in 1.4., when Oswald the steward, having been instructed by Goneril to behave in an insolent manner toward the king in the hope of instigating a confrontation, answers Lear's rhetorical, "... who am I, sir?" with a reply that is all the more insulting because it's the truth: "My Lady's father". This leads to a moment of incredulity from Lear followed by some name-calling and some blows which are met with another haughty reply ("I'll not be struck, my lord"). At which point, Kent (disguised as Caius, the rough-and-tumble servant) knocks him to the ground and says, "Nor tripped neither, you base football player". As first mentions go, it's a bit of an inauspicious one, I suppose, but there you have it: England's national game and the world's most popular team sport first appear in print as part of an insult.

When we speak of Shakespeare as "using poetry" or "writing in verse", I think we may be missing the point. Shakespeare's brilliance is largely due to the fact that he was always thinking poetically, not simply employing it as a device, and over the next few posts, I'm going to try to prove this contention. Today, I'd like to consider Shakespeare's use of metaphor.

When something new is brought to the mind's attention, one of the processes that it employs in its apprehension is to compare it to something that it already knows. The flip side to this also happens, where something familiar can be understood differently, and often more deeply, by comparison with something new. Therefore, writing (which is, in one sense, simply recorded thinking) based on the metaphorical concept will lead to places that "realistic" writing won't. Here is an example from the opening scene of King Lear. This occurs as Lear is in the act of disowning Cordelia because he did not get the answer from her that he was expecting, either in form or content, to his question about the quantity of her love. The Earl of Kent, a nobleman of great personal loyalty to Lear, attempts to intercede and prevent disaster:

KENT

Royal Lear,

Whom I have ever honour'd as my king,

Lov'd as my father, as my master follow'd,

As my great patron thought on in my prayers-

LEAR

The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft.

KENT

Let it fall rather, though the fork invade

The region of my heart! Be Kent unmannerly

When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man?

Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak

When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour's bound

When majesty falls to folly. Reverse thy doom;

And in thy best consideration check

This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment,

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least,

Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound

Reverbs no hollowness.

The last lines contain a metaphor of astonishing power: Kent points out that the heart of a person who does a lot of talking about love or loyalty can be like a barrel that produces more sound when it is less full. So here's the question: Would this remarkable observation have come into being if Shakespeare was not thinking poetically? My own feeling is that the poetry is more often the cause rather than the effect of moments like this one.