Shakespeare's use of figurative language also facilitates the portrayal of large-scale emotion, the type that might be hard to render otherwise. Here is an excerpt from Henry IV, Part One that illustrates the point. The following takes place at the end of 1.2, during which we have met Prince Hal and his friends, Falstaff and Poins, for the first time. After an indescribable exchange which features the dueling wits of Hal and Falstaff, the latter leaves and Poins stays behind to try to get Hal to join in an elaborate practical joke to be played on Falstaff. Hal agrees and Poins, satisfied, leaves as well, at which point Hal speaks the following soliloquy - which shows him to be politically motivated in his dealings with his "friends". The nature of the character of the future Henry V is a divisive matter among Shakespeare commentators, but what I'm interested in here is the powerful imagery and emotion that the language conveys. The passage contains three extended metaphors: the first is the comparison of royalty to the sun (not a new one, but handled freshly here); the second involves the nature of human wishes in regard to play and work; and the third, the difference between a shiny substance and the ground. As a whole, the passage's poetic content allows the audience to enter into the emotional world of a young man considering a glorious future:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humour of your idleness:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

If all the year were playing holidays,

To sport would be as tedious as to work;

But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,

And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

So, when this loose behavior I throw off

And pay the debt I never promised,

By how much better than my word I am,

By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;

And like bright metal on a sullen ground,

My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,

Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes

Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;

Redeeming time when men think least I will.