TRANSLATING INVESTMENTS : THE METAPHORICITY OF LANGUAGE, 2 HENRY IV, AND HAMLET

Abstract

My argument, historical in orientation, suggests a way of conceiving language that informs the metaphoricity of Renaissance writings and bears on our reading of them. In doing so, it also addresses contemporary debates about the metaphoricity of language and their application to the early modern period. Ultimately it treats Shakespeare's use of the word investment in 2 Henry IV and Hamlet as a telling instance of the linguistic character of early modern metaphor, whose conditions of meaning differ in significant ways from our own. What follows is an effort to make history, theory, and textual practice converse and mutually inform one another. Its purpose is to identify historical and theoretical contexts that explain and validate the existence of analyzable spaces between the vexed poles of fixed meaning and total unfixity in the Renaissance. Margreta de Grazia's Shakespeare Verbatim provides a backdrop for this effort: de Grazia skillfully traces the fixing of Shakespearean meaning to the search for historical certainty that motivated Edmond Malone, the eighteenth-century Shakespearean who instituted a methodology of editing still dominant today. Insofar as my argument would free Renaissance meaning from narrow, anachronistic lexicalization, it supports and extends de Grazia's, yet it would also balance this freedom with a responsiveness to systemic and local contexts, even in the extreme instances in which these are overruled. My point is not to jettison historical context but to contribute to its redefinition in a way that renders it pertinent to the claims of modern theory, rather than the other way around. My story of the past is not Malone's, but it is grounded in the historical conditions of Renaissance meaning.

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