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2. Translating Investments: The Metaphoricity of Language, Hamlet, and 2 Henry IV In this chapter, my argument, which is 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  Henry IV and Hamlet as telling instances of the linguistic character of early modern metaphor, whose conditions of meaning differ in significant ways from our own. What follows in this chapter is an effort to make history, theory, and textual practice converse and mutually inform one another. Its purpose is also 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 historical backdrop for this effort: de Grazia 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 influential today.1 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 but significant instances in which these are overruled. Thus my point is not to jettison historical context but to contribute to its definition in a way that renders it pertinent to the claims of modern theory, as well as the more commonly assumed reverse. My story of the past is not Malone’s, but it is grounded in the historical conditions of Renaissance meaning.  In the early modern period, metaphor was also called translatio, or ‘‘translation ,’’ a term with a broad range of meanings that exceed synonymy yet resist designation as unmotivated polysemy. These meanings exemplify the 8 The Metaphoricity of Language, Hamlet, and 2 Henry IV 9 figurality and cultural embeddedness of language. Translation refers to the carrying of something (anything) from one place to another; as the trope translatio it indicates a transfer of words and a likely transformation of meaning . Despite attention to the concepts translatio studii and translatio imperii— diachronic translations of cultural wisdom and power—and attention to the ideology of translation from one language to another, the parameters within which early modern metaphor, or translatio as trope, is usually discussed have excluded other meanings of the term, which are rich and varied.2 In English, they include the transfer of an official from one ecclesiastical jurisdiction to another, the transmigration of a soul to heaven, the transformation or refashioning of apparel, the transfer (or alienation) of money or property from one person to another, and the movement of a tradesman from one company to another (e.g., baker to draper). Any expression of one thing in terms of another, whether relatively neutral explication or more intrusive interpretation, might also be termed ‘‘translation.’’3 What is constant in all these significations is some degree of modification or change. Historically, linguistic and tropic translations are—to borrow a term from George Lakoff —‘‘radial’’ instances of such changes, that is, motivated and conceptual, rather than haphazard, and potentially metaphorical in extension.4 This constant , change, suggests more than the mere substitution of meaning that so knowledgeable and influential a theorist as Paul Ricoeur has found characteristic of rhetorical definitions of metaphor such as those of the early modern period.5 The force of the term translation is inseparable from the variously lived contexts to which its historical meanings testify. These provide a living resonance for the trope, a kind of associative or paradigmatic nuancing that the meanings of translation or metaphor would not now suggest to speakers of English: in the early modern period translation is an implicitly metaphorical, multivocal pun just waiting to happen. Whether then or now, moreover, the very word translation—the phonically close English translation of a phonically less obvious Latin translation of Greek metaphora—is not merely a linguistic ‘‘carry-over’’ but also a spatial metaphor to begin with, one of movement and, more exactly, of displacement, since it derives from trans and fero (latum), ‘‘across,’’ ‘‘beyond,’’ and ‘‘carry,’’ ‘‘bear.’’6 Indeed, in our own time, it is pleasant to suppose that I. A. Richards’ seminal...

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