Oldal 70 [70]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
into a scenario, an interpretive framework, of financial accounting.”””° Thus
the word bond refers to a financial obligation that fits into Lear’s “financial
accounting scenario,”?”! since he sees his children as assets on a balance sheet
and their love as interest. Within this theoretical framework, abstraction as
an element of figurative language is deeply rooted in everyday experience,
and metaphors thus appear as “embodied human understanding.”*”? Freeman
argues that calling this scene of King Lear a “love trial” is not appropriate as,
unlike the mock trial scene, it does not depend on legal vocabulary, but rather
exploits the semantic field of financial accounting.””* As a response to the
balance schema that Lear initiates, Cordelia intends to set what Freeman calls
the links schema, in which bond is understood as the physical link between
father and daughters, or in other words, as family ties. Thus the word “bond,”
according to Freeman, becomes a generative metaphor for the idea that family
relations are not the object of measures but rather human connections or
“links.”? In Freeman’s reading, it is obvious that Cordelia uses the word
“bond” to fit her father’s literal understanding of the word, yet she herself
grasps the metaphorical meaning referring to the filial link, which results in
her intentionally tying the balance and the links schemata. Therefore, her use
of the polysemous “bond” “epitomizes the competition between the financial
accounting and links metaphors crucial to the play’s conceptual structure.”*”
Coherent, consistent, and scientific as his interpretation may be, I believe there
are certain points that Freeman failed to notice due to his strong focus on the
mercantile aspect of the scene.
First, the major change Shakespeare introduced compared to his sources is the
transposition of the private, household dialogue of the royal family into a public
and ceremonial context, which contradicts Freeman’s contention concerning
Cordelia’s emphasis on family relations. Shifting the interpretive framework of
the word bond from the private to the public seems especially plausible when one
also considers that the utterance in which her “bond” appears (“Vnhappie that
Iam, I cannot heaue my heart into my / mouth, I loue your Maiestie according
to my bond, nor more nor lesse”?”*) is remarkably formal and thus denotes the
style of public rather than private speech as discussed above.
Second, if one understands “bond” narrowly as a financial reference, as
Freeman suggests one should, in Puttenham’s terminology, this trope would fit
the category of “Catachresis or the figure of abuse,” a derivative of metaphor:
270 Donald C. Freeman: “According to my bond:” King Lear and Re-cognition, Language and
Literature 2 (1993), 1.
271 Thid., 8.
272 Thid., 5.
273 Tbid., 5.
274 Thid., 8.
275 Tbid., 12.
276 Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. B2r.
+ 68 *