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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 *
