A Study Of Shakespeare’s Fools’ Rhetorical Figures And Their Translations From The Perspective Of Cognitive Metaphor

As a giant playwright in Renaissance, Shakespeare has made great contributions to the dramatic treasure for human literature. However, due to their low social status and eccentric images, the Fools can hardly become the focus of the linguistic and literary studies, compared with other major types of Shakespeare’s images and figures. In fact, there is no doubt that the language and rhetoric of Shakespeare’s Fools is rich in content, bold wording, and innovative and impressive wisdom, constantly drawing the attention of scholars in recent years. In this paper, in order to fill up the previous research deficiency, the language and rhetorical figures of four representatives of Fool—Touchstone from As You Like It, Feste from Twelfth Night, Lavatch from All’s Well That Ends Well, and Fool from King Lear in Shakespeare’s plays are chosen to be analyzed and studied. First of all, rhetorical figures are collected, classified and analyzed so as to find out the dramatic function and common characteristics of Fools. Besides, it will be proved that they have played very important role in Shakespeare’s plays due to their high value of appreciation and research. This thesis applies the theory of cognitive metaphor into exploring the rhetoric features and their cognitive mechanism, as well as the formational similarity and difference of different rhetorical figures from the perspective of metaphorical cognition. And it also tries to verify whether the rhetorical figures are the reflection of the mental characteristics and cognitive space of characters in the plays. Meanwhile, aiming at dealing with the difficulties the translators will meet in translating the rhetorical figures of Fools, the thesis attempts to put forward some proper and flexible translation strategies by applying the theory of cognitive metaphor translation into the analysis of the major Chinese versions. Metaphor study has experienced the transformation from the traditional rhetoric view to the cognitive view. A growing number of studies show that in addition to metaphor, many rhetorical figures such as simile, metonymy, and personification are essentially metaphorical and they are various forms of conceptual metaphors from the perspective of metaphorical cognition. As a basic way for people to understand the knowledge of the world, they reflect that people regard and understand things based on the experience of life. Thus this paper argues that the theory provides a powerful analytical tool for the construction of metaphorical rhetoric and of the mental process of their translations. Besides, applying it to the studies of Shakespeare’s masterpieces can provide a new angle of view for the further research on Shakespeare.Through applying the theory of cognitive metaphor into analyzing a series of metaphorical rhetorical figures of Fools, including simile, metaphor, metonymy and personification, this paper tries to deeply study their psychological process and cognitive motivation as they create different rhetoric by using rich imagery, and to prove the views that rhetoric can reflect the cognitive space of figures in the play, as well as helping readers to cognitively understand the figures; in comparing some current Chinese versions, including Bian Zhilin, Fang Ping, Liang Shiqiu, Ruan Shen and Zhu Shenghao’s translations, the paper applies the theory of cognitive metaphorical translation into analyzing the translations of Fools’ rhetorical figures, and summarizes three different translation strategies, i.e., the translation strategies of complete corresponding, partial corresponding and total reconstruction. Hopefully this research on Shakespeare’s Fools’ rhetoric and their translations from the perspective of cognitive linguistics would make contributions to a new perspective for rhetorical translation studies of Shakespearean works.