Lakotl George said that metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish#8212;a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.(4) Bruce Wilshire said that we must turn now to the question of metaphor. Aristotle defined metaphor as the application of a thing's name to something else which resembles that thing in certain ways. This definition has drawbacks: it presupposes that all metaphors are, that in every case the name refers in a literal sense to something else, and that the literal sense is a clear and obvious matter. For us, however, characters enacted on stage are not verbal but physiognomic metaphors; we see and feel them to be like ourselves. And it is not true that there is always an adequate literal way to refer to the persons or things in the off-stage world which are referred to metaphorically by the characters on stage. The whole point of art is to put us in touch with things that are too far from us or too close to us for us to see them in our ordinary off-stage life .We said that Hamlet is not an art object at all, but is ourselves speaking to ourselves about our essential possibilities. For both Hamlet and ourselves do not exist for us in our isolation, but in our relationships to others.(235) In Hamlet the play metaphor attaches itself to the Prince's feigned madness. It is an "antic disposition." But the metaphor takes other important forms in the play: the masks and pretenses put on by the main characters in Claudius's "mock" court, the use of the itinerant players and the play within the play, the imagery of clothing and painting. Indeed, "The Murder of Gonzago" is the climactic theatrical center of the action of Hamlet, and "act" is "the play's radical metaphor." These manifestations of the theater metaphor, however, are subsumed by the larger questions of Hamlet's social, indeed, cosmic, role in Denmark. That is, they are expanded by the widest circumference of the thematic meaning of Hamlet.( Ma Tthew N. Proser, 338) Redori Lewis said that recent scholarship has gone a long way in exploring the technologies to which Hamlet refers in discussing his memory through tabular and bibliographic metaphors, in terms of both the ars memoriae (mnemo-technique, or the so- called ”art of memory”) and the erasable ”table books” popular throughout early modern Europe. The most important of these studies is the 2004 article coauthored by Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe. Their first and most powerful argument comes in the observation (amplified from the account of Francis Goyet) that Hamlet#8217;s shift from the ”table of my memory” to the ”book and volume of my brain” reflects the relationship between writing tablets and commonplace books: the sixteenth century student would have made a record of the things that he had read or audited on the former, but then transferred them to the latter as a site of more permanent and better organized data storage. On this reading, Hamlet wants to do away with the trifles to which his conventional humanist education had exposed him, and to maintain his father#8217;s commandment alone in his memory. Another advantage of this interpretation is that it can explain Hamlet#8217;s intention to ”set it down /That one may smile and smile and be a villain.” Writing tables are mutable and fit for ephemera relating to a hypocrite like Claudius, whereas the ”book” of memory has a permanence consonant with the gravity of the Ghost#8217;s injunction. yet as Stallybrass et al. go on to discuss, this situation is ripe with dramatic irony, for Hamlet#8217;s memory is by no means trustworthy: for instance, once Hamlet has been chastised by the Ghost for failing to remember him in act 3 (”Do not forget!” [3.4.106]), his father simply vanishes into oblivion for the remainder of the play. Thus, as Hamlet progresses, the model of memory as a ”book and volume” is supplanted by the memory as ”table.” The memory becomes a site of erasure, forgetfulness, and decided impermanence.(615) C. G. Thayer said that he is concerned here with Hamlet, and I rather doubt that the device-turned-metaphor with which I am concerned occurs anywhere else in Elizabethan or Jacobean drama in quite the same way, except possibly in The Duchess of Malfi. But it will be useful to show briefly that the idea of theatre-as-world and drama-as-life is not uncommon. Then it will appear that Shakespeare is giving a kind of immortal habitation to something that was almost commonplace to himself and to his colleagues. Later in this essay ”I” will give some familiar evidence from other plays of Shakespeare.(118) Simile may be in one sense cruder than other forms of metaphor, in that it does not seek to conceal its artificiality; but alternatively one might say that it is the original form of metaphor. When camels are spoken of as ”ships of the desert#8217;, the missing word ”like#8217; is, as it were, present but”under erasure#8217;; it has been omitted but the notion of ”likeness#8217; continues. As a different example of metaphor we might think about the word”fascist#8217;. Nowadays that word seems to have a field of precise connotations, largely held in political movements (”movements#8217; is clearly another metaphor!) of the mid-twentieth century; but the word itself derives from another Latin term, the fasces, which were a bundle of rods bound up with an axe in the middle and its blade projecting. These rods were carried by lectors before the superior magistrates at Rome as an emblem of their power.(OED) We could fairly conjecture that when the fascist movement appropriated this image, this was done with an awareness of its metaphorical power; that what was being said, or indicated, was, for example, something about power and authority, and about the threat of violence at the heart of apparent order.( David Punter, 225)