“The Pox like a Pilgrim on his road.” A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Visual Metaphors Used to Represent Medical Knowledge in Early Modern English Literary and Non-Literary Texts

This paper presents preliminary findings from a national research initiative examining the relationship between theatre – specifically Shakespeare’s The Tempest – and the healthcare context. The analysis presented in this paper arises from one research unit’s exploration of the distinctions and overlaps between medical discourse depicted in theatrical contexts and that found in non-literary texts of the period. It focuses on the specific use of metaphors in communicating medical knowledge in early modern England, particularly in the articulation of various diseases and anatomical concepts in early modern English drama, including Shakespeare’s works, as well as in contemporary non-literary sources. The research is supported by three specialised corpora: the Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) corpus; a complete corpus of Shakespeare’s plays; and the English Drama Corpus, available through Sketch Engine. Utilising Kovecses' Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (ECMT) and his framework of visual metaphors, along with corpus-based critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004; Deignan, 2005; Steen et al., 2010), this paper aims to elucidate how metaphors influenced the understanding and perception of medical knowledge among early modern English audiences.