“Shaking off so good a wife and so sweet a lady”: Shakespeare’s use of taste words

Abstract

AbstractThe sense of taste has been considered an “inferior” sense for a long time, both in philosophical and scientific fields of investigation (Cavalieri 2011.Gusto: l‘intelligenza del palato. Bari: GLF editori Laterza). However, the recent growing interest in Cognitive Science has driven scholars to a reconsideration of the role of taste in human cognition. This paper intends to investigate such a role in a corpus of five Shakespearean plays. To do so, I conducted an analysis by looking at the occurrences of seven taste terms. The research aims at exploring the metaphorical occurrences of the lexicon of taste, i.e. concordances in which a taste word does not describe food or an actual taste sensation. I propose an idealised cognitive model to organise such occurrences that involves a central mapping from which others derive, in keeping with Kövecses (2010.Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Results are consistent in showing the role of taste in the motivation of metaphorical expression in Shakespeare’s plays.