Question

Claudio: "Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits." and "Bait the hook well; this fish will bite.

In these lines from the scene to trick Balthazar, Shakespeare is using which figure of speech?
1) Simile
2) Metaphor
3) Personification
4) Hyperbole

Answer 1

Shakespeare uses a metaphor in the provided lines to compare characters to animals indirectly, which enhances the meaning of their actions without using 'like' or 'as'.

Step-by-step explanation:

In the lines from Shakespeare, "Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits." and "Bait the hook well; this fish will bite." a metaphor is being used. A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to one thing by mentioning another thing, implying a comparison between them without using the words "like" or "as". Here, the characters are being compared to a fowl and a fish, drawing an analogy between hunting or fishing and their stratagem of trickery without making an explicit comparison.

The example: "Claudius is a snake." and "Polonius is a rat and a fishmonger." from Shakespeare's Hamlet are metaphors as well. These examples further demonstrate the rhetorical effect of using one object to describe another in literature.