I was just thinking of Mark Anthony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Mark Anthony talks about Caesar lying in his ‘coffin’. Neither in the play, nor in the records of the actual event, is there any mention of Caesar lying in a coffin, I think.
Anyways, it got me to thinking. Sometimes words have come to be so commonly used, that they lose their original meaning. Take ‘going to the bathroom’. You can catch your dog ‘going to the bathroom’ on your lawn, even though your dog is plainly outside, and nowhere near an actual bathroom.
What is the linguistic term for that phenomenon? I was just wondering. But I am sure that I am not the only one.
In that specific example, I would say it’s an anachronism, just like the sounding mechanical clock in the same play.
Shakespeare is using the common term for his time for dealing with a dead body, without realizing that it’s not necessarily how the Romans conducted a funeral.
Yup, metonymy, in the specific sense described by your link as “A physical item, place, or body part used to refer to a related concept”.
So the physical place of the bathroom is used to refer to the related concept of urination or defecation, and the physical item of the coffin is used to refer to the related concept of death.
But according to the OP, Shakespeare doesn’t even have a physical coffin in the play. So he’s not so much “anachronizing” Roman burial customs as “metonymizing” the word “coffin” to imply death.
Here’s an even sparser stage direction, from Richard III:
How is the corpse entering? There’s gentlemen with halberds guarding it, and Lady Anne in mourning, but no mention of how the corpse is entering. It can’t be the gentlemen, since they’re carrying halberds which are two-handed cumbersome weapons. Read literally, the stage direction says the corpse is coming in on its own power.
But the dialogue makes it clear that there are people carrying the corpse:
The dialogue also indicates that there’s a coffin:
The absence of modern detailed stage directions doesn’t mean there’s no coffin and no coffin-bearers.
I don’t think those are the only two choices. The lack of reference to a bier or cart (or coffin) doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t one, and Antony’s reference to his heart being “in the coffin” doesn’t necessarily mean there was one.
Certainly, the idea of a living person’s heart being in a dead friend’s coffin is metonymic rather than literal, whether or not there’s also an anachronism about the physical presence of a coffin.
Right, the lack of reference to a coffin doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, so I think the OP is incorrect when he says that there was no coffin.
But once we accept that the lack of a stage direction doesn’t mean no coffin, then the text of the speech is a pretty good indication that there is a coffin.
Similarly, later on in the scene, Antony says “here is the will”, but there’s no stage direction for him to pull the will out of his pocket. That lack of a stage direction doesn’t mean there’s no will. When he starts to read, it’s clear that he has a physical piece of paper.
We can rely on the speeches to tell us what’s going on, without the need for modern complex stage directions.
Not anachronistic. Romans used coffins for burial. Cite: as an archaeologist I have dig in a Roman graveyard and recorded the iron stains that were all that were left of the coffin nails and thus the coffin itself.
