Shakespeare and elizabethan theatre

In Philip Massinger’s The Maid of Honour, Adorni momentarily considers suicide; but then rejects the idea, commenting:

This life’s a fort committed to my trust,
Which I must not yield up till it be forced:

Adorni did not simply say “It is wrong to kill oneself.” Instead, he used a metaphor, a comparison, connecting his life to a fort which he must save at all cost.

Metaphors do more than make one’s writing more interesting; as the scholar and translator of Homer Richmond Lattimore wrote in his introduction to The Iliad, a metaphor “concentrates attention on what is distinctive about the main action on which it dwells.” By comparing his life to a fort, Adorni dramatizes the moment and focuses our imagination on how important the protection of one’s life must be, and to what extents one must go to preserve it.

Elizabethan authors frequently use multiple words and phrases with double-meanings to intensify their metaphors.

For example, when, in The Duke of Milan (also M