English in 'The Tempest': The Value of Metaphor and Re-Imagining Grammar in English

Abstract

Garth Boomer's thinking influenced many of us working in school English during the time he was alive. But the ripple effects of his legacy continue to be felt. For me, it is Boomer's interests in metaphor and meaning that resonate most. The use of tropes and figure is a distinctive feature of his writing and offers a rich allegorical resource for current reflections on curriculum. In this paper, I explore the potential of metaphor for thinking in new ways about the relationship of grammar to key issues facing school English. Drawing on key figures in Shakespeare's play "The Tempest", the paper makes use of an old association between the word 'grammar' and the practice of magic. In early 14th-century parlance, the word "gramarye" was adapted from Old French to refer to 'learning, especially philology, but also magic, incantation, spells, mumbo-jumbo.' It had a secondary meaning - occult knowledge - which evolved in Scottish into 'glamour'. If teachers in English can learn to re-imagine grammar as a source of magic in the work of English, they will be in a far better position to take up its available resources. Prior to this, however, we need to recognise its usefulness to literary study (what is often called stylistics), its bounty for playful work on language as system, its rhetorical power in text composition, and its analogical relevance to multimodal communication. These enterprises call for a re-imagining of grammar, or what we call 'grammatics', following Halliday's lead (Macken-Horarik, Love and Unsworth, 2011). "The Tempest" is a rich resource in this regard. It offers compelling images of disciplinary power (and its limits), of desire and relatedness, of design and of development.