Shakespeare wrote much of the text of his plays in iambic pentameter, a poetic form well-suited to speaking aloud. One of drama's most recognized speeches, words spoken by Macbeth in Act V of the play "Macbeth," contains the words "Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." Within these 4 and 1/2 lines of text, Shakespeare creates three different metaphors for "life" -- that of a "walking shadow," "a poor player. . .upon the stage" and "a tale told by an idiot."
Nearly every dramatic script provides a description of the setting as imagined by the playwright. Samuel Beckett often describe sparse, cryptic and metaphorical landscapes that are inhabited by his plays' characters. "Waiting for Godot," perhaps his most famous dramatic work, describes a simple setting for the play's performance -- a lone tree on an otherwise bare stage. The characters are waiting here, with no beginning or ending of this suspension in sight. The simple, spare, unchanging setting of "Waiting for Godot" serves as a metaphor for the monotony and confinement of man's everyday existence, alluding to the entrapment modern man feels within his life's circumstances.
In Tennessee Williams' play "The Glass Menagerie," a group of glass figures owned by one of the play's central characters serve as an important metaphor in the drama. The play's title reiterates the importance of the small glass animals owned by Laura, the fragile, delicate and easily "broken" sister of the play's narrator. When an especially beloved unicorn glass figure falls and breaks in the play, the action is a metaphor for the broken spirit experienced by Laura when her hopes that she has attracted a gentleman caller are dashed. Through the use of the easily broken glass figure as a metaphor, Williams is able to share the break experienced by Laura through a subtle, indirect means.
Though the play depicts events in 17th century New England during the famous Puritan witch trials, the title of the play "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller metaphorically refers to a container used in scientific experiments to melt a substance by way of extreme heat. In experiments that use crucibles, one substance is sometimes combined with another and the two are melded together into one. As Miller stated in a June 2007 article for the online version of "The Guardian/The Observer," " 'The Crucible' straddled two different worlds to make them one," referring to the correlation the play draws between the witch trials of the 17th century and the McCarthy "witch hunts" of the 1950s. The title itself is a metaphor for the play's combining of two distinct historical events which Miller saw as melded into one.