『햄릿』의 카니발 미학

Abstract

In Hamlet Shakespeare put the Elizabethan ideology of the body politic under interrogation at the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Scrutinized by the Elizabethan discourses of order, Hamlet's Denmark is not a healthy and functional body but a polluted and rotten one. Denmark's diseased body politic is manifested by three symptoms: the appearance of the Ghost, the anticipated invasion by the Norwegians led by Fortinbras, and the neglect of the proper mourning ritual for the death of King Hamlet by the newly throned Claudius and his followers. The symptoms mark Denmark's important referential registers — i.e. the natural-supernatural order, the foreign relations, and the domestic political and social structure. They concur in locating the pollutant in King Claudius's court. It is because those who are responsible for the health and safety of the Danish body politic are concerned only about their own access to power and the expansion of their political influences, thus causing themselves severed from the rest of Denmark. Interestingly enough, the Danish ruling bloc speak the same language and ideas of kingship and the body politic in general as what the Tudor ideologues advocated. Yet they are blind to the crucial fact that the disruptions of the Danish body politic are provoked by their own wrong doings, including Claudius's double crime and negligence of mourning. Conversely, the underprivileged marginal figures, such as the grave diggers or the unprincely Hamlet acting like a clown, can see the fault-line in the hegemonic practices of the rulers and provide counter-discursive practices that may redress the disarrayed state of Denmark. Especially Hamlet's performance of an antic role, which he assumes in a mourning ritual for his murdered father, touches on the principles of the Bakhtinian grotesque body. It is the clownish Hamlet, not the crown prince, who awakens senses of ethical responsiveness in the Elizabethan audience as well as the unfeeling subjects of Elsinore, thus hinting at the reform in the ideological closure of monarchy on the stage and beyond.