불일치의 일치: 『한여름 밤의 꿈』(A Midsummer Night’s Dream)에나타난 낙관적 비전

Abstract

Despite modernist and post-modernist critics’ emphasis on the darker sides of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is absurd to deny the comic spirit of the play. Admittedly, the play should not be treated as a fairy tale as was often the case on the Victorian stage, against which the modernist and post-modernist receptions were quite a wholesome antidote. There are, of course, tragic potentials in the play, but, fortunately, they are not actualized thanks to the providential interventions in favor of human beings. Keeping a balanced eye on the play, this paper locates the concord of discord in the dialogues between Theseus and Hippolyta in Act 4 Scene 1 as the theme and aesthetic principle of the play with particular attention to the analogical relations between different plots seen from an optimistic perspective. Shakespeare lived in a time when religious matters were very much important: it was the Reformation era in which the relations between God and man were radically restructured. Protestant theology, for instance, described man as totally depraved so that he was unable to restore himself by any means, but paradoxically righteous enough to be saved by the unconditional grace of God. The optimistic vision represented in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not irrelevant to the atmosphere of grace preached by the early Reformist theologians such as Luther and Calvin, which was predominant during the first half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career. A Midsummer Nights’ Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most typical comedies in which the optimistic vision of the early Protestantism is well represented.