『태풍』에 나타난 정치와 연극

Abstract

In the political theater dealing with various treasons against a monarch, the monarchial power has theatrical aspects and so does the theater having political aspects. This superimposed delineation derives from the monarch’s perception about the court and kingship during the Renaissance. James I, as Elizabeth I did, built an image of “player king” in the political realm and made use of the theater to reinforce and stabilize his absolute power. King James used the theater as a way to display his absolute power and at the same time used it as a medium to promote the ideology of his monarchy. In accordance, he made the most use of, one of the most popular forms of drama during the Jacobean era, the masque. In the Tempest, Shakespeare who had never written a masque used the concept of “player king” more ingeniously by making the character Prospero take the role of a monarch, magician, and playwright/director. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the theatrical aspects of monarchial power and the political aspects of the theater are revealed in the Tempest. A marked example of both the theatrical aspects and political aspects is Prospero’s masque in the Tempest. It does not represent a real masque but a dramatic representation of one in the theater. In doing so it is seen as the combination of art and power, showing that the theater functions as a political weapon for the usurpers of the dukedom, and that the politics celebrates the royal power and glory in a theatrical way. When the theater and the politics in the masque carry on to a point where both of them are inseparable from each other, the absolute power represented becomes fictional construction on the stage in the sense that theater is necessarily illusive. Shakespeare shows the praise of Prospero’s absolute power on the surface, but also reveals the limitation to that power in the background, both of which are also shown by King James, in which Prospero is the symbolic representation of. Such an attitude of Shakespeare does not simply reflects upon the absolute power and monarchy, but helps to shape the politics of the future England that is under transformation from that absolute monarchy.