셰익스피어의 경제인:<오셀로>에 나타난 교환의 세계와 젠더화된 주체성

Abstract

Theater played an important role in the historical transformation of early modern England. With the establishment of theatrical edifice in the commercial city of London, theatrical performance and playgoing became part of everyday life for Elizabethan and Jacobean English men and women. The playgoers came of diverse social strata, ranging from apprentices and noblemen's pages to citizen entrepreneurs, gentry, and nobility. Regardless of their class distinction, they could buy tickets to theater and have their seats which were differently arranged according to the money they paid. A merchant's wife could find herself seated next to an aristocratic lady. Here money acted as a sort of social equalizer, enabling class mobility to the people of lesser degree. This picture of early modern theater hints at the real historical change that took place in England at the time. That change is now known as the rise of capitalism, which is marked by the increasingly wider circulation of money in all realms of social activities. Money introduced new channels for the circulation of social energy, creating new chances of mobility; it even infiltrated into the exclusive social relations of status hierarchy like patronage, turning it into a relation of commercial exchange, and bringing forth a new type of personality, namely "artificial person." Another important social engine to safeguard the hegemonic social order, marriage also came under a serious threat by the new social ethos arising from economic practices. Traditionally marriage was a form of social alliance defined by lineage and kinship and served the dynastic interests of the family by way of the dowry system. The father had the prerogative to authorize his children's marriage. However, the concepts of the individual and authority came to be redefined with the emergence of mobile property. The children came to claim their right to choose their spouse. Othello illustrates how theatrical practices and social relations join in a new mode of economic exchange. Iago is an exemplary figure of artificial person who makes up his self-identity through theatrical performances, while Othello shows the ways in which a possessive individual fashions himself in a foreign country. The tragic paradigm manifested in the cuckold plot shows the continuum of male domination even in the emerging commercialized social relations. As in the case of Desdemona's progress from the jewel of her father and the pearl of her husband to the whore of Venice, women are still the objects of possession by, and of exchange among, men.