As You Like It, 에 나타난 Fool 플롯연구

Abstract

To the Renaissance audience, the prevailing attitude on love and nature in pastoral was an ambivalent one. It would have presumably required an uncommon courage and foresight to perceive this problematic relationship. Moreover it would have been more than a creative job for a playwright to develop a new technique of dramatizing it. Shakespeare seems to have fulfilled this requirement. By developing Vice into Fool, Shakespeare established the Fool convention more firmly than any other contemporary writer did. The significance of the Fool convention is to be fully understood in terms of the Fool's role to place every characters in his/her own background. The fact is that contemporary minor writers presented a puppet shepherd and shepherdess estranged from his/her natural background or idealized on a pure intellectual level. While Shakespeare took a concise measurement of every psychological distances of the characters in experiencing nature and succeeded in constructing vivid characters. Touchstone and Jaques, unseen in Lodge's Rosalynde, play typical fools. Especially Touchstone shoots his bolts behind a stalking-horse hiding his character, which is traced back to the character of Vice as an ambidexter. He transforms himself so brilliantly, depending on the opposite speaker, that one is simply fascinated. But his transformation in AYL contributes to revealing the Weltanschauung of other characters so critically that each is individualized and organically merged into his own background. In conclusion, the Fool convention made it possible for Shakespeare to achieve three goals: the synthesization of various views of the Elizabethan age, the divulgence of the problematicity of pastoral view on nature and love, and the characterization in depth.