『사랑의 헛수고』의 대론 구조

The debate between spring and winter in Shakespeare’s early ‘lyrical’ comedy, Love’s Labour Lost, is a unifying theme and structure; it is not attached for the musicians at the time of rehearsal of the play, written on a separate paper. The dialogue or debate of spring and winter reflects the traditional medieval literary form representing two irreconcilable opposing values or attitudes of life, as shown in such works as The Owl and the Nightingale(c.1250) and The Debate and Stryfe Between Somer and Wynter(c.1530). The Shakespearean debate, which was originally planned as the end of the pageant play, “the Nine Worthies”, is replaced as an epilogue to the main play. Through this technical replacement in the play of the dialogue between spring and winter, Shakespeare critiques the artificiality of the traditional debate form as a kind of aristocratic and intellectual game or war of wits. As a language game, the debate form seems to Shakespeare’s eyes unnatural in separating the intermingled yarns of life; rather his vision of life is comprehensive and dialectical. The vigorous and energetic sexuality of the spring time is also found in the ice-cold winter when the owl hoots to the greasy Joan to make it. As in the cuckoo’s song of love is overheard the undertone of infidelity and betrayal, the two opposite seasons of spring and winter are mutable in the cyclic space of life. By his critical and ironical appropriation of the inherited debate form, Shakespeare is satirical of the humorous young aristocrats in their speech and behavior. If the anti-comic ending of the play is in itself the Shakespearean experiment on the comic genre of courtship and marriage, the debate form in the play works as his ‘living art.’ However, this re-appropriation of the literary form in Shakespeare does not mean the final triumph of Apollonian song over the Mercurian eloquence and letters. The songs are written. The Shakespearean authority in the theatre as a playwright lies somewhere between the borderland of speech as a breath and textual letters. The theatrical representation is both a voice and a letter at once. The debate between spring and winter in Shakespeare’s early ‘lyrical’ comedy, Love’s Labour Lost, is a unifying theme and structure; it is not attached for the musicians at the time of rehearsal of the play, written on a separate paper. The dialogue or debate of spring and winter reflects the traditional medieval literary form representing two irreconcilable opposing v