Poetics of Ambiguity: Reading Shakespeare's Chronotope

모호함의 시학 -셰익스피어의 크로노토프 읽기

This essay questions and attempts to answer why and how Shakespeare set his plays in time and space other than his own England. Bakhtin's concept of chronotope as integrated time-space offers a model of establishing "a historical poetics." Shakespeare's chronotope has been either negated as mere names for transcendental ideas by universalists, or reduced to a "cover" for contemporary England by historicists. Refuting such either/or approach, this essay claims chronotopic dynamics of both/and as Shakespeare's intentional poetics of ambiguity. While Shakespeare clearly wants to build fictional chronotope distant from reality and does so through verbal repetition, character names, alternation of locales and speaking directly to the audience, he also brings in reality through the figure of clowns and the theatrical space of platea. Anachronism and topological errors ensuing from chronotopic collision register desire to produce multiple meanings. Shaped by historical forces such as Renaissance poetics, education, censorship and new geography, chronotopic form itself is a witness of historicity as much as the coded ideological messages New Historicists industriously delve out. Shakespeare's chronotopic dynamism offers the space for dialogue and appropriation to modern readers, a practice no less worthwhile than history lesson.