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학위논문 동서

Tom Stoppard의 초기극에 나타난 삶의 연극적 속성

이부용

부산: 동아대학교 1997. -

i,114p: 삽도; 26cm. -

학위논문(박사)- 동아대학교 대학원 영어영문학과 전공 1997년8월

영문초록 : Tom Stoppard's earlier major plays have a purpose in common, to emphasize the perception of the theatrical quality of the life wherein we would find its reality. In the pursuit of this purpose, the writer establishes a new and valuable dramatic pattern which he creates by the imagination of another play's content, and not by simple adoption or imitation. This method, different from the customary one, derived from his opinion that the play does not imitate life but life should imitate theatre. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play basically concerning uncertainty in modern society, Stoppard recreates the offstage situation of Hamlet by means of the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the minor characters of the play, into the leading ones in his play. Though their garrulity looks rather frivolous, the play itself is essentially a search for the meaning of death. In the plays death appears a course of life, an aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion. Accordingly, when we do our best to play a given role in life as a play, we are sure to find a meaning. In this regard Stoppard advises us that the conception of "Theatre Mundi" when transformed into a new one, will be best utilized as a means of escaping the absurdity of our world. In the long run, this work suggests a new possibility for man to confront the universal situation and at the same time give us hope through the so-called 'play-life metaphor' Stoppard insists that parody can produce a creative play. The Real Inspector Hound, among other plays, deeply deals with parody in using a play within a play. In this play, Stoppard satirizes country-house drawing-room detective novels and critics and critical reviws. His principal method in exposing their absurdity and pretensions is parody. He succeeds in bringing one of the most solemn of literary genres down to the level of farce by playing havoc with its techniques and conventions. In the play he undermines the barrier between art and life and attempts to show that life is as absurd as detective melodramas. He believes life is even stranger than fiction and that the only way for art to be truly representative of life is to be as chaotic as the object it is representing. Stoppard expresses his view about art most intensively through the work Travesties. Advancing the play to the level of criticizing art or artists, he extends his view of history as to a fiction of history. Stoppard theatricalizes the historical figures into new focus through the memory of a minor official at the British consulate in Zurich. He regards history as a fiction made by a creative memory and only makes use of it as a means to embody his view of art. By the method of dramatizing history, he attains his aim of finding out the reality of the world of the imagination. In the course of reconstructing history with the technique of fantasy, Stoppard creates a theatrical art and proves that historigraphy is also a kind of art. As mentioned above, Stoppard's three major early plays indirectly anyalize epistemological matters by the method of imagining and criticizing other works, The self-consciousness he utilizes for his analysis is an indispensable means of delivering and at the same time forming a thought. In this repect we can conclude that Stoppard created a unique dramatic method in which both the content and form simultaneously establish the subject of the play. In the meantime, he points out the illusionary knowledge about life, gives a lesson to us that as our life and reality itself are originaly theatrical, we should after all find true reality in theatrical art. Ascertaining that theatrical quality of life is a standard for our behavior and judgement, Stoppard presents us with the possibility of enlarging our life's scope.

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