되돌아 옴[反]의 순환: 폭풍에 나타난 도가적 질서관

초록

The plot of The Tempest, as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, moves from organized and civilized society to a condition much closer to raw nature. Such movement presents a characteristic pattern in Shakespeare’s plays, both comedies and tragedies. Moreover, at the end of this journey there is always some kind of return to the city, to the court, and to old relationships, and this cycle of return implies the pattern of the recovery of order. In the Romances, which provide a vision created artistically after a long experience in writing comedy and tragedy, the cycle of return conveys more than the geographical movement to the normal world after the achievement of the comic resolution in what Frye called the “green world.” The cyclic movement of return in the Romances is presented as the principle not only of one’s outer world, but also of his inner world. Shakespeare, like Taoists, sees the human as a microcosmic expression of the macrocosm and comprehends the cyclic order of nature as the principle dominating the two worlds simultaneously. This paper is designed to illuminate Shakespeare's comprehensive vision of life conceived in The Tempest, which is a poetic intuition of the Tao, i.e., the cyclic order of return in man’s inner and outer worlds. This is not to make a conscious Taoist of Shakespeare; it is, on the other hand, to show that Shakespeare applied a principle of life and thought that is fully formalized in the viewpoints of the philosophy of Tao.

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