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In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, all the time is the present, since the world the play depicts is in the process of fragmentation. In the world of discontinuous time, all the action is iterative, and no historical memory is allowed to the people. What is done in the present is only meaningful. Time in this play is self-consuming like an adder with its tail in its mouth. This devouring time, with its spots of moments, allows no history to a person and hence no stable identity to speak of. A kind of stylistic "hara-kiri" is the proper way to express this world of discontinuity, dissonance, and relativity. Since all the characters are imprisoned in the present and have no historical wisdom to esteem themselves by, self-knowledge, if any, is only possible in partiality at best. Valuation is subjective and relative in this dramatic world where no common measure is allowed to exist, and where everybody sees things in his own perspective, with no feeling of human kindness. Shakespeare gives an expression to this common tradition of Renaissance scepticism in the dialogue between Ulysses and Archilles on the difficulty and partiality of self-knowledge in terms of mirror-reflection and visibility. Here value is but what is opined and imposed by the concerning situation. Value is like an airy fame that fritters away in the next moment. The debate in the play on value whether it is inherent in the object, or only subjectively possible is itself made insignificant when we see through the ironic fact that all the debaters are biased by self-interest and eye-blinded by the "green-eyed monster." In experimenting with this world of transitoriness and fragmentation, Shakespeare is in a dilemma. While he is proud of himself rewriting the Troy legend in his own present interest and viewpoint, appropriating all the achievements of his literary predecessors, he is at once anxious about of being overrun and trodden down, in his turn, by the following upstarts. This anxiety makes him sceptical about literary representation. If representation stands up for the presentation of something absent in the present, the ever-present presence is only visibly meaningful because the present eyes see only the present objects. These problematics of discontinuous time, relative value, and self-negating representation make this play one of the most experimental both dramatically and metaphysically in the whole Shakespearean canon.

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Works Cited
 ABSTRACT

키워드

저자

• 박우수 [ Park, WooSoo | 한국외국어대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810