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O-sook KweonShakespeare lived in the era of a great transition that the feudal society shifted into the modern one. The social shift was accompanied by the change in ways of thinking. The medieval dogmatism was replaced by the modern pluralism. Shakespeare represented this new trend in his plays, mixing genres and modes. He integrated seriousness and laughter in his tragedies and the two realms reflects each other. Comic scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies are carnivals to the official, doctrinal and monolithic voice of tragedy."Clown" and "fool" frequently featuring in Shakespeare's comic scenes have a lot of dramatic functions. Their voices are the heteroglossias that translate the actions of the locus to the audience through their own views. Sometimes they laugh at the ludicrous seriousness of the main plot and the folly or the hypocrisy of main characters. Their carnivalesque laughter overthrows all kinds of hierarchies including in class, gender and occupation. They also dissolves separations of audience and performer, going and coming between the dramatic illusion and the real world. In spite of such important functions, comic scenes have been neglected or criticized for diminishing the greatness of the works by many critics. Some critics even guessed some comic scenes had not been written by Shakespeare himself but inserted later by performers. But comic scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies should never be underestimated those ways for they reveal his modern view of the pluralism of thought and culture.
