earticle

영어

William Shakespeare had an interest in narrating the visual arts or objects throughout his different genres from narrative poems such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and early plays, The Taming of the Shrew and Timon of Athens to romance plays, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. This paper explores the complex relationship between verbal and visual modes of representation in Shakespeare’s ekphrastic descriptions in Hamlet and primarily focuses on the importance of narrating the visual. Significantly, Hamlet presents Shakespeare’s fascination with vivid narration. Shakespeare often describes absent scenes or offstage events through his characters’ recounting, and he also chooses not visual but verbal representation in describing the important events which are worth emphasizing in Hamlet. In other words, many scenes including the murder of Old Hamlet, Hamlet’s enigmatic encounter with Ophelia, and Ophelia’s drowning are narrated rather than staged. The narrated moments highlight Shakespeare’s ekphrasis and create the visuality of language, a speaking picture. Fascinated by the ability of words to create images, Shakespeare makes us(audience and readers) see invisible things and actual events in his vivid descriptions. In Hamlet, especially, the emphasis upon descriptive vividness is found in the Player’s speech and Hamlet’s second soliloquy. Player’s speech raises several complex questions regarding the relationship between narrative and drama. As a literary dramatist, although Shakespeare seems to prioritize dramatic and visual immediacy above verbal narratives, he suggests that we rather count on narrative about what we can’t see, and even what we can see. Eventually, Shakespeare stubbornly shows his interest in the relationship between visual and verbal modes of representation and blurs the distinction between them throughout Hamlet.