The Birthday Party와 King Lear의 상호텍스트성 = The Intertextual Reading of The Birthday Party and King Lear

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study aims at the intertextual reading of The Birthday Party and King Lear. Harold Pinter, our contemporary playwright, is generally regarded as one of the absurd dramatists or postmodern literary artists. Actually his plays deal with essentially absurd human conditions on the basis of existential thought of our time. Shakespeare, the literary genius of the sixteenth century, is the great and distant ancestor of Harold Pinter. Shakespeare's characters, however, are so vivid even in this time that we think of them as detachable from the play, like real people. It means that there are fundamental theme and situation about our mankind presented by the maestro, that are not so changed according to the age.
In this study, intertextuality of those two plays by the two playwrights is read in terms of their languages, dramatic situation of menace, and the motif of disabilities such as madness, aphasia, and blindness. In The Birthday Party, the human condition of menace is delivered through the shift of strength revealed in the dialogue of the characters. The language of Goldberg and McCann is full of verbal strategies to make Stanley give in, and we see Stanley become unable to see and articulate as the play goes on. Stanley's aphasia and blindness is in fact the representation of his state of absolute subservience. Shakespearean language in King Lear also contributes to survey the unbalance of power among characters in the course of development of dramatic situation. Interpreting Shakespeare's dialogue, the audience appreciate the rise of victor and the fall of victim, the result of which is blindness and death, although the surface meaning of the language may not be as logical and grammatical as we expect language to be, as in the case of Pinter.