“O madness of discourse, / That cause sets up with and against itself!”: The classical notion of discordia concors in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Much has been written about Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles. The spread of the humanism and the development of a print culture in the final decades of the fifteen-century England made people widely read Homer’s text in translations as seen from the case of George Chapman’s Achilles Shield. Our understanding of the description of Achilles’ shield is largely confined to its interpretation as the primary exemplum of ekphrasis, and our attention to Achilles’s shield, in this regard, is drawn to how classical texts provided the English renaissance poets with a rhetorical model to imitate.
In this paper, however, I explore the extent to which Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Chapman’s Achilles Shield talked to each other in order to advance the notions of discordia concors (unity in diversity) and multum in parvo (greatness in little) both as a cultural phenomenon and as an experimental form of dramatic genre. Looking at Troilus’s speech “O madness of discourse, / That causes sets up with and against itself!” (5.2.140-141) in Act 5 that best captures the paradoxical situation, I argue that Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, like Chapman’s Achilles Shield that represents the whole (good and bad) of human life, can be seen conceived as a manifestation of the notion of discordia concors not only as a thematic framing of love, but also as a generic reconciliation between comedy and tragedy.
The striving for realization of discordia concors in Shakespeare’s imaginative space is so important, but it has much difficulties in its own meaning-making. Nevertheless, the notion of discordia concors deserves our special attention to understanding of Shakespeare’s philosophy of life and his generic development.

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