셰익스피어 66번 소네트에 대한 비평적 무관심과 그 함의

초록

This essay attempts to investigate why Sonnet 66 has rarely invited critical attention from Shakespearean scholars for a long time. This strange phenomenon is closely bound with the peculiar nature of the sonnet, as its proposed political agenda destabilizes the assumptions shared among Shakespearean critics: for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets address private romance between individuals defined by their gender distinctions, and the psychosocial conflict between same-sex and heterosexual relationships is the backdrop of the entire sonnet sequence, and so forth. This disturbing nature of Sonnet 66, however, is not so much destructive as constructive. Bringing to the foreground communal virtues, such as equality and justice against social evils, Shakespeare turns Sonnet 66 into the ideological centerpiece upon which his other sonnets can build. This remarkable poetic distinction makes the expected effort to challenge contemporaneous social corruptions an integral part of the romantic fervor glorified in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

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