말볼리오와 “곰 놀리기 시합”

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In Twelfth Night Malvolio is the most vividly described character. For many critics he is a "mal-willed man" as his name hints, haughty and ambitious, "stubborn and uncourteous"(5.1.360), sick of merrymakers, the power repressing the life force, and deserving of the punishment. But strangely his punishment doesn't make the spectators genuinely delighted. It gives uneasiness to the spectators who doubt whether Malvolio's defeat is just.
The main conflict does not arise from the romantic lovers, but from Malvolio and Toby and his company. Toby calls Malvolio "the bear"(2.5.9). This is not only a metaphor. Shakespeare intently made equivalent the gulling of Malvolio to a bear-baiting, a bloody sport which was popular in the early modem England. Malvolio is deceived, gulled, humiliated, denounced as a madman, and confined to a dark house. "The notoriously wronged" man brings up the image of the chained bear in a bear-baiting beset by the hounds, attacked, wounded, disabled, and mastered. And It seems that the playwright has the hope that the spectators pity the victim in his suffering and recognize themselves on the stage who are also the spectators of the bloody sport.
In this paper I firstly intend to find out what is a bear-baiting in Shakespeare's England, what is the playwright's view of the bloody sport in Twelfth Night, and how Malvolio and Toby and his company are related to the sport. Secondly I want to show that the gulling of Malvolio suggests a bear-baiting and that Toby and his company are just the dogs and spectators of the sport. Thirdly I'd like to hint that the desire for this bloody inhumane sport is the result of the weariness and idleness from too long continued festival, the product of the surfeited and stagnated society.