'I see the play so lies that I must bear a part': Metatext in Shakespeare and Spenser.

摘要

The dissertation explores the metatextual figures which surround Shakespeare's late plays and Spenser's The Shepheards Calender and The Faerie Queene. Author-figures, narrative voices, and choric characters seem at once to participate in and stand aloof from the events of these texts. Shakespeare and Spenser seem to generate metatextual characters in a thematic way---but also in an obsessive, anxious way. As texts become nervous about the meaning of (and the possibility of) their own closure and authorship, the text begins to spawn marginal author-figures who serve as a safe, defined source of authorial power for the text. That is, being an author is frighteningly powerful; author-figures serve as a safety valve to contain and displace some of that power.;Shakespeare's late plays seem a crucial place to look at that phenomenon. It is not only that Shakespeare was forced to deal with the closure of his career in addition to the closure of his individual plays, but also that the final plays contain issues of closure and loci of authorial meaning themselves. For Shakespeare, metaquestions spawn characters with authorial voices and powers, able to step out of the frame of their plays, such as Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, the Soothsayers in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline, Gower in Pericles, and Prospero in The Tempest.;Unlike Shakespeare, Spenser does not solve his problem by creating new author-figures (like Gower, Autolycus and Prospero) but by fictionalizing himself (as the "Proem" poet in The Faerie Queene, and as Colin Clout in The Shepheards Calender) and inserting himself in his own text. Spenser's anxiety over the meaning of his authorship gives rise to a narrative voice which wavers between being a wholly fictional, characterized voice, and a puppet for Spenser.