John Fordの劇に於ける「死」
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概要
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In the later Elizabethan period, the notion of tragedy gradually changed, and a mere story which ended in death was considered a tragedy. However, the more deaths were portrayed in tragedies, the more novel devices of presenting them were sought in order to give fresh impressions to the audience. The deaths in Tourneur and Webster often became scenes of horror and those of Ford, like a show on the stage. Such presentation of deaths was caused not only by the desire for novelty of style, but also by inner motivation. For Tourneur to whom life was the important concern, death was the horrible enemy of man. Although death sometimes was a sort of relief to the characters of Webster who were disillusioned in life, they were frightened even by the word 'death', for they were not confident of the world after death. However, Ford's characters always "marched grandly cn" to death. They no longer had the fear which Webster's or Tourneur's had. They regarded death even with a scientific attitude. For instance, there is something scientific about Orgilus' death scene, which may be regarded as a ritual as Ellis-Fermor points out. For Ford, quite contrary to Tourneur, it was death that mattered and tested whether the life had been good or bad as a passage in A Line of Life shows. Therefore, brave and triumphant death was important, and this might be a part of the reason why death scenes in Ford led the way to show-like scenes. In this point, we no longer find tragic emotion in Ford's deaths. At first, death might have been indispensable for tragedies to create tragic emotion, but while the tragedy-ending-in-death style was pursued, the style reached its utmost limit where death is not always necessary to tragedy while tragic emotion is created by something other than death. If we feel something tragic in Ford's plays, it is caused by such conflict between man's desire and its defeat, and here is the possibility of a new style of tragedy.