| Research Abstract |
This study aims to examine the significance of the multiple plot structure widely seen in English Renaissance Drama in terms of audience involvement in the theater. The most significant function of the sub-plots of English Renaissance Drama is to associate dramatic action with everyday life of the audience and the function plays an important role in English Renaissance Drama which was primarily intended for theatrical performance.
In this study the author argues the following two points: (1) In The Changeling, a collaboration of William Rowley and Thomas Middleton, the idea of sublunary world which was understood as full of changes and changelings in Western philosophical tradition, plays the unifying role between the two plots which seem to present discrepant actions in the light of causal relations between the two plots. (2) The concept of equivocation which plays an important role in the thematic formation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth is rooted deeply in the political context of Jacobean age, especially in the political crisis exemplified in The Gunpowder Plot. Shakespeare makes use of the concept effectively for his manipulation of how audience perceives Macbeth's tragedy, alluding to the contemporary political issue when he gives giving a dramatic form to the original story of Macbeth which is supposed to happen in eleventh century Scotland. Therefore the Porter scene of Macbeth serves the similar function, however small in its magnitude, as other multiple plots of English Renaissance Drama.
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