Shakespeare the Shaman (Mudang)

Shakespeare inherits the legacy of religious drama in enacting on stage the ritual of purifying the demonic possession, physical disorders and diseases, and socio-cultural pollutions. In his commercial theatre Shakespeare as a shaman (mansin or mudang in Korean) impersonates himself into his therapeutic characters such as Edgar, Helena, Paulina, Cerimon, and Prospero. If a shaman is the mediator between the dead and the quick, the past and the present, the heaven and the earth, the sacred and the secular, Shakespeare's drama is a medialogy linking the transcendental and the mundane, good and evil, and the feminine and the masculine. In a shamanistic ritual of purgation and expelling of pollution (miasma), the shaman enables the spiritually possessed to recall and re-live the repressed past in his/her imaginary and imaginative impersonations. By means of this ritual of imaginary impersonation the person at issue can be transported out of his/her possessively bound self and world. The ecstasy of shamanistic ritual is a drama of imaginary enlargement of the soul both for the disordered person and the audience seeking for some entertainment.