Shakespeare's comic discourse as an instrument of multiple communication: A pragmatic approach (Spanish text, William Shakespeare)

On dealing with Shakespeare's comic discourse, Linguistics and Literature specialists have usually focused on stylistic aspects, such as rhetoric figures, verbal puns and other semantic proceedings. In the present dissertation, pragmatics is taken as a starting point of analysis, so that the mere verbal content of the discourse is confronted with the contexts it generates (from the Elizabethan to the current public attending a theatre play), as well as with the communication processes involved (among the characters of the play, between characters and public, and at the fruitful intersection of visual and verbal elements). The result is a thorough approach to Shakespeare's main comedies through the scenes where communication mechanisms are especially highlighted, be it by virtue of semiotic inversion, emission of contradictory messages or any other strategies of "strangeness" by which two different worlds are usually faced in the midst of an unresolved conflict.; The analysis of specific plays and scenes constitutes the final step of an approach which begins by searching for the origins of comedy and comic values, followed by a review of Shakespeare's significance in its historical moment. A relevant aspect is equally presented: the new relation that the Renaissance establishes between a potential spectator and a work of art, be it a painting or a theatre play, and whose consequences can be traced up to the 20th century. In his comic discourse, Shakespeare shows himself utterly aware of this relation and its theatrical possibilities, not as a mere source of laughter but as a profound tool of research on the human desires and attitudes of his characters.; Finally and, as a necessary background of all the above said, the dissertation grounds its reasoning in previous studies where theatrical pragmatics has been applied to Shakespeare's works, as well as to other authors. Thus, it occupies a line of research whose main objective is to retake the (not always harmonious) relationship between Literature and Linguistics, on one side, and other disciplines that have been present during the last decades in Shakespearean studies (Cultural Studies, Historicism, Feminism, etc), on the other side.