Introduction 2: Shakespeare's World

2 - Historical context

2 – 历史背景

William Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616 in England, during the reigns of the Tudor monarch Queen Elizabeth I and the Stuart monarch King James I. To get a sense of what Shakespeare’s historical period was like, we spoke to Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford.

威廉·莎士比亚于1564年出生在英国。直到1616年去世，他经历了都铎王朝伊丽莎白一世女王统治时期，以及后来的斯图亚特王朝詹姆斯一世统治时期。为了探索莎士比亚生活的那个历史时代，我们将对话牛津大学莎士比亚研究所的艾玛·史密斯教授。

Emma Smith: That's a period of extraordinary change in English history. Perhaps one important thing is the ongoing religious controversies in the wake of what's called the Reformation, the Reformation began as a movement to reform the Catholic Church and via some royal divorces and so on. If it in fact became the establishment of the Church of England, the Anglican or Person Church in England, and the break with the religion of much of Europe and ongoing controversies about the assault schism between Protestantism and Catholicism on the one hand, but also different brands of Protestantism.

艾玛·史密斯：那段时期，英国正经历着巨大变革。当时，在宗教改革浪潮下，宗教纷争风起云涌，影响深远。其实，宗教改革最初只是为了改革罗马天主教会，主要以结束皇室婚姻等方式展开。但后来，这场运动为英国国教的建立奠定了基础，英国国教又称“盎格鲁教会”或“新教教会”。同时该运动持续引发新教与天主教之间有关教会分裂的争端，并在新教内部分裂出多个不同教派。

At the start of the sixteenth century, England was a Catholic country, part of the Christian Church that accepted the pope in Rome as its head and spiritual leader. In 1517, a monk named Martin Luther challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. He claimed that its leaders and priests had corrupted the purity of the original Christian faith and were using the Church as a means to gain wealth and power. He also rejected the idea, which he saw the Catholic Church as supporting, that it was possible to “earn” salvation through good works or sacraments. Salvation, Luther emphasized, came only through God’s grace.

16世纪初期，英国还是一个天主教国家，部分基督教会听命于罗马教皇，将教皇视作自己的宗教领袖。1517年，一位名叫马丁·路德的僧侣却挑战了罗马天主教会的权威，他宣称罗马天主教的领导者和神父玷污了基督教原教义的纯洁，只是将教会当作一种敛财谋权的手段。路德还反对罗马天主教会一贯宣扬的那种鼓励人们通过做善事或举行圣礼“获得”救赎的做法，路德反驳说，救赎只能通过上帝的恩典来实现。

Luther set out to merely reform the Catholic Church. But he ultimately helped start a movement that established separate, Protestant Christian Churches across Europe--a process known as the Reformation. The Protestant Church of England came to have fewer sacraments than the Catholic Church, a Bible and a liturgy in English rather than Latin, and a new emphasis on one’s personal spiritual life. Protestant spirituality aimed to help believers recognize their need for God’s grace and draw personally closer to God, coming to know him directly through Scripture rather than through the mediation of priests. And the shift to Protestantism had political as well as spiritual implications. England’s church no longer recognized the authority of any spiritual leader higher than the English monarch. Religion now became a key factor in the alliances England made and the wars it fought with other Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe. 

路德起初只想改革罗马天主教会，但最终却掀起了一场名为“宗教改革”的运动，运动中，独立的新教教会在欧洲陆续建立。而作为新教中的一支，英国国教会和天主教会有很多不同之处，不仅圣礼数变少了，圣经和祷文也都采用英文译本而非拉丁文版本，同时英国国教会还强调个人的宗教生活，这在天主教中是从未有过的。新教精神旨在帮助信徒认识到自己对于上帝恩典的需求，拉近信徒与上帝之间的距离，让他们通过《圣经》直接认识上帝，而不是借助牧师的解读。改信新教对英国的宗教和政治都产生了影响，英国的教会将本国君主视为最高宗教领袖，不再承认其他的宗教权威。自此，宗教成为了影响英国与欧洲其他天主教国家和新教国家结盟或对抗的一个关键因素。

England’s King Henry VIII initially fought against the Reformation. But then he asked the pope to annul, or cancel, his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The pope refused. This conflict over his marriage eventually led King Henry to reject the pope’s spiritual authority and to pressure English clergy into proclaiming him the “supreme head of the Church in England.” When Henry’s son Edward VI took the throne, his advisors continued to strengthen the new Protestant Church. When Edward died in 1553, his half-sister Mary took the throne. She was a devout Catholic, as was her husband, King Philip II of Spain, and so she sought to restore Catholicism in England. Queen Mary brought back the Catholic Mass, asserted the pope’s authority, and violently suppressed Protestantism, burning Protestants as heretics. Only five years later, however, in 1558, Mary’s Protestant half-sister Elizabeth took the throne to become Queen Elizabeth I. As queen, Elizabeth once again established Protestantism as the national religion, so that Catholics now faced fines, imprisonments, and possible death.

英国国王亨利八世一开始是反对宗教改革的。但后来，为了迎娶安妮·博林，他希望教皇能宣告他和西班牙公主阿拉贡的凯瑟琳婚姻无效，或取消他们之间的婚姻。但教皇拒绝了亨利八世的请求，最终，这次由婚姻引发的矛盾，导致亨利八世和教皇决裂，他不再承认教皇的宗教领袖地位，并要求英国的牧师称他为“英国国教会领袖”。亨利八世的儿子爱德华六世继位后，群臣们继续巩固英国国教会的地位。1553年，爱德华去世，他同父异母的姐姐玛丽继位。玛丽和她的丈夫西班牙国王菲利普二世都是虔诚的天主教徒，她希望在英国重树天主教权威，于是恢复了天主教弥撒仪式，承认教皇权威，并残酷镇压新教，甚至将新教徒当做异教徒活活烧死。仅仅在五年后，在1558年，玛丽同父异母的妹妹伊丽莎白继承王位，成为伊丽莎白一世女王。伊丽莎白再次将新教确立为国教，而天主教徒则面临罚款、监禁，甚至死刑。

Religion in Shakespeare’s time was so controversial that it was eventually banned from being mentioned onstage. But Christian language and ideas still permeate Shakespeare’s plays. Protestantism provided a framework for thinking about right and wrong and for examining your own conscience to see on which side you fell. These frameworks influenced the way that Shakespeare explores moral questions in his work. He also frequently alludes to the Bible and Protestant prayer services, suggesting new layers of spiritual meaning to audiences who would have immediately recognized those allusions.

在莎士比亚生活的年代，宗教是一个极具争议性的话题，到后来，宗教问题甚至成了舞台上的禁忌。不过，莎士比亚的戏剧仍充满了基督教的语言和思想。当时，新教教义为人们提供了分辩是非、明确立场的信仰准则。而这些信仰准则，也影响着莎士比亚在作品中对道德问题的探索。他经常在作品中暗暗融入圣经的内容以及新教的祷告礼仪，向那些能够瞬间领会这些暗示的观众传递新的宗教讯息。

Queen Elizabeth I never married. At first, her status as the “virgin queen” was a source of strength. She wouldn’t compromise England’s independence by marrying a foreign prince.

伊丽莎白一世女王终身未婚。在其统治初期，“童贞女王”这个身份是国家实力的来源，女王为了维护英国的独立，拒绝与外国王子通婚。

Emma Smith: but by the end of her reign. What starts to impact more is the fact that there's no obvious heir and the struggle for an heir is the great crisis of the Tudors, because that's why Henry the 8th has all those wives. So it feels like a sort of awful flashback to the dynastic problems and interruptions of that period.

艾玛·史密斯：然而到了统治后期，由于女王没有明确的继承人，继承人之争使都铎王朝陷入重大危机。当初，伊丽莎白的父亲，亨利八世之所以娶这么多位妻子，也就是为了解决继承人问题。现在，同样的问题再次出现，威胁着王朝统治，甚至可能引发局势动荡。

Elizabeth, like her father King Henry VIII, faced a problem of succession--she had no children, male or female, to whom she could pass the throne. But, this problem was resolved when Elizabeth’s cousin, King James VI of Scotland, took the throne after her death in 1603 and became King James I of England.

伊丽莎白和他的父亲亨利八世当初一样，也面临着王位继承的问题：她没有孩子，不论男孩还是女孩，一个都没有。女王没有可以传王位的子女。但是，伊丽莎白的堂弟，当时的苏格兰国王詹姆斯六世解决了这个难题。1603年伊丽莎白去世后，詹姆斯继任王位，加冕成为英国的詹姆斯一世国王。

Renaissance culture and education

文艺复兴的文化和教育

In the sixteenth century, England went through another significant cultural change known as the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a movement that started in fifteenth-century Italy and aimed to recover the great languages, literatures, arts, and values of classical Greece and Rome. Renaissance scholars developed an educational program centered on these subjects that came to be called humanism.

16世纪，英国在文化领域，也经历了一次重大变革，即文艺复兴。文艺复兴起源于15世纪的意大利，目的是为了复兴古希腊和古罗马的伟大语言、文学、艺术和价值观。文艺复兴时期的学者们围绕这些主题，发起了一项名为“人文主义”的教育运动。

Emma Smith: When we talk about Shakespeare as a Renaissance writer, or a subject, I think we are thinking about him as the heir to a European educational movement which emphasizes vernacular languages. So in his case, the English language, it emphasizes learning from and reforming and recasting classical texts and classical knowledge. And it emphasizes forms of education, which are highly constructed by rhetoric and debate.

艾玛·史密斯：我认为，把莎士比亚看作是一个文艺复兴作家,或者一个研究课题，是因为我们把他看作是欧洲教育运动的继承者，这一运动倡导使用英语本土语言。在莎士比亚看来，英语注重吸收古典文本和知识，并对这些古典内容进行重塑和改造，同时它还重视以修辞和辩论为鲜明特色的教育方式。

In the late fifteenth century, Italian humanist scholars started coming to England to teach, and English schools reshaped their curriculum around humanist principles. Humanism emphasized rigorous training in classical languages, especially Latin, as well as training in rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Students focused especially on the ways that writers adapted their language and style to persuade a particular audience of their point.

15世纪晚期，意大利人文主义学者来到英国宣传自己的思想，英国的学校依照人文主义原则改进了自己的课程设置。人文主义强调学习古典语言，尤其是拉丁语，同时也重视进行严格的修辞训练。修辞其实是一门游说的艺术，学习者重点关注作者如何通过调整语言和风格，使观众接受自己观点。

Emma Smith: I think the kind of education checks because of grammar school, probably unintentionally, was a really brilliant training for a dramatist. One of the ways that school boys. They were all boys were encouraged to look at classical texts. Was to sort of turn them inside out and see them from a different point of view. So to either to ask questions about what happened was a famous grammar school exercise, which was where the conspirators. Right. To assassinate Julius Caesar. And you had as a schoolboy to be able to argue both sides of that. It didn't really matter what you thought or what you believed to be true. What mattered was the rhetorical energy and persuasiveness with which you could argue each case. And that's really revealing to me about Shakespeare. Obviously, Shakespeare writes his own play about which we could ask where the conspirators write to Caesar. And I feel as if sometimes we're looking for what Shakespeare himself might have believed. And I partly think that the education he had, the school education he had, may have knocked that out of him in favor of this different kind of ethical point, which was not so much about belief, but about the ability to see both sides. So the argument about understanding both sides of the situation. The Latin for that is in Trump, quite part on both sides. That seems really crucial to the way Shakespeare works.

艾玛·史密斯：我认为这种教育模式，这种文法学校，不经意间，为培养剧作家提供了十分有利的环境。其中一点就是，文法学校鼓励男孩子们去读古典文本。是的，当时上学的都是男孩子们。这从一定程度上，可以让这些男孩子们以全新的视角颠覆性地去解读那些古典文本。文法学校有一个很有名的操作，就是让学生从不同的角度看问题。比如说，如果问到刺杀尤利乌斯•凯撒的共谋者都有谁？作为学生，你要能够从正反两个方面进行辩论，你的想法，或你所认为的真相并不重要，学校看中的是你在辩论中展现出来的修辞能力和说服能力。这些就让我想到了莎士比亚。很明显，莎士比亚在创作《凯撒大帝》这部戏剧时，也涉及了我们会问的那个问题，就是刺杀凯撒的共谋者有谁？我感觉，似乎有时候，我们很想知道莎士比亚本人的想法。但是，在一定程度上，我认为他所接受的教育，学校教育，让他不会简单支持某一特定的伦理观点，这不是信仰问题，而是因为他能看到事物的两面性，会从正反两个方面去分析问题。而这也正是拉丁语的一大特色，它具有两面性。而这一点，似乎也就是莎士比亚创作方式大获成功的关键。

Shakespeare often shows characters in debates with each other, and even with themselves. The first line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” is framed like a question that students at school would debate. Students were also assigned creative exercises, like picking a character from literature or history and writing a speech from that character’s point of view. This gave students the habit of inhabiting someone else’s perspective--another useful exercise for a future dramatist.

莎士比亚经常让剧中人物互相辩论，有时甚至还让他们自己和自己辩论。哈姆雷特最著名的那段独白，第一句就是“生存还是毁灭”，这就很像文法学校学生们的辩题。此外，文法学校还会要求学生们完成一些创意性练习，比如选择一个文学作品或真实历史中的人物，从这个人物的角度写一段话。这让学生养成了站在他人立场上思考问题的习惯，对于培养剧作家也很有帮助。

Theatrical

戏剧性

Shakespeare lived at a time uniquely equipped to appreciate his artistic talents. He was working during the very beginning of the entertainment industry. In 1567, three years after Shakespeare was born, a theatre was opened in England--something that hadn’t happened for over a thousand years. In medieval England, plays would have been staged for special holidays or Church festivals by members of the parish, but there were no permanent theatres or professional actors. But in the 1570s, multiple theatres were built around London. These theatres were public, they were popular, they were commercial, and they were capitalized. People invested in the theatres as shareholders, as people might invest in a big movie today, anticipating a large future profit. For the first time, there was a market that allowed people to make a living as popular mass entertainers. So when Shakespeare arrived in London in the 1580s, his innate dramatic talent found an artistic and economic environment fully ready to draw those talents out.

莎士比亚的创作年代正值娱乐产业的萌芽期，那个时代的人们特别懂得如何欣赏他的艺术天赋。1567年，莎士比亚三岁的时候，英国开了一千多年来的第一家剧院。中世纪时期，英国舞台上上演的都是教区教徒为特殊假日或基督教节日而排演的戏剧，那时既没有永久剧院也没有专职的戏剧演员。但到了16世纪70年代，剧院在伦敦随处可见。这些商业性质的公共剧院深受人们喜爱。剧院采用资本化的经营方式，人们可以投资剧院，当股东。就像今天人们为了获得未来的高收益去投资电影大片一样。有史以来第一次，人们可以通过为大众进行表演来谋生。莎士比亚16世纪80年代来到伦敦时，那里的艺术和经济已经发展得十分成熟，这一切都将激发莎士比亚内心的戏剧天赋。

Emma Smith: So Shakespeare's working in the London playhouses at a time when they have a huge appetite for new plays. That's what the theaters thrive on, relatively short runs of new plays so that the same. Still quite small city audience will keep coming back to the theater and perhaps every week or certainly regularly. So this is a real heyday for playwrights. It must have been an absolutely exciting and hectic kind of place and time to work.

艾玛·史密斯：莎士比亚来到伦敦，在剧院里从事创作，那时各个剧院对新剧本需求量十分大。剧本是剧院赖以生存的基础，但由于新剧相对匮乏，只有很小一部分的伦敦人会每周或定期去剧院看戏。这段时期的确是属于剧作家们的光辉时刻。在这样的氛围下进行戏剧创作，一定令人万分激动、无比狂喜。

Between 1567 and 1642, a new class of professional playwrights wrote over 2,500 plays. These were plays of all kinds--witty academic plays for lawyers, ceremonial masques for the royal court, and plays based on rural folktales, English history, Italian novels, Roman tragedies, and Greek comedies. Some material was off-limits. The court required new plays to be passed by a censor; playwrights couldn’t address controversial topics of politics or religion. But even so, there was tremendous variety in the subjects and ideas that the new theatres could explore.

从1567年到1642年，一批新兴的职业剧作家创作了2500多部戏剧作品。涉及众多题材，有写给律师们看的诙谐学术性戏剧，也有为宫廷创作的假面剧，以及各种取材于民间传说、英国历史、意大利小说、罗马悲剧和希腊喜剧的戏剧。但由于其中一些涉及到了禁忌话题，所以宫廷要求新戏都必须先经审查官审查，剧作家不能在戏剧中涉及具有争议性的政治或宗教话题。可即便如此，除去这些禁忌话题，仍有数不尽的各类主题和思想等待着这些新剧院去探索。

And all this variety of story drew a variety of people. Like big-hit television shows today, theatre in Shakespeare’s time was both popular and elite. People from every social class attended plays. The same play might be performed for monarchs and for servants, for aristocrats, educated professionals, middle-class citizen workers--and for their wives. Shakespeare did not write for female actors--all actors in his time were male--but he did write for a partly female audience.

多样化的故事吸引来了各式各样的观众。就像今天那些火爆的电视节目一样，莎士比亚时代的戏剧制作精良，深受人们喜爱。当时，社会各阶层的人都会去剧院看戏。同一部戏剧的观众，有王室成员和他们的仆从，也有贵族和有学识的教授，还有社会中层的劳动者以及他们的妻子。虽然莎士比亚从未专门为女性演员写过角色，毕竟在当时，所有演员都是男性，但是他的作品在一定程度上也很适合女性观众观看。

The most notable woman in Shakespeare’s audience would have been Queen Elizabeth. Under Queen Elizabeth and King James, actors were summoned to the royal court at holidays to provide entertainment. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was one of the two companies “on call” for performances at court after 1594. When King James took the throne in 1603, he made himself the patron of their company, which was renamed the King’s Men.

在莎士比亚众多观众中，最引人注目的一位女性观众就是伊丽莎白女王了。在伊丽莎白女王，以及后来的詹姆斯国王统治时期，他们会在节假日召集演员到宫廷进行演出。1594年后，“被召”入宫进行表演的两个剧团中，有一个就是莎士比亚所在的“宫内大臣剧团”。1603年，詹姆斯国王继位后，成为该剧团的赞助人，剧团改名为“国王剧团”。

When not at court, the King’s Men performed in a theatre called the Globe. Today, many theatres feature a stage that’s set back and separated from the audience, with curtains that close between acts and house lights that dim when the show begins. The Globe was different. It was what is known as a thrust theatre, with a stage that actually extended out into the audience. It was outdoors, so there was no darkening the stage. Both actors and audiences were brightly lit the whole time. This meant that Shakespeare’s actors could see the audience and likely engaged with them directly as they performed. In the later part of his career, however, Shakespeare did begin writing for a setting much closer to a modern theatre: the Blackfriars, a small indoor theatre lit by candlelight.

除了宫廷表演，平时国王剧团会在一家名为“环球剧场”的剧院进行演出。今天，许多剧院的舞台都靠后设置，和观众之间保持有一段距离。幕间，舞台上会拉上幕布，而每当演出开始时，现场还将调暗灯光。但环球剧场却是完全另外一番模样，它的伸展式舞台可以延伸到观众当中。而且由于它是一个露天剧院，舞台也无法调暗灯光。演员和观众们全程都暴露在日光下。这就意味着，表演莎士比亚戏剧的演员可以清楚地看到观众的反应，于是，他们会在表演过程中，直接让观众参与进来。不过，莎士比亚在创作晚期，也为一个类似于现代剧院的室内剧场—黑衣修士剧院进行过创作，这个小小的室内剧院用蜡烛照明。

At these theatres, audiences would not have seen elaborate scenery or props. But they would have seen elaborate, expensive costumes. Costumes worked to convey setting, rank, and gender. Roman soldiers wore breastplates and helmets, kings wore cloaks embroidered with gold, and male actors wore gowns to represent themselves as female characters. All of the actors on the London stage in Shakespeare’s day were male. Women were played by teenage boys. Scholars speculate that Shakespeare’s company must have acquired a particularly talented young male actor in the early 1600s because that’s when Shakespeare started writing some of his most challenging female roles--roles like Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth.

当时，虽然没有精美的布景和道具，但在演出时，演员们会穿上各种代表不同场景、地位和性别的精致且昂贵的服饰。罗马士兵身着胸甲和头盔，国王穿着镶金边的披风，男演员穿上长裙则代表他此刻扮演的是一位女性角色。莎士比亚时期，伦敦戏剧舞台上只有男演员，女性角色都是由十几岁的男孩扮演的。学者们认为，在17世纪早期，莎士比亚剧团中一定有一位极具表演天赋的青年男性演员，因为在这段时期，莎士比亚创作出了埃及艳后和麦克白夫人这些非常具有挑战性的女性角色。

Emma Smith: There's a different kind of actor. It's available in order for Shakespeare to write those roles. And it's a small insight, I think, into how one of Shakespeare's most important collaboration's was with the actors who were going to embody his plays

艾玛·史密斯：这个演员很不一样，他让莎士比亚写出了那些女性角色。我觉得，从这小小的一点，我们可以窥见 莎士比亚和那些扮演他笔下人物的演员 的一种重要合作方式。

Shakespeare had to work closely with his actors because their work was highly demanding. In his day, actors would perform as many as six different plays in a single week. So they had very little rehearsal time. And because plays often had more speaking parts than there were actors in the company, one actor would play multiple characters. The practice is called “doubling”--and when modern companies double roles today, it can lead to interesting thematic connections between the two roles being played by the same actor.

莎士比亚在创作过程中需要与演员们密切合作，因为他们的表演极具挑战性。那时，一位演员一周内可能需要参演六部不同的戏剧，几乎没有什么彩排时间。而且由于戏剧中的角色往往比剧团中演员人数还多，一位演员常常需要扮演多名角色，这就是“一人分饰两角”。今天，每当现代剧团采用这种一人分饰两角的表演方式时，同一演员所扮演的两个角色之间常常会产生有趣的主题性关联。

But Shakespeare didn’t just collaborate with his actors. What may surprise some people is that Shakespeare also collaborated extensively with other writers.

莎士比亚不仅仅与演员们合作，也与其他剧作家广泛合作，这一点也许也令不少人感到惊讶。

Emma Smith: We used to think that Shakespeare really didn't collaborate with other writers. Why would he? Because he's such a genius.

艾玛·史密斯：过去我们总认为莎士比亚是不会和其他剧作家合作的。他怎么会需要和别人合作呢？他可是一位天才呀！

But we're now starting to build up a picture in which he's probably writing collaboratively with other writers at points throughout his career, know early, mid and late career for different reasons, at different times and in different ways.

但现在我们开始意识到，也许莎士比亚在整个创作生涯中，不论是早期、中期还是晚期，在不同时刻，出于不同原因，都会以不同方式和其他剧作家合作。

But whether Shakespeare, however much Shakespeare collaborated as a writer, the important thing I think is that he's in a deeply collaborative environment. He's not a poet writing alone in a garret. He's a creative, collaborative artist. Anybody who's worked in the theatre knows, I think, that script change under the pressure of rehearsals and that the people who are going to speak the lines and that that's a creative and reciprocal process. And I think there's every reason to think it was the same for Shakespeare.

可不论莎士比亚究竟与他人有过多少合作，我认为他所处的那个高度倡导合作的环境十分重要。莎士比亚不是那种在小阁楼中孤独写诗的诗人，而是一位富有创造力，且乐于和他人合作的艺术家。我相信，任何一个在剧院工作过的人都知道，剧本会随着彩排时的压力而有所变化，演员有时也会对台词做一些修改，这是一个互动的创作过程。我认为，我们有充分的理由相信，莎士比亚也会面对同样的情况。

We hope this short introduction gives you some orientation in Shakespeare’s historical time. As we go through the plays, we’ll fill you in on the most important pieces of historical context for reading each individual play. Understanding some of this history can illuminate new meanings in the play that you might not have seen before. But the play’s possible meanings are also not limited to their historical ones.

希望这个简短的导入能让大家对莎士比亚所处的时代背景有一个大概的了解。在后续介绍他的戏剧作品时，我们还将为大家介绍与每部作品相关的最重要历史背景。了解这些历史，也许可以让大家看到戏剧中，之前未曾注意过的新内涵。当然，对戏剧可能的解读，也不仅仅局限于它们的历史意义。

Emma Smith: So I think the plays are part of a historical world, obviously, and they participate in some of the debates about that world. But I don't think history gives us the answer to what they meant, because in a way, I think they're probably always meant different things

艾玛·史密斯：所以我认为，很明显，戏剧也是历史的一部分，它们也参与了关于世界的一部分探讨。不过，我觉得历史并不会告诉我们这些戏剧到底要表达什么意思，因为从一定程度上说，我认为，戏剧要表达也许是很多不同的内容。

New performances in new contexts continue to reinterpret and transform Shakespeare’s work. And those new interpretations also become part of the meaning, and the history, of the plays. We'll think about some of those many different interpretations when we look at the plays in later episodes. But in the next episode, we’ll turn to exploring Shakespeare’s personal history--a biography so unexpected, in some ways, that it has even led some people to question how he could have written his plays at all.

在全新的时代背景下，对莎士比亚作品的全新演绎，不但重新解读了这些戏剧作品，还让它们焕发出新的生机。这些全新的解读也成为了戏剧内涵一部分，成为了历史的一部分，最终也成为了戏剧本身的一部分。之后的节目中，我们在欣赏莎士比亚戏剧作品时，会看许多不同的解读。不过，下一期节目，我们将聚焦莎士比亚的个人生平。他那出人意料的人生经历，甚至让一些人好奇，他究竟是怎么写出这些戏剧作品的。