Introduction 3: Shakespeare's Life

3 - Shakespeare’s Life

3 – 莎士比亚生平

The poet John Keats once described the true poet’s nature like this: “it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade … It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.” Iago and Imogen are, of course, two characters from Shakespeare’s plays. And Keats’s description resonates deeply with our understanding of Shakespeare.

诗人约翰·济慈曾这样形容诗才“它没有个本身——它一切都是又什么都不是——它没有特性——它喜爱光明与黑暗……它塑造一个伊阿古得到同塑造一个伊摩琴一样的乐趣。”这段话中提到的伊阿古和伊摩琴正是莎士比亚笔下的角色，而济慈的这段描述也正完美地契合了我们对莎士比亚的理解。

Emma Smith: I think it's a natural thing to want to know about authors and to understand their biography.

艾玛·史密斯：我觉得，想要去了解作者，了解他们的生平，是很自然的。

That’s Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford.

这位是艾玛·史密斯，牛津大学莎士比亚研究所的教授。

And there are lots of biographies of Shakespeare out there. But I think Shakespeare is quite a poor biographical subject because the things we really want to know about him, which are probably. How did he feel? How was it to be him? What were his views on X or Y? Subject? None of them material we've got about his life will tell us that.

虽然人们写了不少有关莎士比亚生平的传记，但我认为，为他写传记并不容易。我们所掌握的资料，根本无法解答我们真正关心的那些问题，从已有的资料中，我们无法得知他的真实感受，不知道他对于当“莎士比亚”有何感想，也不清楚他对某些具体事件的看法。

But even though Shakespeare didn’t leave behind records of his thoughts, it’s useful to look at what we do know about his life, to understand what might have influenced his work.

虽然莎士比亚没有留下任何有关他思想的记录，但回顾一下他的生平，了解那些影响了他创作的因素，也能帮助我们更全面地了解莎士比亚。

Shakespeare grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small but prosperous town about a hundred miles outside of London, England’s capital and largest city. Shakespeare’s father, John, was a successful glove-maker and landowner who held important civic offices in the town. William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford on the 26th of April, 1564, indicating that he had been born a few days before. Today, people around the world traditionally celebrate his birthday on the 23rd of April.

莎士比亚出生在一个繁华的小镇——埃文河畔斯特拉特福，这里距离英国最大的城市及首都伦敦约100英里。莎士比亚的父亲，约翰，是一位殷实的地主和手套商人，同时还担任重要的市政职务。威廉·莎士比亚在1564年4月26日受洗礼。虽然，我们不知道他的具体生日在哪一天，但从这个日期我们可以推算出，他一定是这前几天出生的，所以，如今在全世界范围，人们都习惯把4月23日当做他的生日。

In 1582, when Shakespeare was 18, he married a local woman named Anne Hathaway. She gave birth to their first child Susanna in 1583 and to twins named Hamnet and Judith in 1585. There are no more records to show what Shakespeare was doing in the years following the birth of the twins. But in 1592, a playwright in London named Robert Greene wrote an attack on a fellow play-wright who, Greene claimed, arrogantly saw himself as “the only Shake-scene in a country.” As Greene’s attack makes clear, by the early 1590s, Shakespeare had arrived in London and begun a career that was already causing others to take some notice.

1582年，莎士比亚18岁时，与当地一位名叫安妮·海瑟薇的女子结婚。1583年，他们的第一个孩子苏珊娜出生；1585年，双胞胎哈姆内特和朱迪思出生。然而，在这之后的几年里，莎士比亚似乎就“消失”了，没有任何资料记载了他这段时期的行踪。不过在1592年，伦敦一位剧作家，罗伯特·格林写了一篇文章抨击同期的另一位剧作家。据格林所说，这位自负的剧作家认为自己是“全国唯一的摇撼舞台者”。很明显，格林的攻击对象就是莎士比亚，由此我们可以推断在16世纪90年代，莎士比亚已经在伦敦开始戏剧写作，并已经引起了人们的关注。

Scholars date the composition of Shakespeare’s earliest plays between 1589 and 1591. These first plays were comedies. They were followed by a three-part drama from English history depicting the War of the Roses. In 1594, Shakespeare joined an acting company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

学者们认为莎士比亚的早期作品写于1589年至1591年间，都是喜剧。之后，他写了一部描写玫瑰战争的戏剧，戏剧分上中下三篇。1594年，莎士比亚加入了宫内大臣剧团。

Emma Smith: Shakespeare is unusual in the organization of his work from pretty early on, from the 1590's onwards. He seems to have been. He seems to have written for a single company, the Lord Chamberlain's man, with whom he had it kind of share what was called a sharers or a shareholder's responsibility. He has a stake in the company. He writes only for that company. And he probably writes on average, two plays for them a year. Most other playwrights of this period are much more like freelancers. They pitch a play or an idea for a play or the scene, perhaps to a theater company. And then the company says, yes, work it up for us. We want it. So someone like Ben Johnson or Owen Marlowe or John Marsden or Thomas Middleton. These are all playwrights who spread themselves about writing for different kinds of companies and theatres, whereas Shakespeare writes for one company.

艾玛·史密斯：很早，从16世纪90年代起，莎士比亚创作的模式和同时期的剧作家就很不一样。他似乎只为一个剧院，宫内大臣剧团写过剧本。莎士比亚是这个剧院的股东之一，只为这个剧院创作剧本，平均一年写两部。而他同时期其他的剧作家大多还是自由作家。他们会先抛给剧院一个剧本，或一个创作思路，然后剧院会说，好的，帮我们把它写出来吧，我们要这个剧本了。像本·琼生、欧文·马洛、约翰·马斯登以及托马斯·米德尔顿都是这样操作的。他们为不同的剧团、不同的剧院写剧本，然而莎士比亚就只用为一个剧团进行剧本创作。

Together, Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did extremely well. Shakespeare’s plays were popular both on stage and in print. His poetry also sold well. Shakespeare eventually earned enough to buy property in Stratford and to pay the fees for his father to acquire a coat-of-arms, the mark of a gentleman. And the Lord Chamberlain’s Men earned enough to build a new theatre, called the Globe, on the South Bank of London’s River Thames in 1599. When James I took the throne in 1603, he became the patron of the company, which was renamed the King’s Men.

莎士比亚和宫内大臣剧团合作得十分完美。莎士比亚的戏剧，不仅在舞台上很受欢迎，剧本的读者也很多。此外，他诗歌的销量也很不错。通过这些方式，莎士比亚挣到了足够多的钱，他在家乡斯特拉特福购置了地产，甚至还为他父亲买了一个象征绅士身份的盾徽。宫内大臣剧团也挣了不少钱，于是他们在伦敦泰晤士河南岸修建了一个新的剧院，取名为“环球剧场”。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”。

Around 1611, Shakespeare started a gradual retirement from full-time work and returned to Stratford, where his daughters lived with their husbands and children. (His son, Hamnet, had died in 1596.) He continued to collaborate with the playwright John Fletcher, who succeeded him as resident playwright with the King’s Men. He died on the 23rd of April, 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. His will has excited a lot of speculation among scholars, especially about what he meant when he left his wife Anne his “second-best bed.” But Shakespeare’s real legacy was something he never saw. In 1623, a monumental volume was published that contained nearly all the plays that he ever wrote. This volume was titled “Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies,” but is more commonly known today as the First Folio. We’ll discuss it more in the next episode.

1611年左右，莎士比亚不再全职从事创作，回到了家乡斯特拉特福，他两个女儿和她们的丈夫孩子也都生活在那里。（莎士比亚的儿子哈姆内特在1596年就去世了。）不过，虽然离开了伦敦，莎士比亚仍和接替他在国王剧团担任主剧作家的约翰·弗莱彻一同合作。1616年4月23日，莎士比亚去世，安葬于斯特拉特福的圣三一教堂。他的遗嘱还引发了学者不少的猜测，尤其是他在遗嘱中写到要给妻子安妮他的那张“第二好的床”，这一点引发了很多不同的解读。但是，莎士比亚却没能看到他留给后人真正的遗产，那就是1623年出版的《威廉·莎士比亚先生的喜剧、历史剧和悲剧》，也就是人们常说的“第一对开本”，它包含了莎士比亚创作过的几乎所有的戏剧。之后的节目中我们会进行详细地讲解。

Even though the Folio loudly announced Shakespeare’s name, some people have questioned whether William Shakespeare--the glovemaker’s son born and deceased in Stratford-upon-Avon--was really the author of the plays inside the book. These “anti-Stratfordians” don’t believe that a middle-class, small-town man who apparently never attended university could have written works with such a range of characters, places, and subjects and in such brilliant poetic language.

虽然第一对开本署的是莎士比亚的名字，但是还是有人会怀疑，埃文河畔斯特拉特福小镇的一个手套商的儿子能写出书中这些戏剧吗？这些“反斯特拉特福派”的人认为，一个处于社会中层，从没上过大学的小镇男子，根本不可能运用如此诗意的语言，写出具有如此纷繁复杂的人物、地点和主题的作品。

Emma Smith: and in some ways, the whole doubt about whether Shakespeare wrote his plays, the so-called authorship controversy is a problem of biography. There was no question about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare until the 19th century and not coincidentally, the 19th century was the great age of Shakespearean biography.

艾玛·史密斯：从某种程度上说，莎士比亚是否写了这些戏剧，这个“署名权”之争也是为他写传记的一个难点。在19世纪之前，从来没有人怀疑过这些作品的作者另有其人。但在19世纪，涌现出了大量有关莎士比亚的传记，所以人们会提出这个质疑也就不奇怪了。

The Anti-Stratfordians suggest that the author of the plays must have been someone with a more exotic biography: someone educated and powerful, such as Francis Bacon, the Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England; or the Earl of Oxford or Southampton; or perhaps even Queen Elizabeth herself. Shakespeare’s enormous prestige, combined with very limited biographical information, makes it tempting to speculate. But today, the speculation isn’t really taken seriously.

“反斯特拉特福派”认为，能写出这些戏剧的作家，一定有着丰富的国外游历经历，受教育程度高，影响力大，他们猜测这些戏剧真正的作者受过良好教育并且有权有势，像是英格兰的司法部长兼御前大臣弗朗斯西·培根，要么就是牛津伯爵或者南安普敦伯爵，甚至可能就是伊丽莎白女王本人。人们之所以会产生这样的怀疑，是因为莎士比亚太有名了，但关于他的信息真的又太少了。不过现在大家也已经不怎么把这些怀疑当真了。

Emma Smith: And it's been a very energetic debate ever since, although debate might be putting it a bit strongly because really almost no professional Shakespeare scholar entertains any doubt at all about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare

艾玛·史密斯：从那以后，关于这个问题的讨论就一直没再停过，甚至还愈发激烈了，但是真正的莎士比亚研究学者其实根本就不会去怀疑莎士比亚是否真的写了这些戏剧。

One reason why anti-Stratfordians raise doubts about whether Shakespeare wrote his plays is that the plays range far and wide in their settings--from Scotland to Sicily to Venice, Athens and Egypt. And yet William Shakespeare himself seems never to have left England. It may be true that Shakespeare did not travel widely. But he did read widely. As a young boy in Stratford, Shakespeare would have been educated at the King’s New School. The curriculum, inspired by Renaissance humanism, emphasized reading, writing, and rhetoric, with a focus on Latin classical literature. Shakespeare would have read the Roman playwrights Plautus, Terence, and Seneca; Aesop’s Fables and Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and works on rhetoric by the Roman orator Cicero. These texts influence Shakespeare’s work in countless ways. He borrows plots, for instance, from some of the things he read at school. In fact, most of his plots are borrowed from sources he read over the course of his career. We might see that borrowing as a mark against an author’s creativity. But for Shakespeare’s audiences, this use of other sources showed that Shakespeare was steeped in a respected tradition of reading.

“反斯特拉特福派”之所以觉得莎士比亚写不出这些作品，是因为这些戏剧的故事背景极其广阔，不仅有苏格兰、西西里岛，还有威尼斯、雅典，甚至还有埃及。但莎士比亚本人似乎就根本没有离开过英格兰。也许，莎士比亚的确没有游历过太多国家，但他爱好阅读、涉猎广泛。少年时期，莎士比亚在斯特拉特福的国王学校接受教育。这所学校的课程设置受文艺复兴时期的人文主义影响，着重培养学生的阅读、写作和修辞能力，注重学习古典拉丁文学。读书期间，莎士比亚也许就已经读过罗马剧作家普劳图斯、泰伦斯和塞内加的戏剧，读过《伊索寓言》、奥维德的《变形记》以及罗马雄辩家西塞罗的作品。这些文本从各个方面影响着莎士比亚的创作。例如，他会借用在校期间所读书目中的故事情节。实际上，在他一生的创作中，他的很多情节都不是他原创的，是“借鉴”来的。对于“借鉴”我们一般会觉得，这是作者缺乏创造力的表现。但是，对于莎士比亚的观众来说，这样的“借鉴”反而体现出他的饱读诗书。

Emma Smith: And it's certainly true that originality has different value in the period when Shakespeare's writing. For us, originality is the real hallmark of what we expect creative art to do. I think that originality would have been very suspicious to Shakespeare's old uses because it would have suggested you didn't know the material. You were supposed to know you didn't you weren't part of the tradition. You are part of the reading and that the kind of knowledge that you supposed to adopt.

艾玛·史密斯：而且，很显然，莎士比亚那个时代的原创性和我们现在所说的原创性不一样，我们现在认为，所谓原创，就是创造出全新的内容。但在莎士比亚引用前人的故事情节时，他认为大家并不知道故事的来源，这样的“原创性”看起来的确不那么纯粹。莎士比亚默认读者和观众都不知道他的故事情节是“借鉴”的，所以在看他的戏剧时，你得习惯这一点。

Emma Smith: So I think Shakespeare gets most of his material through reading, I think. And often when we know what he's read, we can see that he has carried over that that material or almost intact, rather than that he's brought in personal experience. And if you were a writer in the late 16th century, I don't think that you were encouraged, really, that you thought about writing as being a personal odyssey or a personal confession. You thought about writing as showing your place in a tradition of previous writers by engaging with and rewriting their work.

艾玛·史密斯：所以，我相信莎士比亚是通过阅读获取所需的创作素材。而且，一旦我们了解他所阅读的内容时，我们会发现，莎士比亚在运用这些材料的时候几乎没有对它们做什么修改，没有掺杂任何的个人体验。因为，在16世纪晚期，并不鼓励作者写个人的冒险经历或自我忏悔。那时作者的创作主要是在前人作品的基础之上，对之前的作品进行改编和重写。

In our fifth episode, we’ll talk about how you can begin your engagement with Shakespeare and with the long tradition that now surrounds his works. But first, we’ll look more closely at the works themselves. In the next episode, we’ll explore the shape of Shakespeare’s career, looking at what kinds of plays he wrote and seeing how the plays made their way from Shakespeare’s manuscripts to the book you hold in your hands.

在第五期节目中，我们将和听众朋友们聊一聊大家可以如何开始莎士比亚阅读之旅，并向大家介绍一些一直以来围绕他作品的传说故事。不过首先，我们还是要聚焦这些作品本身。所以，下期节目，我们将探讨莎士比亚的写作生涯，看看他一生中写过哪些类型的戏剧，而他的手稿最终又是怎样集结成册变成你手中拿着的那本书的。