Introduction 4: Shakespeare's Works

4 - Shape of the Canon and the First Folio

4 – 莎士比亚经典作品集和第一对开本的形成

In this episode, we look at Shakespeare’s body of work: what kinds of plays he wrote, how they’ve been shared with readers over the centuries, and what makes it so challenging to edit the plays for publication. We talk about these questions with Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford.

本期节目我们将把目光投向莎士比亚作品本身。看看他写过哪些类型的戏剧，看看这些戏剧如何跨越数百年时光在历代读者中引发共鸣，以及编撰出版这些戏剧时出现的种种挑战。今天，我们将继续对话牛津大学莎士比亚研究所的艾玛·史密斯教授，与她一同探寻这些问题的答案。

Between the start of his career in the late 1580s or early 1590s and his death in 1616, Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays--at least 38 and possibly more, depending on how you count the plays that Shakespeare co-wrote with other authors. One extraordinary thing is how many of Shakespeare’s plays could be considered masterpieces. Many of them have been drawing audiences almost continuously since Shakespeare’s death. And today, all of them are performed regularly by Shakespearean theatre companies around the world.

莎士比亚的创作生涯开始于16世纪80年代末或90年代初，直至1616年去世，他一共创作了至少38部戏剧，如果再算上与其他作家合作的那些，数量也许还要多。而且令人惊叹的是，他所创作的这些作品中，许多都是公认的杰作。其中多部杰作在莎士比亚去世后，仍不断被搬上舞台，吸引着无数观众。即便在今天，全球的莎士比亚剧团仍在定期演出所有的这些杰作。

Another extraordinary thing is how many different kinds of plays he wrote. Shakespeare proved himself a master of each dramatic genre. One observer wrote, “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds.” To get a sense of Shakespeare’s whole body of work, we can think about his career in terms of these genres.

此外，莎士比亚创作的戏剧种类之繁多，也令人叹为观止。莎士比亚用作品向我们证明，他擅长写任何一种戏剧流派。一位评论家曾这样写道：“正如普劳图斯和塞内加创作了拉丁语中最好的喜剧和悲剧；在英语中，莎士比亚一人就创作出了最优秀的喜剧和悲剧。”为了领略莎士比亚作品的全貌，我们可以从这些流派入手，探索莎士比亚的创作生涯。

Emma Smith:  So I think it can be helpful to look at Shakespeare's career in two decade long blocks. The first is perhaps from the early 1590s to say 1601 or something. And the second the next tendered or not ten or so years after that, in that first block in the fifty nineties, Shakespeare's work is mostly rewriting medieval English history. And romantic comedy, there are a couple of tragedies that he writes. But the bulk of his work is in is in history and comedy.

艾玛·史密斯：我认为把莎士比亚二十多年中创作的戏剧作品分成两个阶段能帮助我们更好地理解。第一阶段大概是从16世纪90年代初到17世纪，差不多就是这个时期；之后，就是第二个十年，嗯，不止十年。在16世纪90年代开始的第一个十年间，莎士比亚主要在改编中世纪的英语，创作了三部浪漫主义喜剧和几部悲剧。不过他在这个时期创作，还是以历史剧和喜剧为主。

Emma Smith: The second decade is tragedies. And then at the end of that period, this this kind of tragicomedy, romantic comedy, late comedy, they've had lots of different ways of talking about it. But plays like The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, which tend to combine some elements of tragedy with a more resolved kind of ending.

艾玛·史密斯：而到了第二个十年，他的作品就以悲剧为主了。到了这个阶段后期，他还创作了一系列悲喜剧、浪漫主义喜剧、最后的喜剧，这些戏剧运用多种不相同的叙事方式。但是在写作《冬天的故事》和《暴风雨》这类戏剧时，莎士比亚倾向于将一些悲剧元素融入一个较为圆满的结局。

During Shakespeare’s lifetime, some of his plays were published as individual editions, called quartos.

莎士比亚去世前，他的一部分戏剧就曾独立发行过，称为“四开本”。

Emma Smith: about half of Shakespeare's plays, 18 titles, are published as individual books. Those books are usually called Quartos, which refers to the size of them. That's they're small in size, like a little paperback, soft back, like a pamphlet. And then those 18 plus another 18, which have not been published before, are all printed together in the First Folio in this big collected edition, a big library book, kind of a doorstop of a book.

艾玛·史密斯：莎士比亚大约一半的戏剧，18部吧，是曾经独立发行过的。这个版本就是人们常说的四开本，因为出版的书就是四开的大小，小到有点像小平装书或小软壳书，就像小册子一样。这18部戏剧和另外18部未曾出版过的戏剧后来被集合在了第一对开本这个大合集中，这是一版巨大的馆藏书，甚至都可以用来挡门。

All those plays that hadn’t been published as quartos--plays that included masterpieces like Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest--only became available to the world because two actors from Shakespeare’s theatre company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, decided to gather all of Shakespeare’s plays together in one magisterial volume.

《麦克白》《裘力斯·凯撒》《暴风雨》等多部杰作当初并没有以四开本的形式被出版过。而这些戏剧得以与世人见面，要归功于莎士比亚的剧团同事，演员约翰·赫明斯和亨利·康德尔。他们决定收集莎士比亚所有的戏剧作品，集结成一个权威版本。

Emma Smith: So the first collected printed edition of Shakespeare's plays is a book we now called the First Folio. In fact, it's called Mr. William Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies and Histories when it's printed in 1623. So 1623 is important. That's after Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare died in 1616. So we can't really assume that the organization or the presentation of the plays in that book is really authorities. Been presented by other agents to us. What we can say is that one of the things that's important about how to present this big book of 36 plays is by genre: comedies, tragedies and histories. Oh, yes. In fact, comedies, histories and tragedies. I think it's important as a marketing pitch, actually, to show a range of different kinds of plays, to show that this is not just still the same. This is a diverse range. There's something for everyone.

艾玛·史密斯：所以，第一部印刷版的莎士比亚戏剧合集就是我们现在所说的第一对开本。实际上，在1623年印刷时，这本书的名称是《威廉·莎士比亚先生的喜剧、历史剧和悲剧》。1623年这个时间很重要，这一年，莎士比亚已经去世了。他是在1616年去世的。所以，我们也不能肯定地说，这本书中戏剧的组织或呈现方式就是真的权威，毕竟编撰者不是作者本人。但可以肯定的是，这本大合集按照流派，按照喜剧、悲剧和历史剧的方式，向我们呈现了36部戏剧，这一点很重要。我觉得这实际上就像一个营销策略，向我们展示了不同类型的戏剧，让我们看到了这些戏剧的不同。在种类繁多的戏剧中，每个人都能找到属于自己的那一种。

The First Folio and the individual quartos are the starting point for the copies of the plays we have today. But they’re a difficult place to start from, because when plays are printed more than once, the two versions are never the same.

我们今天看到的戏剧版本都源自第一对开本和独立的四开本。但以它们作为开端并不是一件容易的事儿，因为一旦戏剧被多次印刷，每个版本之间肯定都会有差异。

Emma Smith: And for the players, which existing two forms in one of those single play versions, the quarters and the Folio, there are always differences, variations sometimes that suggest adaptation for the theater. That might suggest a mistake or a misreading in the typesetting. There are lots of different reasons why they might be different.

艾玛·史密斯：对于戏剧表演者来说，每一部戏剧都存在两个版本——四开本和第一对开本。它们之间常常会有出入，这些差异也许是由不同剧院的改编造成的，也可能是排版错误或误读导致的，总之原因多种多样。

And I think the main thing, the main reason that Shakespeare's plays exist in these different forms attests to the fact that these scripts are alive or they were alive, they were alive for performance and that they were changed by different sort of performance possibilities. They were not set out like poems or like novels, whether that the most important thing was what the author said that set out in order to enable performance, which is that at first, but not their only purpose.

不过我认为莎士比亚戏剧之所以有这么多不同的版本的主要事情，主要原因在于，这些文本是有生命的，或者说它们曾经是有生命的，它们在表演中是活的，会随着表演中出现的各种可能性而变化。剧本和诗歌或小说不同，主要区别在于作者是否是为了表演而设定内容，适合表演这是戏剧的首要目的，但绝不是唯一目的。

For almost half the plays, there are multiple editions of the text. Those editions vary, in many small ways and also in some quite substantial ways. Hamlet’s famous line, “To be or not to be; that is the question,” appears, in the first edition of the play, as “To be, or not to be--ay, there’s the point.” And the entire first edition is only about half as long as the later editions. If we want to print the play Hamlet, do we print the early edition? Or the later edition? Or some version that combines both? Do we print the word “question” or “point”? These are the kinds of challenges that editors have to deal with. So when you read a modern copy of a Shakespeare play, you’re getting the end product of a long line of decisions made by the editor has made: decisions about what text to print and how to shape that text.

莎士比亚有差不多一半的戏剧都有多个版本。这些版本之间有大量的细微差别。哈姆莱特那句著名的台词“生存还是毁灭，这是一个问题” (To be or not to be; that is the question) ，在第一个版本中这句话是这样写的“生存还是毁灭，啊，这是一个关键点” (To be or not to be--ay, there’s the point)。而且第一版的长度只有之后版本的一半。所以，如果我们想印刷《哈姆莱特》这部戏剧的话，是要选早期的版本还是之后的版本？还是将这些版本结合一下？我们印刷的时候，是印“问题 (question) ”还是印“关键点 (point) ”？这些都是编辑们需要应对的挑战。所以，当你在阅读一个现代版本的莎剧时，你手中的已经是经过编辑一连串决策之后的最终产品了。他们决定了印刷哪个文本，决定了如何呈现这个文本。

Emma Smith: One thing that these in determined early texts, require, I guess, is for modern editors to do some work, to tidy them up, to present them to us. And that's a great service. If you've got a modern edition of a play someone has gone through, they've changed and standardize the spelling. They've organized it on the page so you can tell who's speaking and get some sense of what the action is that's being described by putting in stage directions. And what that does, though, is it does interpret the plays in some important ways.

艾玛·史密斯：我猜测，现代的编辑们在处理这些早期文本、作品集时，要花一些功夫，他们要整理这些文本，向我们呈现这些文本。这很了不起。如果你拿的是编辑审阅过的现代版本，里面单词拼写其实已经被改过、被标准化了。编辑们把戏剧呈现在书页上，让你可以读出此刻是谁在说话。同时，他们还加进了舞台指示，让你明白当前描述的是什么动作，并借助这些指示从一些重要的方面来解读这些戏剧。

Stage directions indicate what the actors are doing onstage. Some are straightforward, like “Hamlet enters” or “Romeo exits.” But others tend to interpret or answer a question that the play leaves open. In The Taming of the Shrew, Katherine is forced to marry Petruchio. One of the play’s big questions is whether this marriage turns out to be happy. The play doesn’t settle the question. But sometimes a stage direction tries to. At the very end of the play, all the characters gather and Katherine makes a speech about marriage.

舞台指示是用来说明演员在舞台上做什么的。一些很直接，如“哈姆莱特上”或“罗密欧下”，但其他的一些舞台指示倾向于解读或者回答戏剧留下的开放性问题。在《驯悍记》中，凯瑟丽娜被迫嫁给了彼特鲁乔。在这部戏剧中，一个主要问题就是：这段婚姻最后是否美满幸福？戏剧本身并没有告诉我们答案，但有时，一些舞台指示却试图回答这个问题。在戏剧的最后，所有角色走上舞台，此时，凯瑟丽娜会做一段关于婚姻的讲话。

Emma Smith: And then Petruchio, her husband, says: “Why, there’s a wench.” and then a famous line, perhaps so many people don't know the play: “Come on and kiss me. Kate.” Let's start direction again. Now, most artists will put in a stage direction that which says that case. And that's certainly one interpretation. He says, kiss me. She does kiss him. We still don't know what that kiss means, whether it's, you know, passionate or reciprocal or slightly coercive or violent. There are lots of different ways.

艾玛·史密斯：然后她的丈夫彼特鲁乔会说“啊，那才是个好妻子！”，之后他说了那句非常著名的台词，也许不知道这部戏剧的人都听过这句话，他说“来，吻我，凯特”。我们再回到舞台指示上，现在大部分的艺术家都会加上这么一个舞台指示，当然这也是对戏剧的一种解读，彼特鲁乔说：吻我。于是凯特亲吻了他。我们依旧不知道这个吻代表了什么，是出于热烈的爱意呢，还是相互利用呢？是有点儿不情愿的轻轻一吻呢，还是激烈极端的呢？对于这个吻的解读多种多样。

So these are possibilities that the play leaves open, I think, because it doesn't have stage directions. And while it's really helpful for modern editors to include speculations about the stagecraft, which can help us make sense of what's going on in the plays, we do need to sort of look beyond that sometimes and think, well, what is that? The only way to see this?

我觉得，这些正是这部戏剧留下的开放可能性，因为戏剧本身并没有舞台指示。尽管对于现代的编辑们来说，加入这些对舞台表演技巧的猜测很有帮助，因为这些猜测可以让我们了解戏剧的发展情况。但有时我们还是需要透过这些来看问题、去思考“那到底是什么？”“这是唯一的解读吗？”

For many pivotal moments in Shakespeare like this one, there’s more than one way to see it. This open-ended quality might sometimes seem frustrating for a new reader. But as Emma Smith explains in our next episode on how to read Shakespeare, it can also be extraordinarily liberating.

对于莎士比亚戏剧中许多这类关键时刻的解读都不唯一。对于刚接触莎士比亚戏剧的读者来说，这种开放性有时也许会令他们感到困惑。但是，下期节目中，艾玛·史密斯教授会向我们介绍如何阅读莎士比亚戏剧，这种对于戏剧解读开放性，也是一种非常自由的体现。