Twelfth Night 2: The Context and the Questions

Twelfth Night 2: The Context and the Questions

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Twelfth Night: “Present Laughter” -- Part 2 -- Romance Reimagined

《第十二夜》:欢笑嬉游莫放过了眼前——第2部分——重新构想的爱情故事


In our first episode, we discussed Twelfth Night’s unusual emotional tone. It’s a romantic comedy that ends with a set of marriages. But throughout the play and even at its festive conclusion, there are notes of melancholy and sadness. The question of the play’s genre, of what kind of story it is, is raised straightaway by the play’s title -- and it’s a question that leads us towards the play’s other key themes, including the transgression and inversion of social norms. Guiding our discussion is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford.

在第一集节目中,我们探讨了《第十二夜》独具一格的情感基调。在这部浪漫喜剧的结尾,举行了好几场婚礼。然而纵观全剧,我们会发现,即便是欢乐喜庆的结局,也带着忧郁和悲伤。从这部戏剧的标题里,我们可以直接看出戏剧流派,了解故事所属类型。同时,戏剧流派的问题又指引着我们去探寻戏剧其他的关键主旨,例如对社会规范的突破与颠覆等等。今天,依旧会由牛津大学莎士比亚研究教授艾玛·史密斯带领我们展开新的谈论与发现。


The twelfth night of Christmas festivities is the eve of Epiphany. It suggests the end of the Christmas period. I think that atmosphere of festivity and for me, crucially, the endof festivity, is really important. So festival traditions in Shakespeare's England were periods of sort of feasting and of inversion. And by inversion, I mean they were often marked by rituals like, servants sat at table and masters waited on them -- that there were sort of social and also gender rituals of inversion that were part of festivity, that atmosphere of excess and of overturning, perhaps, what are normal social restrictions or social conventions. So festivity and comedy, the idea that comedy is itself a form of festival, I think that's all important to the play.

圣诞欢庆的第十二夜是主显节前夜,它预示着圣诞节的终结。这种节日的欢庆氛围,尤其是它暗示着欢庆结束这一点,很值得我们重点关注。在莎士比亚时期的英国,节庆传统既是欢乐庆典,同时也是对常规的颠覆。所谓颠覆,是指在节日期间,经常会有这样的仪式,就是仆人们坐在桌边吃饭,而主人们站在一旁伺候。这段时期,还会有一些颠覆社会传统和性别传统的仪式,这种放肆的颠覆性氛围挑战了人们习以为常的社会约束和社会惯例。剧中,欢庆与喜剧相互融合。这种将喜剧看作一种节日庆祝的观点,对于我们理解这部戏剧至关重要。


If we think of the play Twelfth Night as being like Twelfth Night itself, both a festival and the end of a festival, we’ll get a clue as to how to think about the play’s genre and tone.

如果我们将《第十二夜》这部剧看作是第十二夜这个节日本身,把它看作是节日与节日尾声的统一,那么我们就可以从中得到一定的线索,由此来推断戏剧的流派与基调。


One quite useful way of seeing Twelfth Night is as the pivot between so-called “festive comedies,” with broadly happy endings and the plays that we've come to call “problem plays,” where the social or sort of philosophical problems that they represent can't really be resolved.

在分析《第十二夜》这部剧时,一个很有效的方法就是把它定位在“节庆喜剧”和“问题剧”之间。所谓“节庆喜剧”,指的是拥有美好圆满结局的戏剧;而“问题剧”则是那些探讨当前无法解决的社会问题或哲学问题的戏剧。


Twelfth Nightcomes at the end of Shakespeare's comic period, just into the 17th century. It shares an interest in romantic comedy as the kind of immediate shaping genre. That's to say, these are plays, which are going to end in marriage. We've also got a sort of social satire, I think.This is a play really concerned with social status. And I think we sometimes lose that alongside its playfulness and permissiveness about sexuality and gender, it has a real kind of restricted view, and a very conservative view about social status, that people sort of stay in their place, and it punishes the one social climber very prominently.

《第十二夜》是莎士比亚喜剧创作阶段晚期的作品,写于17世纪初。它具备浪漫喜剧的特点,这些特点确定了这部戏剧的流派类型,这类戏剧往往都是以圆满的婚姻收尾。此外,这部戏剧还带有一定的社会讽刺意味,它十分关注社会地位问题。有的时候,我们关注戏剧在性和性别问题上的玩世不恭时,往往会忽略它在社会地位这个问题上的保守态度,它主张人们应该呆在属于自己的位置不动,同时它还主张严厉惩罚那些想方设法想要挤入上流社会的人。


The other play that I think I'd want to put in conversation with Twelfth Night is actually quite different, and it's the play that I think Shakespeare’s working on more or less at the same time -- Hamlet. Now, Hamletobviously is the archetypal tragedy, and it may seem that it's got nothing in common with Twelfth Night at all. But I actually find the juxtaposition quite helpful. It points up how steeped in mourning and melancholy Twelfth Nightis, particularly at the beginning -- just like the castle of Elsinore. It gives us children operating, trying to find a place for themselves in the shadow of the dead father. There's a lovely piece by an actor, Zoë Wanamaker, who played Viola, and she talks about Viola as a catalyst -- that she's sort of introduced into a society in Illyria where things are stuck. Orsino’s stuck in this self-indulgent, slightly sonneteering kind of love-melancholy. Olivia is stuck, cloistered, weeping for the people she's lost -- and that Viola / Cesario’s job is to shake that up and to give people a way out of these damaging kinds of behaviours.

在探讨《第十二夜》时,我很想再谈谈莎士比亚另外一部剧,这部剧和《第十二夜》很不一样,但它们却是在相近的时间里创作完成的。这部剧就是《哈姆莱特》。很明显,如今我们都会把《哈姆莱特》看作是一部典型的悲剧,乍一看,它和《第十二夜》似乎毫无相似之处。但我认为,我们很有必要把它们放在一起分析,因为这样可以衬托出《第十二夜》中的悲伤和忧郁情绪究竟有多沉重,尤其是戏剧开始,那一幕就像是《哈姆莱特》中在厄耳锡诺城堡中发生的故事一样。在这两部剧中,我们都可以看到那些希望在父亲影子下找到自己位置的孩子们。曾经饰演过薇奥拉的女演员佐伊·瓦纳梅克就曾有过这样一番可爱的评价。她说,薇奥拉就像是一个催化剂,在她到来之前,伊利里亚中的一切都陷入了僵局。奥西诺自我放纵,沉溺于爱情的忧伤之中,那模样有点儿像忧愁的十四行诗诗人。奥丽维娅则深陷于对已逝亲人的哀悼中,过着基本与世隔绝的生活。薇奥拉,或者说西萨里奥的到来,打破了这个僵局,帮助这些角色脱离出了这些毁灭性的举动。


The main way Viola shakes things up and causes other characters to change is by changing herself: by becoming Cesario. The obvious way to describe what she does in adopting this new appearance and name is to say she ‘disguises’ herself, as if the male ‘Cesario’ is a false identity concealing her true one. But Emma Smith thinks that this is not quite the right way to think about it.

而薇奥拉打破僵局,激发其他角色作出改变的主要方法是改变自己,她女扮男装,化名为西萨里奥。对于薇奥拉乔装打扮、隐姓埋名这种做法很常见的一个解读就是说她这样做是为了“伪装”自己,她化身为“西萨里奥”是为了掩饰她的真实身份。但艾玛·史密斯教授认为这种理解并不完全准确。


It's interesting to think whether the word “disguise” or the idea of disguise or even of cross-dressing is quite sufficient, really, to register what Violet chooses to do as Cesario. So I've been interested in what it might be like to take Viola's transformation into Cesario seriously, and rather than thinking of it as a sort of contingent plot device, and what that might open up about the play's understandings of gender and of identity. I think perhaps the one most significant thing aboutTwelfth Nightis that it is written for a theater in which all the actors are male. So the male characters and the female characters are all played by male actors. And I think that's important because we used to think that was just how it was. It was just something people took for granted. But if you look atTwelfth Night, it's a play which really pushes that acceptance, and I think encourages us to ask questions about it or to interrogate it differently. So I think the performance conditions for which it was written, that all-male theater is the crucial thing to its playfulness and transgression about gender.

“伪装”这个词,这个概念,或者说“女扮男装”这个表达,是否可以完全解释清楚薇奥拉假扮成西萨里奥这个举动呢?思考一下,你会发现这其实是个很有趣的问题。我很感兴趣的地方是,如果我们转变一下角度,认真严肃地看待薇奥拉假扮成西萨里奥这件事,而不是把它看作一个临时起意的决定的话,情况又会是怎样呢?这会让我们对于性别和身份认同产生哪些新的认识呢?也许《第十二夜》最重要的地方是它是为所有演员都是男性的剧团而创作的。剧中角色,不论男女,全都是由男演员扮演的。我之所以觉得这一点很重要,是因为以往我们都会把这看作是很正常的事情,认为这都是理所应当的。但在欣赏《第十二夜》时,我们会发现这部剧其实是在推翻我们这样的惯常认识,它鼓励我们对戏剧提出疑问,从不同的角度对它发出质疑。因此最初上演这部戏剧的背景,那种舞台上只有男演员的情况,对于戏剧在性别上的戏谑和颠覆至关重要。


The female character Viola, who we see perhaps for about 15 minutes in her presumably wet female clothes, spends the rest of the play -- including the end when she is betrothed to Orsino -- spends all the rest of the time in male clothing. And what we just absolutely don't know, I think is really fascinating, is whether the male actor playing a female character dressed as a male has any vestige of femininity at all. So is it putting on an additional layer of costume, or is it really just taking a costume off? And there are lots of interesting ways in which the male persona of Viola / Cesario is more prominent in the play than the fact that she is “really,” sort of in inverted commas, she's “really” a woman underneath. So I think that's the great sort of confusion, gender confusion, at the heart of the play, the sense that gender is a kind of performance, that what's underneath is really just another kind of performance, and that the true identity of Viola, which seems so important for readings of the play, actually in performance, is quite difficult to pin down.

薇奥拉是个女性角色,但在整部剧中,她大概仅仅只有15分钟是身着女装的。在之后的剧情里,即便是在剧末她与奥西诺订婚时,她也一直穿着男装。我们不知道,扮演这位女扮男装角色的男演员是否会在表演时保留一丝女性特质。对此我真的很好奇。他是会额外穿上一件演出服装呢,还是会脱下一件?很多时候,男性装扮的西萨里奥比“真正”的她更加引人注目,这里的“真正”上需要加个引号,指的是她隐藏起来的“真正”女性身份。这种混乱状态,这种性别的混乱状态是戏剧的核心。让我们感觉性别就是一场表演,隐藏的性别又是另一场表演,而对于解读戏剧而言十分重要的薇奥拉的真实身份实际上也是一场表演,这种感觉是很难解释清楚的。


And I think the play really enjoys that. And I think that's one of the things that we really appreciate about the Elizabethan theatre, the late Elizabethan theater. It's a place of playfulness and enjoyment and a transgression which perhaps doesn't tell us all that much, necessarily, about what goes onoutsidethe theater, but rather shows us that art, theatre, performance, is able to do things and take people with it. And one reason I say that is because, of all the characters in the play, Viola -- who spends the majority of it dressed as a man, so usurping or presuming to a position of power which she might not have been expected to have in early modern society -- Viola gets exactly what she wants at the end of the play. So Viola’s transgression, if indeed it is transgressive, is rewarded. That feels to me important in thinking about how the stage thinks about gender and sexual identity, as opposed to how a broader society thinks about it.

我觉得这部剧很喜欢这种感觉。这也正是伊丽莎白女王时期,尤其是后期的那些戏剧演出让我们着迷的地方。那时的剧院,是一个有着戏谑、欢乐和反叛颠覆的地方。它们不会传递太多剧院以外现实世界中的情况,相反,它们会向我们讲述艺术、戏剧、演出中能够实现的内容,并让人深深为之着迷。我之所以这么说,一个原因在于,剧中的所有人物角色,例如薇奥拉,她大部分时候,都是男子的模样,一直在竭尽全力去争取那些在早期现代那个年代也许根本不可能属于她的东西,并且在戏剧结尾时,她成功获得了自己想要的一切。薇奥拉这样的颠覆性行为,这样离经叛道的做法,最终获得了回报。在思考戏剧舞台对于性别认同的看法时,我们很有必要把它与更广大社会在这个问题上的看法放在一起做比较。


Viola / Cesario is one of several characters who transgress boundaries or social categories in the world of Twelfth Night. But not all of these transgressions are rewarded -- as we see when the steward Malvolio attempts to cross a status line.

在《第十二夜》中,薇奥拉或者说西萨里奥是其中一个挑战社会边界、社会分类的角色。然而在剧中,并不是所有这类角色都像薇奥拉那样得到了回报。例如管家马伏里奥就没有这样的好运,虽然他也曾试图打破自己的地位界限。


Malvolio seems to cross two lines in the play. One is, I think, the importance of merriment and comedy. So that's the kind of Malvolio as a Puritan, Malvolio as a killjoy -- this is the initial spur for the trick that's played on him by Sir Toby and the others. But how that trick presents a kind of elephant trap for Malvolio is how fully he enters into the lie that Olivia is in love with him, and how, in what detail, what loving, upwardly mobile detail, he imagines his life married to her. So it's a fantasy of social elevation, of no longer being the steward, but being the master of the house. And I think that, really, is what the play can't quite forgive -- because, of all the things that people do that are transgressive in one way or another, perhaps Malvolio’s fantasy of his life with Olivia is the one which is most heartily punished.

马伏里奥似乎想要打破的还是两条界限。一道是人们对于欢笑取乐的沉迷。马伏里奥是一个清教徒,他反对节日狂欢,是个很让人扫兴的人。这也是触发托比爵士和其他人捉弄他的最初的诱因。然而,这场恶作剧之所以会像引诱大象掉入陷阱那样让马伏里奥深陷其中无法脱身,是因为他完全相信了奥丽维娅爱上了自己这个谎言。他甚至还详尽美好地幻想着,如果和奥丽维娅结婚,他的社会地位会有怎样的提升。他幻想自己成为上流人士,不再只是个管家,而是成为了这栋房子的主人。但这部戏剧不能容忍这样的想法和企图。因为在剧中作出了种种越轨行为的人物中,幻想着与奥丽维娅美好婚后生活的马伏里奥,遭受的是最严厉的惩罚。


And I think it does depend a little bit on production, how far the audience goes along with that punishment -- there's a lot of set-up for Malvolio’s first piece of ridiculing, which is that he's going to show himself in these yellow cross-garters. That can be a very funny scene in performance. I think you have to now be quite hard to feel that the scene where he is imprisoned and made to feel he's going mad -- I mean, sort of gaslit in the most cruel way -- I think it's quite hard to see that as a funny scene now. He's the butt of a joke which gets harsher and more violent and more cruel.

我认为作者的创作方式影响了观众对于马伏里奥所受惩罚的接受程度。作者埋下了充分的伏笔,为之后马伏里奥穿上十字交叉的黄色袜带这第一个恶作剧做足了准备。这出剧情在舞台上演出是相当滑稽好笑的。但马伏里奥被囚禁、被指控发疯的那场戏其实是很残酷的,我们很难将它看作是一段滑稽搞笑的剧情。他是玩笑笑柄,而且那个玩笑变得越来越尖酸,越来越刻薄,越来越残忍。


It’s clear that the play punishes Malvolio for his attempted social transgressions. But for another character, it’s a little less clear whether her transgressions are punished or rewarded.

很明显,戏剧是想惩罚马伏里奥妄图突破自身社会地位的企图。然而,对于另一个角色,她的颠覆行为究竟是受到了惩罚还是得到了奖赏,就不是那么明显了。


I think Olivia is a really interesting character in all of this, and there were certainly influential feminist scholarship about the play who said that Olivia is the really transgressive model of femininity in this play, not Viola -- the challenge to sort of normative modes of femininity in the play really comes from Olivia, somebody who doesn't want to get married, who runs her own household, who is a powerful, competent operator, who doesn't seem to need a husband. The play really shows us that, if you're a woman who dresses as a man, that's kind of fine. But if you're a woman who tries to sort of play the man in your own household, that's not so good. And you probably ought to be married off so that your real husband can take over and regulate this behavior.

在剧中所有角色里面,奥丽维娅这个角色很有趣。很多女性主义学者表示,这部剧中,真正叛逆的女性角色其实是奥丽维娅,而不是薇奥拉。他们认为奥丽维娅才是真正挑战了戏剧中常规女性形象的角色。她不想结婚,自己管理着家业,是一位强势又能干的管理者,她似乎根本就不需要丈夫,不需要依附于他人。但这部剧让我们感觉到,如果你女扮男装,这没问题。但是,如果你作为一名女性,想要像男性一样管理自己的家庭事务,这就不行了。你应该结婚,这样你的丈夫就可以接手,管理家庭事务。


One quite dark argument might be Olivia is being punished for her resistance to marriage and her attempts to be an independent woman. She's being palmed off on someone she doesn't know and who the play presents as, I mean, at best, a kind of airhead. spending other people's money. That seems to be really all Sebastian does.I guess a more positive way of seeing it might be that Sebastian's presence at the end of the play enables Viola/Cesario to be both people, enables Olivia to get her version of Cesario and Orsino to get his version. The end of the play seems to me a sort of wish fulfillment in all kinds of ways, that the object of Olivia's desire sort of is materialized in Sebastian, and that enables Viola to be in two places at once.

对于奥丽维娅,有一个很暗黑的看法,就是说由于奥丽维娅拒绝结婚,并且企图做一名独立女性,她也遭受了惩罚。戏剧惩罚她同一个她根本不认识的人结婚,而且从剧中所呈现出的内容来看,这个人还是一个花别人钱的傻瓜。确实,西巴斯辛在剧中就只做了这些事情。但从一个更积极的角度来看的话,我们可以理解为西巴斯辛在剧末的出场,让薇奥拉获得了双重身份,他在让奥丽维娅获得了“西萨里奥”,同时也让奥西诺得到了他的“西萨里奥”。戏剧的结局似乎满足了剧中人物的一切愿望。奥丽维娅的欲望对象在西巴斯辛身上具体化,这使得薇奥拉可以同时以两种身份出现。


We could say that the two places Viola occupies are the roles of Olivia’s male partner and Orsino’s female partner. But we could also say that Viola simultaneously occupies the role of Orsino’s wife and his closest friend -- roles that weren’t generally combined in Shakespeare’s time, but which merge in the permissive world of Twelfth Night.

薇奥拉的两个身份指的是奥丽维娅的丈夫,以及是奥西诺的妻子。但她的两个身份还可以理解为奥西诺的妻子,以及他最亲密的朋友。在莎士比亚时期,妻子和朋友一般不会在同一个人身上重叠,但在《第十二夜》这个颠覆传统的世界中,这两种身份却合二为一了。


One thingTwelfth Nightdoes in the sequence of Shakespeare's comedies is it squares a kind of circle, that often Shakespeare's comedies have been about the conflict between male-male friendship and male-female romantic love. WhatTwelfth Nightenables, particularly for Orsino, is that he can have his best friend, his best buddy, and also his wife, that he doesn't have to choose between them because they're actually the same person. And what that does is to give a different twist to that high cultural status that Renaissance society put on male friendship and the relatively low status it put on male-female, on the sort of emotional or intellectual quality of male-female relationships. One real irony about Twelfth Night is that Orsino and Viola are able to get to know each other really well, despite the fact that Viola is pretending to be someone that she isn't. And that’s because male-male friendships or apparently male-male friendships, which are extremely important -- they have a really high cultural importance in Shakespeare's time -- those enable forms of intimacy, forms of proximity, forms of shared discussion and shared ideas which high-status courtship between men and women really doesn't allow at all.

在莎士比亚的喜剧系列中,《第十二夜》完成了一件不可能的事情,成功地“化圆为方”。我们知道莎士比亚的喜剧往往围绕男性间友谊与男女间浪漫爱情的冲突而展开。但在《第十二夜》中,尤其是对于奥西诺这个角色而言,他最好的朋友,他最好的兄弟同时也是他的妻子。他不需要在兄弟和妻子之间做选择,因为他们就是同一个人。这样的剧情是对当时文艺复兴时期社会现实的一种另类的展现。当时社会认为男性间友谊有着较高的文化地位,而男女间爱情的文化地位则相对较低,同时那时的人们还认为,男女间关系不论是在情感上还是在理智上都比不上男性之间的关系。《第十二夜》中很讽刺的一点是,奥西诺与薇奥拉在相处过程中得以很好地了解了对方,尽管薇奥拉伪装了自己的真实身份。因为男性间的友谊,或者说看起来是两个“男性”间的友谊在莎士比亚时期有着很高的文化重要性。这样高度的重要性使得男性间可以产生亲密亲近的感情,可以进行志趣相投的讨论,可以在思想上产生共鸣,而这些在当时上层社会男女间的爱情中是根本不可能实现的。


The intimacy and intellectual sharing afforded by male-male friendships may be one reason that Viola never reveals herself as a woman to Orsino until the play’s very end.And significantly, even at the very end, she continues to be called and to dress as Cesario.

直到戏剧快结束时,薇奥拉才向奥西诺表明自己的女性身份,其中一个原因也许就是那种男性间的友谊才会有的亲密关系和理性分享。特别值得注意的是,即便到了戏剧的最后一刻,薇奥拉依旧身着西萨里奥的装扮,而且奥西诺依旧称呼她为“西萨里奥”。


It would seem that if you were trying to, sort of, reinstate a heteronormative marital ending, you would have Viola come back in a big dress and a sort of tableau of the couples at the end. But Viola doesn't do that. For me, that suggests that Viola / Cesario is always a kind of “in between” figure, is not securely a woman who disguises herself as a man for some particular practical reasons and then gives up the disguise when that work's done. Cesario seems really important to who she is and who she's going to continue to be. And the fact that that's not completely resolved at the end feels very modern in my reading of the play.

如果想要恢复规范传统的异性婚姻结局,其实应该让薇奥拉穿回大礼服长裙,呈现一种男女夫妻的画面。但薇奥拉却并没有这么做。我觉得,这暗示着薇奥拉会一直处于这样一种“中间”位置。这样的设定让我认识到,薇奥拉不是为了某些特定目的而女扮男装,不会在目的达到后就放弃伪装的男性身份。西萨里奥这个身份对于她本人,以及她之后的形象意义重大。薇奥拉直到剧末都没有完全放弃这个身份,这是十分现代的做法。


This modern perspective on gender, the idea that Cesario is as important to Viola’s identity as Viola,is communicated by the split nature of the play’s ending. On the one hand, it seems to clarify and reestablish gender and gender identities. On the other hand, characters keep reminding each other and the audience that those identities have not been stabilized.After Sebastian and Cesario meet and Sebastian realizes that Olivia was originally drawn to his sister, his words to Olivia underline the gender-ambiguity at work.

这种性别观很现代。对于薇奥拉而言,西萨里奥这个身份与薇奥拉这个身份是同等重要的。而戏剧那个割裂的结局就很好地传达了这样一种观点。一方面,戏剧结局似乎想要澄清并重塑性别和性别认同。但另一方面,剧中角色却又不断地互相提醒,提醒观众,让他们意识到性别和性别认同并不是一成不变的。西巴斯辛和西萨里奥见面后,他意识到奥丽维娅其实爱上的是自己的妹妹,他对奥丽维娅说的一番话重点体现了这部剧中那模糊的性别界线。


“You would have been contracted to a maid,” he says, “you are betrothed both to a maid and man.” And that's a really interesting phrase. Logically and practically, he means, ‘Both to the disguised Viola and to me.’ But in a more conceptual way, I suppose, we again see this spectre of the half-man, half-woman, the kind of composite twins, the composite Sebastian-Viola.

他说:“您本来要跟一个女孩子订婚。您现在同时是一个女人和一个男人的未婚妻了。”这句话很有意思。他的这番话,从逻辑和实际上看,是在说奥丽维娅“同时是女扮男装后的薇奥拉的未婚妻,也是自己的未婚妻”。但从更概括的角度说,我们再次隐约感受了这种一半男性和一半女性的融合,这种双胞胎形象的融合,西巴斯辛和薇奥拉形象的融合。


I think that these unions look quite striking on the stage. You have got what's ostensibly two men who are a couple, and a woman and a man who are the other couple. So you've got something which looks less normative.

我想,这些融合在舞台上表演出来的时候,一定会十分震撼。你会看到两位男性衣着的夫妻,和一对男女衣着的夫妻。这一幕看起来多少有点儿不符合常规。


I think it's possible to play the ending as the end of playfulness and the end of, sort of, gender disruption, and the return to heteronormativity and heterosexual normative marriage. I think that would be easier if Shakespeare had written Viola back into her women's clothes, which he doesn't do. And we see importantly, Orsino continues to address Viola as Cesario: “But when in other habits you are seen, / Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen.” When will we ever see Viola/Cesario in these other habits? Well, actually never. There isn't a sense that Viola has come back into the frame at all. One could argue thatCesariois the person who gets married, not Viola.

我认为戏剧结尾可能想宣告一切戏谑和性别混乱的结束,让一切回归异性恋正统,回归正常的异性恋婚姻。其实,如果莎士比亚在最后写薇奥拉穿回了女性服装的话,这个目的是很容易实现的,但他却并没有这样做。而且,我们还发现,奥西诺在得知薇奥拉真实身份后,依旧称她为“西萨里奥”:“当你还是一个男人的时候,你便是西萨里奥——等你换过了别样的衣裙,你才是奥西诺心上情人。”那么我们什么时候会看到薇奥拉换上女性的衣裙呢?好吧,实际上,我们根本看不到这一幕。因此,我们根本不会觉得薇奥拉回归了正常框架。甚至有人还认为,真正结婚的其实是西萨里奥,而不是薇奥拉。


So those relationships at the end do, in some ways, reorient themselves around more normative ideas of coupledom. But they're still questioning that, I think, in some interesting ways. There's a sense that, perhaps, they’re still not all quite settled down. And that seems important to me, that the sort of normative marriages, the male-female marriages are not fully embraced at the end. And in fact, here they're quite explicitly pushed, pushed off and deferred off in favour of a final tableau, which is much more -- yeah, I think the modern word is probably right, much morequeer-- queer in all its ways of sort of transgressive or non-normative, in that it has sibling relationships, same-sex relationships, relationships of strangers, all in the frame, as opposed to courtships, standard courtships leading to marriage.

在一定程度上,这些人物关系在剧末确实是围绕着更常见规范的夫妻关系展开的,但他们依旧以一些很有趣的方式提出了某些质疑。让人觉得很多问题其实依旧没有得到解决。在我看来,很重要的一点是,在剧尾,那种正常的婚姻,那种男女之间的婚姻并没有被完全接受。实际上,为了突出戏剧结尾这一幕,结尾明确避开了这样的婚姻关系。对于戏剧结尾这一幕,用一个现代的词来形容就是“怪异”。从很多方面来看,这都是很怪异的一幕戏。这里有各种各样反常规的颠覆性剧情,有兄妹情谊,有同性情谊,有陌生人之间的情谊等等,这些都与异性之间那种标准的,以婚姻为目的的追求相对立。


There’s one particularly significant relationship in the final tableau that doesn’t take the form of a couple. It’s the relationship between Antonio and Sebastian, now splintered by Sebastian’s marriage to Olivia. Antonio plays no role in the comedy’s push to pair people off -- but that’s partly why Emma Smith finds him so interesting.

在最后这一幕中,还有一个非常重要的情谊,单这段关系中的两个人最终并没有结成夫妻。这段情谊就是安东尼奥与西巴斯辛之间的友谊,最终还被西巴斯辛和奥丽维娅的婚姻打破了。在这部喜剧中,安东尼奥的角色并没有促成任何人的婚姻,但这也是在一定程度上让艾玛·史密斯教授看到了这个角色的有趣之处。


I'm really, really fascinated by Antonio, because in a way, he's a completely unnecessary character to the play and yet he is there. Antonio is sort of unnecessary in that, for an ending of the play which understands Viola and Sebastian as the sort of male-female single character, in order for that to work well, we don't want Sebastian to have too much personality of his own. And Antonio's main function in the plot is to give Sebastian more opportunity to show personality and history and backstory. So it's all very, very, very puzzling and very interesting. And I think that Shakespeare has brought Antonio into the play to give us an example of a different kind of -- another kind of love, not necessarily a different kind.

我非常非常喜欢安东尼奥这个角色。因为,在一定程度上看,这个角色其实完全没有存在的必要,但莎士比亚却还是把他安排在了故事里。我之所以说安东尼奥这个角色没有存在的必要,是因为在戏剧结尾,薇奥拉和西巴斯辛是要作为一个男女融合的单一角色出现的,而为了凸显这一点,西巴斯辛就不能拥有太多自己的个人特色。但安东尼奥在剧中的主要作用却又是让西巴斯辛有更多的机会展现自己的个人特色,讲述亲身经历的故事,并突出他的个人背景。所以,这就很令人困惑,但不可否认这也很令人感兴趣。我认为,莎士比亚将安东尼奥这个角色安排进来,是想为我们展现另一种爱,而这种爱与之前那些爱未必会有什么不同。


Onstage, Antonio’s love for Sebastian is often performed as homoerotic or homosexual -- and sometimes, so is Sebastian’s love for Antonio. Antonio’s love is also distinctive for its generosity. In a play with numerous narcissistic or self-centered characters, Antonio stands out as someone who risks imprisonment and possibly death to help and protect the person he loves.

在舞台上,安东尼奥对于西巴斯辛的爱往往被呈现为同性之爱,有时,西巴斯辛对安东尼奥的爱也会以这样的方式被呈现出来。安东尼奥的慷慨无私让他的爱看起来十分与众不同。在这部剧中,大部分角色都是自恋或者以自我为中心的,而安东尼奥却会冒着被监禁,甚至冒着死亡危险去帮助,去保护他所爱的人,就这样,他的形象突显了出来。


Antonio, then, becomes the model of a generous or selfless love, that what he tends to be doing is giving things to Sebastian, protecting him, and then ultimately, giving him away, or watching while he is given away, to someone else. At the end of the play, we've got all kinds of characters who can't be included in the circle of couples, and Antonio watches Sebastian married to Olivia, and there isn't really very much -- there isn't much space for him.

安东尼奥成为了慷慨无私爱情的典范,他给予西巴斯辛很多东西,他保护着他,并且最终心甘情愿地把他交给别人,看着他与别人成婚。在戏剧结尾,我们看到很多未能结为夫妻的角色,安东尼奥看着西巴斯辛与奥丽维娅结婚,他在那个场合中并没有太多的容身之处。


Twelfth Night offers a happy ending to some of its characters, but not to all. Antonio and Malvolio, in different ways, find themselves excluded from relationships they desired. And these cracks in the comedic ending, how it’s filled with both mirth and disappointment, reflect the play’s distinctive emotional palette: its combination of sadness and joy. We generally see those emotions as opposites, and so we see the corresponding genres of tragedy and comedy as opposites, too. But for Shakespeare, says Smith, those genres might not be opposites at all.

《第十二夜》为剧中部分角色书写了圆满美好的结局,但这样的结局并不是所有人都拥有的。安东尼奥和马伏里奥都以不同的方式被排斥在了他们所渴望的爱情之外。这个喜剧结局中充满了欢乐与失望,结局中的这些割裂的地方表现出了戏剧与众不同的情感基调,在这里悲与喜交汇融合。我们一般都会将悲与喜看作是相互对立的情绪,会将悲剧与喜剧看作是互相对立的流派。但史密斯教授却认为,这两种流派其实一点儿也不对立。


Twelfth Night, I think, is in between those. It begins with this atmosphere of melancholy and death. It ends with Feste’s song about the wind and the rain, “The rain it raineth every day” -- death and sadness always sort of threatening to come in, come into the play or to overtake the attempts at happiness or or distraction. This is a dangerous world. It's a world of shipwrecks. It's a world where not everybody who is dead comes back to life, and a world of sort of sadness and rejection, as well as a world of connection and merriment. That continues throughout.

《第十二夜》属于悲剧和喜剧的中间地带。戏剧开始时,一切都笼罩在忧伤和死亡的气氛中。而且,在结尾处,小丑费斯特还唱起了有关风和雨的歌谣,“朝朝雨雨又风风”,这里预示着死亡和悲伤时刻有可能入侵过来,破坏幸福欢乐的氛围。这个世界很危险。这个世界会发生可怕的海难事故。在这个世界上,不是每个人都能够死而复生。在这个世界上,人们有着亲密和欢乐的同时,也会有悲伤和被排挤的痛苦。而且这些情况会永远持续下去。


Sometimes I feel that tragedy sees death and melancholy as an ending, and that's very dramatic and very sort of beautifully shaped -- whereas comedy realizes that, in good ways and in very difficult ways for humans, death and melancholy are actually part of life, and you have to carry on after them. So comedies tend to start, really, in a way where tragedies have ended. They pick up, try and pick up the pieces, or they try and imagine how people sort of get going again after these past sort of traumas. So it feels to me as if they're perhaps the same, kind of, tragedy and comedy for Shakespeare, maybe, have some of the same events, but in a different order.

有时候,我觉得悲剧将死亡和忧郁视作是一切的终结,往往会把它们刻画得极具戏剧性,又极其美感。然而喜剧却认识到,对于人类而言,不论是从美好的方面,还是从困难的方面来看,死亡和忧郁实际上都是生活的一部分,在经历过死亡和忧郁之后,我们依旧要继续我们的生活。所以,喜剧往往会以悲剧终结为开端。他们试图捡起一个又一个碎片,试图想象人们在经历过重大创伤后将会如何重新开始新的生活。因此我认为,从某种程度上说,莎士比亚的悲剧和喜剧其实是一样的,它们都讲述着相同的事件,只不过这些事件发生的顺序不一样罢了。


In our next episode, we’ll see how the play blends tragic and comic moods from the very first lines -- and how it blends laughter and cruelty. We’ll also analyze key speeches that set out that contrast between self-love and generous love.

下集节目,我们将从戏剧的最开始探讨戏剧是如何将悲伤与欢乐相融合,如何让欢笑与残酷相融合。同时,我们还将分析一些重要的台词选段,从这些台词中感受自爱与无私的爱之间的差异与不同。

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