【解读】李尔王2 角色、文本和问题：利用“没有”

King Lear -- Part 2 -- Making Something Out of Nothing (The Characters, Context, and Questions)

《李尔王》——第二部分——利用“没有”（角色、背景和问题）

King Leartakes its audience on a tumultuous emotional journey, from Lear’s fury in the storm, to his tender reconciliation with Cordelia, to the horror of the play’s final, fatal moments. In this episode, we speak with Simon Palfrey, Professor of English at the University of Oxford, about the play’s expansive scope: from its intimate look at human relationships to its metaphysical exploration of what life is at its essence, and what it means to be reduced to nothing.

《李尔王》带领观众们踏上一段喧嚣动荡的情绪之旅。旅途中，我们可以感受到李尔在暴风雨中的狂怒，可以体会到他与女儿考狄利娅冰释前嫌时的温情，还可以品味到戏剧结尾那一幕幕死亡景象的惊悚与恐怖。本集节目，我们将继续对话牛津大学英语文学教授西蒙·帕尔弗里，与他一同探索戏剧的广阔维度，戏剧既有对人与人之间关系的细微探查，也有对生命本质形而上的追寻，同时它还对“没有”这个概念的意义展开了求索。

Simon Palfrey:King Learis so capacious, it’s got so much, that the only problem is if a critical view pretends to have encompassed the play, to have captured it, to have explained it, subdued it. That's -- you're not going to do that.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：戏剧《李尔王》气势恢弘，涵盖了非常丰富的内容和要素，它唯一的问题就是，对于一部如此宏大的戏剧，我们是否可以只用一个核心观点来概括剧中的一切，解释剧中的一切，把握剧中的一切呢？不，这不可能。

The play’s capaciousness starts with its main character. Lear is a figure who can be seen in multiple ways: both as an individual, and a representation of universal human experience.

戏剧的宏大气势始于主角李尔。对于李尔这个角色，我们可以从多个角度来解读。一方面，他是一个独立的个体，另一方面，他又象征着世人都会有的普遍经历。

Simon Palfrey: Lear is defined by very limited particular characteristics. He's petulant, he's spoiled, he's bad-tempered, he's impatient, he's sort of shrill, and he's infantile. He’s, you know, what his daughters say -- he's never known himself. In the one sense, he’s a very limited human being. He's been placed in this position of enormous authority, and then renounces that authority and then is left with his own kind of weakness, his own sort of self-cannibalizing fury or something. It’s a typical Shakespeare thing, to create this enormous figure who's in so many ways tiny.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：李尔有着明显的性格缺陷。他倔强易怒，脾气不好，没有耐心，还很幼稚任性。就像他女儿说的，他根本不了解自己。甚至可以说，他并不是一个性格健全的人。起初，他拥有无边的权力。但后来，他主动放弃了这些权力，只留下了自己的弱点和缺陷，以及那不断消耗自我的愤怒情绪等等。他是典型的莎士比亚式人物形象，高大伟岸，但在许多方面却又很渺小卑微。

Simon Palfrey: But Lear is also a character who absolutely does encompass the whole gamut of human experience. Lear, in some ways, has his origins in morality play figures who are always kind of everyman, who embody the whole range of human responses and become kind of compendia of all the possible virtues and vices of human beings.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：但李尔这个角色同时也包罗了普遍的人类经历。从某些角度看，李尔来源于道德剧中的角色，这类角色往往都是普通人，他们面对事情时候的反应是普通人类都会有的，他们身上同时存在着人类都所有可能具备的美德与邪恶。

Morality plays were a type of medieval drama in which figures representing universal qualities acted out stories that symbolized internal spiritual journeys. In one play, a figure called Everyman, who represents all human beings, goes on a journey towards death. In Shakespeare’s play, we follow Lear not just towards death but symbolically througheverystage of human life.

道德剧是中世纪的一种戏剧形式，故事的主人公拥有普通世人的种种品质，他们所表演的故事寓意人类内心的精神之旅。有一部道德剧，它的主人公名叫“世人”，“世人”象征着世间所有人类。戏剧讲述的是他那段通向死亡的旅途。不过，在莎士比亚所创作的《李尔王》中，我们不只是跟随李尔朝着死亡前行，我们更是与他一起经历着人生的每一个阶段。

Simon Palfrey: He's massively old, he's kind of titanically old. At the same time, he's a child. He's talked about as a baby, he's treated as a child by his daughters -- he regresses into this state of a kind of childlike nakedness. After enduring madness, he comes back, and he's there, and Cordelia is like a midwife, a kind of a magical angel figure. There's music, he's being reborn, almost literally reborn. And he says, “You do me wrong to take me out of the grave.” So he goes through, in all sorts of ways -- so many different life stages are experienced by Lear in the play, that it really does have the sense of a person who's reliving, in this incredibly accelerated way, all of the possibilities of life.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：李尔衰老年迈，他年纪非常非常大了。但同时，他又十分孩子气。他说话的语气就像个婴儿，他的女儿们也像对待幼童一样地对待他。他一步步退回到了孩童般的赤裸状态。当他从癫狂中恢复后，他又变得正常了，回归了原本的模样。对他而言，考狄利娅就像一名接生婆，有着天使般的魔法。伴随着音乐声，李尔重生了，是真的字面意义上的那种重生。李尔自己也说：“你不应该把我从坟墓中间拖了出来。”从很多方面看，李尔在剧中经历了人生的许多不同阶段。这种感觉就像是一个人再次以极快的速度又一次走过了自己的一生。

Morality plays were didactic, written to teach clear ethical and spiritual lessons. Some critics have readKing Learin similar terms. Lear makes a grave mistake at the play’s beginning and must ask the angelic Cordelia for forgiveness. Gloucester committed adultery and pays the price of his sin when the resulting child, the bastard Edmund, turns on his father. But though Lear may resemble a figure from a morality play, this story does not offer quite such clear lessons.

道德剧的目的为了说教，旨在给人们提供道德和精神上的教育。有不少评论家从道德剧的角度解读戏剧《李尔王》。戏剧一开始，李尔就犯下了可怕的错误，之后不得不请求天使般的考狄利娅的原谅。而至于葛罗斯特伯爵，他早年与人私通，后来他的私生子爱德蒙与他反目，这也正是葛罗斯特伯爵为私通而付出的惨痛代价。虽然李尔有着道德剧角色的特色，但《李尔王》这部剧却并没有明确的说教内容。

Simon Palfrey: Certain particular moralistic understandings of the play see the play as transgression and punishment of transgression. There's a strong vein of moralistic criticism which draws upon the morality play tradition, which I think is absolutely there in the play. I think the play is a very explicit and sustained engagement with morality plays, in which, you know, there are certain things which are sins, certain transgressions, and you will pay for them. It's very straightforward and Lear does have that there. But it's much, much, much more complicated and modified, because it's a play which holds multiple moral, ethical, spiritual, theological positions in equipoise all the time.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：对于这部剧特定的道德解读认为，戏剧讲述了违背道德的行为，以及违背道德后会遭受的惩罚。我也认为，这部剧中确实借鉴了道德剧的传统，有着明显的道德主义批判风格。这部剧明显与道德剧有着千丝万缕的联系，包含了道德剧的种种要素，如罪恶和背德行为，以及为此将要付出的代价。戏剧内容在剧中都有明确体现，李尔也确实犯下了这些错误。但故事却又不仅仅局限于这些，作者在此基础上作出了一定的修改，让剧情变得更为复杂，涵盖了伦理、道德、精神以及神学等多重内容。

Some of the play’s complexities arise from the way that Shakespeare revises his source material. The story of King Lear came from a twelfth-century history and was retold in numerous chronicles, as well as in a play from the 1590s calledThe True Chronicle History of King Leir. In every version of the story before Shakespeare’s, Lear is overthrown by his two eldest daughters but ultimately restored to the throne with the help of his loving youngest daughter, who succeeds him as ruler. This tragicomic story, starting in calamity but ending in happiness, follows a biblical pattern familiar to Shakespeare’s Christian audience: loss and redemption, symbolic death and rebirth. Shakespeare echoes that Christian story in moments throughout the play: when Gloucesterthinkshe has fallen off a cliff and is told, “Thy life’s a miracle”; and the moment before Lear and Cordelia’s reconciliation, when Lear thinks he has died and that she is a saint in heaven.

戏剧部分的复杂性源于莎士比亚对历史原型的改写。李尔王的故事取材于12世纪的一段历史，这段历史被记载于大量编年史书中，甚至在16世纪90年代就有过一部名为《李尔王的真实编年史》的戏剧。在莎士比亚的《李尔王》之前，每一个版故事中，李尔都是被他的两个大女儿推翻，但之后他又都在最爱的小女儿的帮助下夺回了王位，并且小女儿最终被确立为王位的继承人。这部悲喜剧从不幸开始，以圆满收尾，遵循的是莎士比亚时期基督教观众们所熟悉的圣经式叙事模式：失去与救赎，以及象征性的死亡与重生。莎士比亚时不时就会在剧中呼应基督教的相关故事。当葛罗斯特以为自己从悬崖上坠落时，有人对他说“你的生命是一个奇迹”；而就在李尔和考狄利娅冰释前嫌之前，李尔曾以为自己已经死了，以为考狄利娅是天国中的一位圣人。

Simon Palfrey: The play gives us an exquisite scene of reconciliation and redemption, which then isn't the end of the play. You could end the play at the moment with Lear and Cordelia and it would be a beautiful play. The version of King Lear in the 1590s was itself a Christian tragicomedy.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：戏剧为我们呈现了父女和解并互相救赎的场面。但戏剧却并没有在此结束。其实，作者完全可以在李尔与考狄利娅重归旧好时结束戏剧，这样戏剧就会拥有一个圆满美好的结局。16世纪90年代的那版《李尔王》故事就是这样一部基督教悲喜剧。

But Shakespeare purposelyaltersthat original redemptive ending. Instead of having Lear and Cordelia end up victorious, he has Cordeliadie. Any audience member who knew the original story would have been expecting a consoling conclusion that suggests a providential force guiding the world and protecting the good. Shakespeare deliberately takes that consolation away.

但莎士比亚却刻意地修改了原版故事的救赎结局，他没有为李尔和考狄利娅书写一个胜利的结局，相反他还把考狄利娅写死了。任何一个知道原版故事的观众都还在期待那个令人安慰的结局，以为上天会庇护这个世界，会保护善良的人们。但莎士比亚却有意地修改了这个可以慰藉人心的结局。

Simon Palfrey: Shakespeare changes the plot. In this play, notoriously, terribly, Cordelia predeceases her father. This is Shakespeare's innovation. And it’s a sort of scandalous, if you like, violation of the source. We experience something of the satisfactions of a tragicomedy, in that the lost child returns to the parent, forgives the parent, and they have a scene of unsurpassable sort of tenderness and beauty where you get the feeling of promise, the promised land of restoration, of redemption. And then, of course, it's destroyed.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：莎士比亚修改了故事的情节。在他的故事里，很可怕、很出人意料地，考狄利娅比李尔先去世了。这是莎士比亚的一次革新，他出乎所有人意料地将原型故事进行了改编。在之前的那部悲喜剧版本中，我们可以收获大量的满足和安慰：出走的孩子回到了父亲身边，原谅了父亲，孩子与父亲之间的充满了无法超越的温情和美好，这些让你感受到了希望，觉得一切都会恢复原样，相信一切都会得到救赎。可事实上，所有的一切全都被摧毁了。

Shakespeare didn’t just revise his sources. He also revised his own play. One text ofKing Learwas published in 1608. A substantially different text was published in the 1623 First Folio. Scholars believe this later text represents Shakespeare’s own deliberate changes to the play. These changes onlyamplifythe bleakness that Shakespeare added to Lear’s story.

莎士比亚不仅修改了原型故事，甚至还修改了自己曾经创作的初版《李尔王》。1608年，莎士比亚创作的第一版《李尔王》问世，但它与1623年第一对开本中所收入的版本有很大的差别。一些学者认为，1623年版里面的改变是莎士比亚有意为之。这些改变放大了莎士比亚为故事所增补的苍凉和萧瑟。

Simon Palfrey: Shakespeare cuts explanatory moments where, at the end of a scene, you might get a character who will comment upon the scene that's just happened. For example, after Gloucester is blinded, you then get a couple of other servants basically saying, “I'm going to look after him and I'm going to wash his eyes and daub them and take care of him.”

西蒙·帕尔弗里：莎士比亚删除了每场戏结束时的阐述性台词。初版剧本中，每场戏结束时，总会有一个角色为观众点评刚刚发生的剧情。例如，在葛罗斯特失明后，会有两个仆人在一旁说：“我会照顾他，替他洗洗眼睛，为他上药，我们会好好照料他的。”

Simon Palfrey: Lear will be taken off to the hovel, and then Edgar will remain onstage to say a sequence of rhyming couplets, reflecting upon it, giving a kind of attempt to sort of put this in place. And I think in many ways that those scenes are beautiful and they offer a perspective upon the action, and they point toward a kind of persisting humanity and care in the world in the midst of chaos. But Shakespeare probably cuts these things for precisely that reason. He doesn't want us to settle upon a kind of morally comfortable position. And he doesn't give you any of those kinds of comfort, any respite in the revised version.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：同样，在李尔被带往小茅屋后，爱德伽会留在舞台上说一段押韵的对句，回顾刚刚发生的事情，并试图解决遇到的问题。从很多方面看，这些场景都很美好，它们提出了一种看待问题的态度，让人们在混沌的世界中依旧可以感受到人性和关怀。但在之后的那个版本中，莎士比亚却把这些内容全删了，也许是因为他不想让我们安安稳稳地坐在一旁，等着别人给我们上一节道德课吧。在修改后的《李尔王》中，这些温馨的时刻都没有了。

Shakespeare’s revisions allowKing Learto evoke multiple genres at once: both comedyandtragedy. Similarly, there are multiple literary lenses through which we could interpret the play’s main characters. Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia can be viewed as the villains and the heroine of a mythological tale, or as flawed but sympathetic players in a harshly realistic political drama.

修改后的《李尔王》还同时具备了多种戏剧流派的特征，它既是一部喜剧，也是一部悲剧。同样地，我们还可以从不同的文学角度去解读剧中的主要人物。我们可以把高纳里尔、里根和考狄利娅看作是神话传说中的坏人和女英雄，或者把她们都解读成残酷现实主义政治戏剧中有瑕疵、但也令人同情的角色。

Simon Palfrey: It depends from the frame in which we understand it. You can think in terms of mythic archetypes, the “good child,” the “bad child.” You've got the bad daughters and the good daughter, you've got the bad son and the good son, that sort of stuff. But as always, Shakespeare is not quite so simple. And so, Cordelia is truth. She is. But we also get these hints, which are very alive in performance, of somebody who is stubborn, who is obtuse, who is willfully not doing what she's required to do in that situation, somebody who is proud, who is contemptuous of her sisters, who is spoiled -- I'm not offering these sort of things as a judgment. I'm offering these sort of things as these are absolutely possible inferences from what she's given to say, and they are absolutely easily personified, manifested in performance. So Shakespeare is sustaining a character who is, at one and the same time, an absolute figure of truth and trust -- and a figure who's engaged in this kind of rivalrous family drama where she's, in her own way, flawed and stubborn and difficult and so forth. So it's different frameworks.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：这些取决于我们把戏剧放置于怎样的框架中进行解读。你也许会想到神话故事中常见的人物模式，那种“好孩子”和“坏孩子”模式。你有几位邪恶的坏女儿和一个心地善良的好女儿，你有坏儿子和好儿子，等等之类的剧情。但我们都知道，按照莎士比亚一贯的操作，故事并不会这么简单。考狄利娅象征着真理。她也确实是这样的一个角色。但在欣赏戏剧的时候，我们也可以从一些很明确的线索中了解到，考狄利娅还是一个固执的人，有点儿迟钝，她会故意不去做她在特定情况下被要求去做的事情，她有着自己的骄傲，瞧不起自己姐姐，是个被娇惯、被溺爱的孩子。不过当然了，我提出的这些解读并不是说要给她下最终的判断。这些解读是我从考狄利娅的台词中推断出的可能性理解，这些特点很容易人格化，很容易通过表演展现出来。由此可以看出，莎士比亚笔下的考狄利娅，一方面象征着绝对的真理和信任，但同时她也是家庭情感剧中的那种有瑕疵、性格固执，而且还不好相处的角色。所以，在不同角度下，我们可以得出不同的解读。

Cordelia can be read as an angelic figure committed to the virtue of truth, making Goneril and Regan look like the “wicked stepsisters” of a fairy tale. But if you choose to look at the play through a realistic psychological framework, as many modern productions do, these roles become less clear-cut.

考狄利娅就像天使，她坚持真理和美德，在她的反衬下，高纳里尔和里根简直就是童话故事中的“邪恶的姐妹”。但如果和很多现代的改编故事那样，从现实心理剧的故事框架下去分析她们，我们会发现想要定义这两个角色并不容易，因为她们不再是非黑即白的了。

Simon Palfrey: These days on stage, what you mostly find with the daughters is that they're absolutely psychologized. They’re turned into typical modern women. And so, Goneril and Regan come off really well because they're funny, they're harsh, they're impatient. They're kind of a little bit feminist. They've got independent will. They know how to play the game.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：你会发现，如今舞台上所呈现的戏剧对李尔的三个女儿都做了行为和心理上的解读。她们就像是有血有肉的典型现代女性。高纳里尔和里根的形象十分生动，她们很有趣，很严格，没什么耐心，带着点儿女性主义者的特质，有着独立的意愿，知道如何为人处世。

Alongside their harshness and independence, Goneril and Regan can also manifest feelings of justifiable hurt and resentment. It may be that Lear hasalwaysneglected them in his clear favoritism towards Cordelia. As Goneril says, “He always loved our sister most.”

高纳里尔和里根除了尖酸刻薄和坚强独立，也会遭受伤害、产生憎恨。李尔太偏爱考狄利娅，总是忽视她们俩。就像高纳里尔说的：“他最爱的是我们的妹妹”。

Simon Palfrey:King Learis a play about family. It's about what it's like to live in a family, about the blindness and ignorance and passions and unspoken feelings that exist within families.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：《李尔王》同时探讨了家庭问题。它探讨了家庭生活，探讨了家庭中的盲目、无知与热爱，以及那些无法用言语表达的情绪。

What sets off the characters’ passions, particularly Lear’s, is precisely Cordelia’s refusal to speak about her feelings -- her reply, when Lear commands her to declare her love, is “Nothing.” The word “nothing” resonates through the play. It sparks Lear’s break with Cordelia. The Fool, whose jokes and songs conceal biting philosophical wisdom, tells Lear how he has ruined himself by saying, “Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and leftnothingi’ th’ middle.” And when Edgar transforms himself into Poor Tom, he says, “‘Edgar,I nothing am.” This refrain of “nothing” raises deep existential questions about how little human life can be reduced to.

真正触发剧中角色，尤其是李尔强烈情绪的，正是考狄利娅拒绝说出自己对父亲的感情。当李尔命令她说说有多爱自己时，考狄利娅却回应道：“我没有话说。”“没有”这个词在剧中反复出现。它最终导致了李尔与考狄利娅的决裂。李尔身边有个爱说笑、爱唱歌的小丑，但他的笑话和歌唱中却往往蕴涵着深刻的哲思。小丑对李尔说，他所作的一切其实是在毁灭自己：“你把你的聪明从两边削掉了，削得中间没有一点儿东西。”而当爱德伽伪装成可怜的汤姆后也说：“我再也没有一点儿是爱德伽了。”“没有”这个词不断出现，反复被提及，它提出了有关存在的问题，让我们思考人生可以被削减到怎样低的程度。

Simon Palfrey: The play is interested in what the word means. What does “nothing” mean? Does “nothing” mean zero? Does “nothing” mean speechlessness? Does “nothing” mean landlessness? Lear has given his land away, and so “nothing” means to lack possessions. He's given his crown away, and therefore he's got this kind of empty head. So “nothing” means kind of brainlessness. So Lear loses his land. He loses his mind. He's even naked. But you meet the figure of Poor Tom who’s a figure without anything, who's homeless, who's mad Tom, he's mindless, and all this sort of stuff. It's also asking whether there is such a thing as nothingness -- the idea, for example, of the worst. Is there such a thing as the worst? Is there such a thing as something which is unsustainable or unlivable? And the answer is probably no. And that is one of the things that's most striking about King Lear. As much as it's a play that leads kind of inexorably to loss, it also continually discovers something where there seems to be nothing, something in the condition of nothing. Even if it's when Gloucester loses his eyes, even there, you get the care that attends his blindness, the care, indeed, of Edgar or poor Tom, who then leads him on. Part of the fearlessness of the play is that it's prepared to keep looking at what appears to be nothing, and finding something, something there.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：戏剧十分关注“没有”这个词的意思。“没有”意味着什么？“没有”意味着“零”吗？“没有”意味着无话可说吗？“没有”意味着没有领地吗？李尔放弃了属于自己的领地，所以“没有”意味着没有所有物。他还把王位拱手给了别人，所以他的脑袋上也什么都“没有”。这样看的话，“没有”还意味着脑袋里空无一物。李尔没有了领土，没有了智慧，甚至连身上也什么都没有了，他几乎是赤身裸体。接着我们又看到了可怜的汤姆这个角色，他也是一无所有，没有家，疯疯癫癫，没有脑子。戏剧还发问，问在这个世界上是否真的存在“没有”这个东西，究竟什么是“最糟糕”。真的有“最糟糕”这种东西吗？真的有那种无法持续、无法维系的东西吗？但答案很可能是“没有”。而这也正是李尔身上最引人注意的一点。虽然这部剧主要在讲述失去，但是它却又能够不断地在看似什么都没有的地方找出一些东西来，在“虚无”之地有所发现。例如，葛罗斯特虽然失去了双眼，但他却又得到了照顾，他有爱德伽或者说有可怜的汤姆领着他一路向前。这部剧之所以会让人觉得勇敢且无所畏惧，部分原因在于它会不断地在看似什么都“没有”的环境中坚持寻找，并最终在“没有”中，有所发现。

When he first sees his blinded father, Edgar steels himself by saying, “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” The play asks what still remains when it seems that all is lost -- even as it also imagines the world coming to an end. This annihilating vision comes to a climax in the scene of Lear in the storm, when he imagines the destruction of all life and also comes face to face with life in its barest form.

爱德伽第一次看到双目失明的父亲时，他希望自己能够保持坚强，他鼓励着自己说：“当我们能够说‘这是最不幸的事’的时候，那还不是最不幸的。”戏剧想要找寻，当一切都失去的时候，甚至是临近末日时，世界上还会剩下些什么。这种毁灭的景象在李尔冲进暴风雨中的那场戏里达到了高潮，李尔想象着一切的生命全部被摧毁的情景，想象着面对生命最赤裸状态时候的场景。

Simon Palfrey: He says, “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! … Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world. / Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once / That makes ingrateful man.” Everything he's saying, these are images of pregnancy. The “thick rotundity of the world,” the world's imagined is as a pregnant woman. The germens that he wants to spill, germans mean seeds. So he wants all the seeds of life to be spilt. So in one sense, that means he wants life to be over, to be done with. He wants an absolute apocalypse. We've finished with a world of deception, of deceit, of fake language, of flattery, of houses. That's all gone. But the end days are also the beginning days. And so the seeds that spill, on the one hand, it means Armageddon, the end of the world. On the other hand, it means a kind of undetermined origin of things. What's going to happen when these seeds, as it were, sprout or hatch? He's entering the most basic conditions of being, which are simultaneously post-human, pre-human, I think, and, of course, human.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：李尔高喊着，“吹吧，风啊！胀破了你的脸颊，猛烈地吹吧！......你，震撼一切的霹雳啊，把这生殖繁密的、饱满的地球击平了吧！打碎造物的模型，不要让一颗忘恩负义的人类的种子遗留在世上！”他说的每一句话，都体现着孕育生命的意象。“这生殖繁密的、饱满的地球”这一句中，他把世界想象成了一位怀孕的女性。他想要摧毁人类的种子。他想要摧毁生命所有的种子。由此我们可以看出，他希望所有生命都消失，希望一切都结束。他希望世界毁灭，希望这个充满欺骗、充满诡计、充满花言巧语、阿谀奉承和弯弯绕绕的世界全都毁灭。他希望一切都消失。但是，终结的日子同时也意味着新的开始。所以一方面，摧毁人类的种子意味着“世界末日”的到来，意味着世界的终结。但另一方面，摧毁也象征着一种不确定的万物起源。如果这些种子生根发芽，孕育出新的生命时会发生什么？这样的话，李尔便进入了存在的最基本形态，这些形态中既有后人类形态，也是前人类形态，当然，还有人类形态。

This apocalyptic sense of beginning and end, the reduction of man and the origins of creaturely life, is embodied in the figure of Poor Tom.

这种蕴涵着开始与结束的末日氛围，这种人性的消亡，以及新生命的诞生，全都融合在了可怜的汤姆这个角色身上。

Simon Palfrey: Kent and the Fool and Gloucester, they're all saying, “go to the hovel, come to the hovel, come to the hovel”. The hovel, for Kent, say, represents a little bit of safety, a little bit of a kind of sanity. It's going to protect Lear against the elements, and it's going to protect his idea of community and of civilization, almost. But the hovel is then, as it were, altered by the fact that out of it erupts this figure of Poor Tom -- “Fathom and a half, fathom and a half, Poor Tom.” The only thing that Lear recognizes is that, is that figure -- he is the thing itself, right. And what do you get? You get this figure who's kind of almost literally exploding with thousands and thousands of lives -- there's inextricable connections between him and pond life, between the beast, between the hogs and the wolves and the dogs, and he's one with all these creatures. You get this idea of multiple lives lived in one, this tremendous turbulence, this sleepless sense of guilt and remorse and inescapable suffering, and all compacted into this manic individual who's, at one and the same time, an image of Lear, his own sense of grief, remorse, guilt, and chaos. But also he's an image of the community, of the people that he's always forgotten. And there's this entire nation -- but it's a nation without any order. All of the hierarchies have disappeared.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：肯特、小丑和葛罗斯特他们都说“到茅屋去，去茅屋，快去茅屋”。对于肯特而言，茅屋是一方小小的安全区域，是一方小小的理智之地。小茅屋可以保护李尔不受伤害，让他可以继续正常地与人交往，可以让他继续保持理智与文明。然而，等他们来到茅屋前，他们发现那里却并非想象中的那般理智平和，因为那里面竟然还有“可怜的汤姆”，嘴里说着：“九尺深，九尺深！可怜的汤姆！”从汤姆身上，李尔发现他保全着天赋的原形。我们从中这个角色身上可以看出些什么呢？这个角色身上充斥着成千上万的生命形态，他与水塘里的生物有着千丝万缕的联系，他与野兽有联系，与猪有联系，与狼和狗也有联系。他一个人与所有生物都息息相关。我们可以从他身上看到多种多样的生命体，动荡又混乱，内疚、自责和无法逃避的痛苦遭遇让他无法入眠，这一切全都压缩在了疯子汤姆一个人身上。此时，李尔心中也充斥着悲伤、悔恨、内疚和混乱。但同时，李尔也象征着社群关系，象征着那些经常被他遗忘忽视的人。这是一个完整的国度，但却又是一个没有界限的国度。所有的阶级阶层全都消失了。

In Poor Tom’s “uncovered body,” Lear gets a glimpse of the “poor naked wretches” of whom he says he has taken “too little care.” He also gets a glimpse of what lies under all the titles and adornments of nobility: the naked essence of humanity. “Thou art the thing itself,” he tells Tom. “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”

“赤身裸体”的可怜的汤姆让李尔想到了那些他以往“一向太没有想到的”“衣不蔽体的不幸的人们”。除此之外，这还让他想到了隐藏在所有头衔名号和贵族地位之下的那赤裸且不加修饰的人性最本质的内容。李尔对汤姆说：“只有你才保全着天赋的原形；人类在草昧的时代，不过是像你这样的一个寒碜的赤裸的两脚动物。”

Simon Palfrey: When people talk aboutKing Learas a universal play, as a cosmic play, it's the combination of having this enormous storm, this kind of world-historical storm, and then getting that storm, as it were, distilled, concentrated into this figure who animates it and kind of takes it, embodies that, and realizes it to be a completely different play than if you just had the king by himself feeling cold and miserable. Poor Tom realizes the reality of this in a way. He's the only person who Lear can talk to, he's the only person who he can converse with -- and that's because they had this kind of -- like at the center of the whirlpool, there's recognition. And so the question is, what exactly is it that you are recognizing?

西蒙·帕尔弗里：当人们把《李尔王》看作是一部宇宙般宏大戏剧来解读时，会发现戏剧中有着世界历史级别的猛烈暴风雨，但很快这场暴风雨又凝练到了一个单一人物身上，接着再由这个人物对暴风雨进行演绎和重现。于是，戏剧就呈现出了完全不同的样子，和你仅仅只从国王自身的寒冷和痛苦去理解是完全不一样的。可怜的汤姆在一定程度上认识到了这个事实。他是唯一一个李尔可以与之沟通交流的人。因为在旋涡的中心，他们可以互相共情对方。那么，从他们身上我们究竟可以看到什么呢？

One thing Lear might recognize is his connection with this “poor, bare animal” - and by extension, with all life. Until now, Lear has insisted on hisdistinction. He wants to bemore loved,moreauthoritative than anyone else. When Goneril challenges that authority, Lear says, “Does any here know me? This is not Lear … Who is it that can tell me who I am?” His sense of “who he is”is so strongly tied to his superior status that he cannot recognize himself without it. When he gave his daughters his kingdom, he insisted, “Only we shall retain / The name and all th’ addition to a king.” But “Poor Tom” has no “additions.” He has nothing at all, not even a piece of cloth to cover his body. And when Lear meets him in the storm, something moves him to want to be more like Poor Tom. “Off, off, you lendings!” he cries, and strips off his clothes, trying to become as bare as Tom and the beasts he lives among.

李尔也许看到了自己与这个“可怜赤裸的动物”之间的关系，或者再放大一些说，他看到了自己与所有生命之间的关系。即便是在这种情况下，李尔依旧认为自己是高贵优越的。他希望比其他人拥有更多的爱和更大的权威。当初高纳里尔挑战他的权威时，他说：“这有谁不认识我？这不是李尔。......谁能够告诉我我是什么人？”他对于“自己是什么人”的理解强烈依赖于他高高在上的地位，所以，一旦他失去了那显赫的地位，他也就无法认清自己了。所以，当他把自己的王国分割了两个女儿时，他依旧坚持要“保留国王的名义和尊号”。但“可怜的汤姆”连这些都没能留住，汤姆一无所有，连一件可以蔽体的衣物都没有。当李尔在暴风雨中见到他时，有些东西触动了他，他希望可以变得更像可怜的汤姆，他高喊“脱下来，脱下来，你们这些身外之物！”，他一边说一边扯去身上的衣服，他想像汤姆那样赤身裸体，想变得和身边的野兽一样。

Simon Palfrey: With a Poor Tom figure, where he really is at one with the animals and even below the animals, with vegetable life or selling the life for some sense in which the interconnectedness of things in all sorts of ways, both terrifying but also redeeming, because there is that sense in which you could in keenly, might eradicate and play almost as eradicate the human. But even if you did eradicate the human, that wouldn't be the end of life. Things would remain. I think it's one of the reasons whyKing Learbecame such a powerful and sort of potent play in the 1950s, 1960s, which were the age of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear apocalypse and so forth. We had this sense that the play was in touch with this kind of post-apocalyptic world where you had the big bomb -- and what can rise from that wreckage?

西蒙·帕尔弗里：可怜的汤姆一度沦落成动物那般不堪，甚至还不如动物，而是植物或者微生物。他以一切可以想到的方式与其他的生命体建立联系，很惊悚可怕，但他从中也得到了救赎，因为这样你也许可以消除人性，这部剧也确实抹除了人性。但即便你抹除了人性，生命依旧不会就此终结。依旧会有东西留存下来的。我觉得这大概也是《李尔王》会在二十世纪五六十年代产生重大影响力的原因之一吧。那正是冷战时期，人们一直处于对核武器等威胁的恐惧中。我们可以感觉到，戏剧试图探讨在经历了大轰炸灾难后，世界会变成什么模样，在废墟之上会我们可以建立什么？

What arises from the wreckage may be a clearer recognition of what was actually there before. The storm is when Lear realizes his flatterers at court never told him the truth about what he was: ordinary, vulnerable. “When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter … there I found ‘em, there I smelt ’em out,” he later says. “They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie. I am not ague-proof.” Similarly, for Gloucester, the moment of his blinding is the moment he gains insight into his own past misjudgments. “I stumbled when I saw,” he says.

也许，从废墟中，我们会更加清晰地认识到那些曾经实际存在过的东西。李尔在暴风雨中明白了，宫廷中那些曾阿谀奉承过他的人根本没有说实话，他们没有告诉他说他不过也是个普通人，没有告诉他他也很脆弱。李尔说：“当雨点淋湿了我，风吹得我牙齿打战，......我才发现了她们，嗅出了她们。......这全然是个谎，一发起烧来我就没有办法。”和李尔一样，葛罗斯特也是在失明的那一刻才知道自己所犯下的那些错误。他说：“当我能够看见的时候，我也会失足颠仆。”

King Learasks what remains when everything seems to be stripped away: whether an individual’s sense of identity, or entire forms of life from the planet. This incredible capaciousness, the ability to take in both the largest and the smallest units of life, is one of Shakespeare’s signature traits, and part of what makes his plays so philosophically rich.

《李尔王》希望理清在撕去一切之后，还会余下些什么：是个人的自我身份意识，还是地球上完整的生命形式呢？这种包罗万象的宏大叙事，这种既可以探讨生命最庞大单元，又不忽视生命最小单元的能力是莎士比亚的一个显著个人特色，也正是这个特色令他的戏剧充满了哲学上的思考。

Simon Palfrey: Shakespeare, he's always seeing the large in the small and small in the large. He never loses sight of the particular, of the specific, local feeling-ness in things, at the same time as he recognizes that every single lived thing is an example of many other lived things, stand for many other lived things. So every emotion in Shakespeare is at once, at one at the same time, absolutely unique and particular to that specific moment, but also exemplary. It can ifanyone can recognize themselves in that. It's not onethenthe other, or oneorthe other. It's oneinsidethe other, all the time.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：莎士比亚总是可以从微小中看到宏大，从宏大中发现微小。他从不会忽略个人对事物的感觉，同时他也明白每一个单独的生命个体都象征着许多其他生命体，代表着其他的生命体。所以莎剧中角色的每一种情绪既是特定时刻所独有的，又是普遍适用的。任何人都可以在这种情绪中找到自己。它不是非此即彼得，也不是彼此割裂的，而是你中有我，我中有你的，一直以来都是如此。

These two forces, the specific and the cosmic, come together most memorably in Cordelia’s death. Lear carries her body in and cries, “Lend me a looking glass. / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives.” And Kent responds, “Is this the promised end?” On the one hand, our attention is focused on the most minute of physical shifts: the trace of a woman’s breath on a mirror. On the other hand, we are asked to imagine the largest possible alteration of the earth: the “promised end,” the apocalypse. And Lear draws both great and small together in his cry as he carries Cordelia : “Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / Thatheaven’svault should crack.She’sgone forever.”

具体与抽象两股力量相互交织，在考狄利娅去世的那场戏中，这两股力量的交织程度达到了顶峰。李尔抱着考狄利娅的尸体大声哭嚎：“借一面镜子给我；要是她的气息还能够在镜面上呵起一层薄雾，那么她还没有死。”肯特回应道：“这就是世界最后的结局吗？”一方面，我们的注意力落在了十分细微的生理动作上，我们会留意到一位女性落在镜面上的气息。另一方面，另一个角色又在提醒我们世界可能发生的巨大改变：最后的结局，最后的大灾难。李尔的哭嚎将宏大与微小相互融合，他抱着考狄利娅的尸体大喊：“哀号吧，哀号吧，哀号吧！啊！你们都是些石头一样的人；要是我有了你们的那些舌头和眼睛，我要用我的眼泪和哭声震撼穹苍。她是一去不回的了。”

Simon Palfrey: This feeling of passion, of fearlessness, of wildness, of something just ripping the lid off and revealing life as it actually is, free from decorum, free from rules, free from obedience, allowing humans to speak as humans, as though for the very first time -- I do think that's what Shakespeare does.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：热情、无畏、狂野等情绪全都宣泄了出来，展现着生命最真实的样子，不受礼节的约束，不受制度的束缚，不受权威的控制，似乎是有史以来第一次，人们可以以人类最本真的姿态表达自我。这正是莎士比亚的伟大之处。

The playKing Learasks what remains when destruction seems at its worst; it also removes many sources of comfort. In the next episode, when we look closely at Lear’s speech over Cordelia’s body, we’ll see how the play simultaneously offersanddenies consolation at this moment. But whatever the play strips away from its characters, it also offers its audience something enduring -- it offers language and story that are full of endless possible meanings.

《李尔王》探讨了在经历了最严重的毁灭之后世界上还会剩下什么，它剥除了很多给予人们慰藉的内容。下集节目，我们将详细分析李尔在抱着考狄利娅尸体时所说的那段台词，一同感受一下，戏剧是如何在给予我们安慰的同时又把它夺走的。不过，不论戏剧从句中人物身上夺走了什么，它给我们观众却留下了一些永恒的内容，我们对于剧中的语言和故事可以有无数种不同的理解。

Simon Palfrey: You've got this sense of plenty, and you can never quite exhaust that plenty. In any reading or any spectating or any act of hearing Shakespeare, there's always more, you cannot take it all in, and split. And so partly that says, go again, read again, think again, go back. But also, it's some really simple, emotional thing, that his worlds are pregnant. They're full of implications, it's everywhere in Shakespeare, this apprehension of other lives, which gives his work its humanness -- unrivaled humanness.

西蒙·帕尔弗里：从这部剧中，你可以感受到很多内容，而且是多得永远也不会耗尽的。不论是阅读莎剧，还是观看莎剧演出，又或者聆听莎剧朗诵，我们总会发现自己不能完全消化戏剧的内容，因为总是会有新的东西出现。所以我们经常会再来一次，再读一次，再思考一次，接着又重头来过。但其实，这也是很简单的情绪上的内容，莎士比亚笔下的世界很耐人寻味且意味深长。他的世界中充满了各种隐喻，隐喻在莎剧中随处可见。莎士比亚对其他生命的深刻理解，赋予了其作品满满的人性——无与伦比的丰富人性。