THREE EARLY COMEDIES（莎士比亚三大戏剧）(ISBN=9780553212822)pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

编辑推荐

An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features: Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages.

内容简介

Three Early Comedies

Love's Labor's Lost
Farce and fun follow when ayoung king and his three friends vow to give up women for ayear—just as a pretty princess and her three ladies-in-waitingarrive—in a delightful play that ends with one of Shakespeare’sloveliest songs.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
In this lyricalcomedy, two friends are infatuated with the same woman, while ajilted girl disguised as a boy and a clownish servant with araffish mutt set the scene for laughter and a timeless story oflove.

显示全部信息

作者简介

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. Thefacts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. Hewas one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant ofsome standing in his community. William probably went to the King’sNew School in Stratford, but he had no university education. InNovember 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway,eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child,Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( whowould die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and alreadyknown as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referredto him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of thesuccessful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later underJames I, called the King’s Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Menbuilt and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the ThamesRiver. Here many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed by the mostfamous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe,and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had ahand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The TwoNoble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus andAdonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets werepublished, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and moretime to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing suchplays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613.He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church,Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published duringhis life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, JohnHeminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection nowcalled the First Folio.

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April
1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The
facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He
was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of
some standing in his community. William probably went to the King’s
New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In
November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway,
eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child,
Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who
would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By
1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already
known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred
to him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”
Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the
successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later under
James I, called the King’s Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men
built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames
River. Here many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed by the most
famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe,
and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a
hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two
Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were
published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or
1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more
time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such
plays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613.
He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church,
Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during
his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John
Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now
called the First Folio.

显示全部信息

目　　录

Three Early Comedies
The Playhouse
LOVE~S LABOR'S LOST
Introduction
Love's Labor's Lost on Stage
Love's Labor's Lost on Screen
Love's Labor's Lost
Date and Text
Textual Notes
Shakespeare's Sources
Further Reading
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
Introduction
The Two Gentlemen of Verona on Stage

显示全部信息

在线试读部分章节

Introduction

Introduction 
 
 In much the same way that The Comedy of Errors
is Shakespeare’s apprenticeship to Plautus and neoclassical
comedy, Love’s Labor’s Lost is his apprenticeship to
John Lyly’s courtly drama of the 1580s, to the court masque,
and to conventions of Petrarchan lyric poetry. The play is
word conscious and stylistically mannered to an extent that is
unusual even for the pun-loving Shakespeare. The humor abounds
in the pert repartee for which juvenile actors were especially
fitted, and an extraordinarily high percentage of roles are
assigned to boys: four women and a diminutive page (Mote)
among seventeen named roles. The social setting is patrician
and the entertainments aristocratic. In some ways, little
seems to happen in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Fast-moving
plot is replaced by a structure that includes a series of
debates on courtly topics reminiscent of John Lyly:
love versus honor, the flesh versus the spirit, pleasure
versus instruction, art versus nature. The songs and sonnets
composed by the courtiers for the ladies (4.3.23—116)
gracefully caricature the excesses of the Petrarchan love
convention (named for the influential Italian sonneteer,
Francesco Petrarch): the lovers are “sick to death” with
unrequited passion, they catalogue the charms of their proud
mistresses, they express their exquisitely tortured emotions
through elaborate poetical metaphors, and so on. Stage
movements are often masquelike; characters group themselves
and then pair off two by two, as in a formal dance. Actual
masques and pageants, presented by the courtiers or devised
for their amusement, are essential ingredients of
the spectacle.   Yet beneath the brightly
polished surfaces of this sophisticated comedy, we often catch
glimpses of a candor and a simplicity that offset the tinsel
and glitter. The wits ultimately disclaim (with some qualification)
their wittiness, and the ladies confess they have tried too
zealously to put down the men; both sides disavow the extreme
postures they have striven so hard to maintain. The clowns,
though deflated by mocking laughter for their naiveté and
pomposity, deflate the courtiers, in turn, for lack of
compassion. From this interplay among various forms of courtly
wit, Petrarchism, pedantry, and rustic speech emerges
a recommended style that is witty but not irresponsibly so,
courtly yet sincere, polished and yet free of affectation or
empty verbal ornament. This new harmony is aptly expressed by
Berowne and Rosaline, whose witty quest for self-understanding
in love foreshadows that of Benedick and Beatrice in Much
Ado About Nothing. The perfect expression of the true
style is found in the song at the end of the play; taking the
form of a medieval literary debate between Spring and Winter,
it beautifully fuses the natural and the artificial into a
concordant vision transcending the mundane. 
 
 Like The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labor’s Lost is an
early comedy that is hard to date with precision. It was
published in quarto in 1598 “as it was presented before Her
Highness this last Christmas” (1597). The text also purports
to be “newly corrected and augmented,” though we know of no
earlier published version. Perhaps a play that was already
several years old may have seemed in need of stylistic
revision. Act 4 does, in fact, contain two long duplicatory
passages, suggesting that a certain amount of rewriting did
take place. The revisions alter the eaning only slightly,
however, and give little support to the widely held notion
that Shakespeare must have reworked the ending of his play.
The unresolved ending, in which no marriages take place and in
which the Princess’s territorial claims to Aquitaine are left
unsettled, should be regarded not as unfinished but as highly
imaginative and indeed indispensable. The title, after
all, assures us that “love’s labors” will be lost, and the
Princess affirms the principle of “form confounded”
(5.2.517).  Some stylistic tests suggest a date between
1592 and 1595, although these characteristics might point to
an early play that had been “new corrected and augmented.”
Topical hypotheses arise from the quest for Shakespeare’s
sources. Since the plot of Love’s Labor’s Lost is
derived from no known literary source, may it have been drawn
instead from the Elizabethan contemporary scene, poking fun at
the pretentiousness of literary figures and intellectuals,
such as John Florio, Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey, Sir Walter
Ralegh, and George Chapman? Or should we seek topical meaning
in the undoubted currency of such names as Navarre (Henry of
Navarre, King Henry IV of France), Berowne (Biron, Henry IV’s
general), Dumaine (De Mayenne, brother of the Catholic Guise),
and others? From the point of view of dating the play,
however, such names would have been distastefully
controversial in a courtly comedy after 1589. That date saw
the beginning in France of a bitter civil conflict between the
Catholic Guise and Protestant Navarre, continuing until Henry
abjured Protestantism in 1593 and assumed the French throne.
In the late 1580s, on the other hand, the tiny kingdom of
Navarre would have seemed charmingly appropriate as a setting
for Shakespeare’s play. Such an early date, although by no
means certain, would also help explain the Lylyan tone of the
comedy and its early techniques of versification: the
high percentage of rhymed lines in couplets and quatrains, the
endstopped blank verse, the use of various sonnet forms and
of seven-stress (septenary) couplets, and the
like.  The world of Love’s Labor’s Lost seems
uneventful at first and remarkably unthreatened by danger or
evil; only hintingly do reminders of mortality intrude upon
the never-never land of Navarre. There are, to be sure,
occasional references to the Princess’s “bedrid” father, to
the plague, and to a “death’s head,” but the courtiers and we
as audience are little prepared for the sudden appearance of
Marcade in 5.2 and his announcement that the Princess’s royal
father is dead and that all lighthearted entertainments must
now give way to mourning. Prior to this belated moment of
reversal, the male characters are menaced by nothing worse
than loss of dignity through breaking of their oaths. And
although oath breaking was a matter of great seriousness to
Elizabethan gentlemen, their doing so here is partly
excused by the constancy of their devotion once they have
fallen in love. In such an artificial world, the preservation
of one’s selfesteem assumes undue importance. Using the
criteria of wit and self-awareness, Mote and Boyet, as
manipulators and controllers of point of view, show us how to
laugh at folly in love and pomposity in language. They present
to us variations on a theme of courtly behavior, creating, in
effect, a scale of manners ranging from the most aristocratic
(the King and the Princess, Berowne and Rosaline) to the most
absurdly pretentiou (Armado, Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Dull).
Nearly all the characters are mocked, but those at the lower
end of the scale are especially vulnerable because they are
grossly un-self-aware and hence
unteachable.    
 
 
The King and his companions deserve to be mocked because of
their transparent lack of self-knowledge, their
affectation, and the futility of their vows against love. As
Berowne concedes from the start, such defiance of love is at
odds with a fundamental natural rhythm that ultimately cannot
be thwarted–a rhythm that provides a counterpoint and
corrective to the frequently artificial rhythms of courtly
life. This natural rhythm asserts itself throughout the play
until it becomes starkly insistent in the death of the
Princess’s royal father and in the resulting twelve-month
delay of all marriages.  
 
Hypocritical defiance of love is doomed to comic failure
and satirical punishment. The basic devices used to expose
this hypocrisy are misdirected love letters and overheard
speech, both devices of unmasking. Appropriately, the young
ladies administer their most amusing comeuppance to the men by
seeing through their Muscovite masks. The code governing this
merry conflict is one of “mock for mock” and “sport by
sport o’erthrown” (5.2.140, 153). In a prevailing legal
metaphor, the young men are guilty of forswearing their
written oaths, and must be punished for their perjury. Love is
metaphorically a war, a siege, a battle of the sexes in which
the women come off virtually unscathed. The language of love
is that of parry and thrust (with occasional bawdy overtones).
The men naturally are chagrined to be put down by the ladies
but are on their way to a cure: they learn to laugh at their
own pretentiousness and, even if hyperbolically, vow to cast
aside all “affectation” and “maggot ostentation” in favor of
“russet yeas and honest kersey noes” (lines 403—16). At the
same time, Berowne’s renunciation of artful language is cast
in the form of a perfect fourteen-line sonnet; Shakespeare is
having it both ways.  
 
 The clownish types are generally more victimized by their
affectations. The fantastical Don Armado, as lover of
Jaquenetta...

显示全部信息

THREE EARLY COMEDIES（莎士比亚三大戏剧）(ISBN=9780553212822)下载

THREE EARLY COMEDIES（莎士比亚三大戏剧）(ISBN=9780553212822)

发布书评

相关图书推荐