Lecture 05 william shakespeare: the sweet swan of avon

(1564 – 1616)

5.1. Творчество Вильяма Шекспира как вершина английской драматургии эпохи Возрождения.

Shakespeare’s plays communicate a profound knowledge of the wellsprings of human behavior, revealed through portrayals of a wide variety of characters. His use of poetic and dramatic means to create a unified aesthetic effect out of a multiplicity of vocal expressions and actions is recognized as a singular achievement, and his use of poetry within his plays to express the deepest levels of human motivation in individual, social, and universal situations is considered one of the greatest accomplishments in literary history.

One of the earliest appreciations of Shakespearean poetry is the sonnet by John Milton created a decade after the Bard's death.

* * *

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones

The labor of an age in piled stones?

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Has built thyself a livelong monument.

For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,

Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart

Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book

Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,

Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,

And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

5.2. Биография Шекспира. Периодизация творчества.

A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeare’s life is lacking, and thus much supposition surrounds relatively few facts. It is commonly accepted that he was born in 1564, and it is known that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was probably educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son, Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his father’s shop so that he could learn and eventually take over the business, but according to one account he was apprenticed to a butcher because of declines in his father’s financial situation. According to another account, he became a schoolmaster. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a farmer. He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had a daughter in 1583 and twins—a boy and a girl—in 1585. The boy did not survive.

Shakespeare apparently arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592 had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly thereafter he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The publication of Shakespeare’s two fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and of his Sonnets established his reputation as a gifted and popular poet of the Renaissance.

Shakespeare’s modern reputation, however, is based primarily on the 38 plays that he apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on. Although generally popular in his time, these plays were frequently little esteemed by his educated contemporaries, who considered English plays of their own day to be only vulgar entertainment.

Shakespeare’s professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company, the Chamberlain’s Men, later called the King’s Men, and its two theaters, the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars. His plays were given special presentation at the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I more frequently than those of any other contemporary dramatist. It is known that he risked losing royal favor only once, in 1599, when his company performed “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II” at the request of a group of conspirators against Elizabeth. In the subsequent inquiry, Shakespeare’s company was absolved of complicity in the conspiracy.

After about 1608, Shakespeare’s dramatic production lessened and it seems that he spent more time in Stratford, where he had established his family in an imposing house called New Place and had become a leading local citizen. He died in 1616, and was buried in the Stratford church.

Although the precise date of many of Shakespeare’s plays is in doubt, his dramatic career is generally divided into four periods:

(1) the period up to 1594,

(2) the years from 1594 to 1600,

(3) the years from 1600 to 1608, and

(4) the period after 1608.

Because of the difficulty of dating Shakespeare’s plays and the lack of conclusive facts about his writings, these dates are approximate and can be used only as a convenient framework in which to discuss his development. In all periods, the plots of his plays were frequently drawn from chronicles, histories, or earlier fiction, as were the plays of other contemporary dramatists.

5.3. Художественное своеобразие сонетов Шекспира, философско-поэтический образ бытия в них. Образы Друга и Смуглой леди; образ лирического героя. Проблемы перевода поэзии Шекспира на другие языки.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609, a pirate edition, but had been circulating previously in manuscript form beginning with the mid-1590s. The Sonnets describe the devotion of a character, often identified as the poet himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated. The ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of the poet’s friend to the dark lady, is treated with passionate intensity and psychological insight.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

С. Маршак. Из письма К.И.Чуковскому, 31 октября 1963 года.

"...Видели ли вы в трех номерах лондонского "Times" статью о Шекспире (в частности, о Сонетах), написанную историком Елизаветинской эпохи доктором Рауз? В ней много интересного, но шекспироведы, несомненно, примут ее в штыки, – слишком уж много у автора апломба.

А мне лично очень неприятен его биографический метод расшифровки стихов. (Может ли служить комментарием к "Чудному мгновенью" известное письмо Пушкина об Анне Керн?!) Да и как-то принижает этот историк Шекспира долгими рассуждениями о его материальной зависимости от графа Саутгемптона в годы чумы, когда все театры были закрыты. Вероятно, Шекспир и в самом деле мог бы помереть с голоду без помощи этого мецената. Но и в самых комплиментарных сонетах нет и тени подобострастия. А лучшие сонеты полны гордости, достоинства, презрения к судьбе и к случайным ее баловням.

Хорошо, по крайне мере, что Рауз начисто отметает какое бы то ни было подозрение в том, будто Шекспир был гомосексуалистом (а вот Марлоу – по его утверждению – был).

Я внимательно прочел все эти статьи, но не нашел в них почти ничего такого, что заставило бы меня изменить что-либо в моих переводах. Вот только в одной строфе известного сонета (20-го) я исправил две строчки, сделав их откровеннее и грубее.

У меня было: Тебя природа женщиною милой

Задумала, но, страстью пленена,

Она меня с тобою разлучила,

А женщин осчастливила она.

Две последние строчки я хочу заменить такими:

Она тебя приметой наделила,

Что мне в тебе нисколько не нужна.

Я был рад, когда нашел слово "примета". Раньше я пробовал перевести это "one thing to my purpose nothing" более вещественно, но получалось слишком уж похабно."

Sonnet 66

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly doctor-like controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill:

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

1

Томимый этим, к смерти я взываю;

Раз что живут заслуги в нищете,

Ничтожество ж – в веселье утопая,

Раз верность изменяет правоте,

Раз почести бесстыдство награждают,

Раз девственность вгоняется в разврат,

Раз совершенство злобно унижают,

Раз мощь хромые силы тормозят,

Раз произвол глумится над искусством,

Раз глупость знанья принимает вид,

Раз здравый смысл считается безумством,

Раз что добро в плену, а зло царит –

Я, утомленный, жаждал бы уйти,

Когда б тебя с собой мог унести!

2

Я жизнью утомлен, и смерть – моя мечта.

Что вижу я кругом? Насмешками покрыта,

Проголодалась честь, в изгнанье правота,

Корысть – прославлена, неправда – знаменита.

Где добродетели святая красота?

Пошла в распутный дом: ей нет иного сбыта!..

А сила где была последняя – и та

Среди слепой грозы параличом разбита.

Искусство сметено со сцены помелом:

Безумье кафедрой владеет. Праздник адский!

Добро ограблено разбойническим злом;

На истину давно надет колпак дурацкий.

Хотел бы умереть; но друга моего

Мне в этом мире жаль оставить одного.

3

Я смерть зову, глядеть не в силах боле,

Как гибнет в нищете достойный муж,

А негодяй живет в красе и холе;

Как топчется доверье чистых душ,

Как целомудрию грозят позором,

Как почести мерзавцам воздают,

Как сила никнет перед наглым взором,

Как всюду в жизни торжествует плут,

Как над искусством произвол глумится,

Как правит недомыслие умом,

Как в лапах Зла мучительно томится

Все то, что называем мы добром

Когда б не ты, любовь моя, давно бы

Искал я отдыха под сенью гроба.

5.4. Исторические хроники. Реконструкция средневековой истории Англии в пьесах Шекспира.

Shakespeare’s first period was one of experimentation. His early plays, unlike his more mature work, are characterized to a degree by formal and rather obvious construction and by stylized verse. Chronicle history plays were a popular genre of the time, and four plays dramatizing the English civil strife of the 15th century are possibly Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic works. These plays, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1590-1592) and Richard III (1592-1593), deal with evil resulting from weak leadership and from national disunity fostered for selfish ends.

Richard III continues the story of England’s dynastic civil Wars of the Roses. The protagonist, Richard of Gloucester, is a Machiavellian villain: a hero who wins the crown by treachery and murder. Yet unlike playwright Christopher Marlowe's supermen, Richard is refined and developed into a more subtle character. Characteristically Shakespearean features are the presence of a nemesis that pursues and destroys Richard, and the subtle implication that Henry Tudor's victory over Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which initiated the Tudor dynasty, laid the foundation of the greatness and unity of England.

The four-play cycle closes with the death of Richard III and the ascent to the throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to which Elizabeth belonged. In style and structure, these plays are related partly to medieval drama and partly to the works of earlier Elizabethan dramatists, especially in the bloodiness of many of their scenes and in their highly colored, bombastic language. Here is an example.

CATESBY

Rescue, my Lord of Norfolk, rescue, rescue!

The King enacts more wonders than a man,

Daring an opposite to every danger.

His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights,

Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death.

Rescue, fair lord, or else the day is lost!

[Alarums.] Enter [King] Richard.

KING RICHARD

A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

CATE.

Withdraw, my lord, I'll help you to a horse.

K. RICH.

Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,

And I will stand the hazard of the die.