victoria_vn: переводы

→reason and love

→And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.

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→PUCK: Lord, what fools these mortals be!

→THESEUS: If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.

→HIPPOLYTA: It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.

→THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

→HIPPOLYTA: This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

→The book A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland was published in 1594, and did, indeed, infuriate Elizabeth I. The pseudonym R. Doleman almost certainly conceals Robert Persons (sometimes Parsons) who was a Jesuit priest and a leader of the mission to convert England back to Roman Catholicism. He was a clever, subtle man, and his book was banned in England. The ageing Queen detested any discussion of the succession. She had no direct heir, of course, and while most people in the 1590s would have assumed that the Protestant James VI of Scotland would succeed her (he was a great-grandson of Henry VII and did, indeed, succeed to Elizabeth’s throne), the Queen obstinately refused to name him or anyone else. The moment she did name an heir, of course, power would begin to flow away from her as courtiers sought the approval and patronage of the next monarch.

→We are also indebted to the good bishop for the text of ‘Panche’, which is the ‘farting song’ Will Kemp failed to complete. Kemp was famous as a comic actor, more famous, probably, than Shakespeare to a London audience. Nick Bottom was a marvellous part for Kemp, and perhaps he embellished the role with extemporary dialogue, a practice Shakespeare deplored, ‘and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,’ he writes in Hamlet’s speech to the players. The clowns that added their own dialogue are ‘villainous’, Shakespeare wrote, and show a ‘pitiful ambition’, and I suspect he had memories of Will Kemp in mind when he expressed that condemnation. Will Kemp is identified in the Quarto text of Romeo and Juliet as the actor who played the serving man Peter, a very small role for such a prominent player, but Kemp would doubtless have dominated the jig following the tragedy. Kemp left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599.

→Purists argue that the whole play should be presented, however long and however obscure some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century language, and despite the ordeal it inflicts upon the audience. Yet there is strong evidence that the published scripts do not represent the plays as originally performed onstage. That evidence comes from Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, who on the title page of his play Every Man Out of his Humour, published in 1600, specifically says that the printed text is the script ‘as it was first composed by the Author B. J. Containing more than hath been Publikely Spoken or Acted’. The exigencies of time and the experience of rehearsal would surely have cut a play, as indeed still happens.

→And were those plays cut? Shakespeare’s plays, if acted in their entirety, are frequently very long, three, or even four hours is not unusual. Yet, in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare himself describes ‘the two hour traffic of our stage’, and I believe the plays were trimmed in rehearsal to run little more than two hours. There would have been no intermission in the Theatre, though there would have been in a candlelit hall to allow the wicks to be trimmed.

→Scholars have estimated that London’s playhouses performed around 3,000 plays between 1570 and the closure of the theatres in 1642, and of those 3,000 we only have the texts of 230, so it is a miracle that any survive, and even more of a miracle that we have 38 by Shakespeare. The mention of Love’s Labour’s Won in Chapter Six is not an error. It is quite possible that a play of that name existed and, if so, it would be, along with Cardenio, one of the two lost plays of William Shakespeare. Love’s Labour’s Won is first mentioned in 1598, and could either be a lost play or, possibly, the name was an alternative title for another play, perhaps All’s Well that Ends Well, or Much Ado About Nothing.

→The excerpts I quote in Chapter Eight have been edited for length, but give the flavour of what was, in the end, a successful campaign to close down London’s theatres. H. L. Mencken’s definition of a Puritan was someone ‘who is haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy’, and the more happiness the playhouses gave, the more virulent the attacks by Puritan preachers. One declared from his pulpit ‘the cause of plagues is sin … and the cause of sin are plays, therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ In 1594 the Lord Mayor of London, John Spencer, tried to persuade the Privy Council to close all the theatres, describing them as ‘corrupt and profane’, containing nothing but ‘unchaste fables, lascivious devices … and matters of like sort’.