[牛津英文经典]罗密欧与朱丽叶(莎士比亚经典爱情悲剧,收录第一四开本和第二版文本,莎翁学者Jill L. Levenso

【编辑推荐】

牛津英文经典（Oxford World’s Classics）系牛津大学出版社百年积淀的精品书系。此番由译林出版社原版引进。除牛津品牌保证的原著版本之外，每册书附含名家导读、作家简介及年表、词汇解析、文本注释、背景知识拓展、同步阅读导引、版本信息等，特别适合作为大学生和学有余力的中学生英语学习的必读材料。导读者包括牛津和剑桥大学的资深教授和知名学者。

《罗密欧与朱丽叶》是莎士比亚早期创作的悲剧，他在世时，这部悲剧的受欢迎程度与《哈姆雷特》不相上下。这部剧作属于传统的爱情悲剧，情节源自意大利的民间故事，莎士比亚借用了原故事，加入了大量的支线人物，丰富了情节。牛津英文经典的版本收录了1597年首次出版的第一四开本文本，以及经过更正、更接近莎士比亚原文稿的第二个版本，多伦多大学莎翁研究学者Jill L. Levenson 撰写导读、注释，全面解析这部世界闻名的爱情悲剧。

【名人评价及推荐】

价格低廉，安于书架的小小一角。普通读者可以用这些书建构出一座图书馆。它们已经融入了我们的生活理念之中，我们还想要把它们请入我们的家里。

——牛津大学出版社

我读到他的第一页，就使我一生都属于他了。

——歌德

从我十岁起，我几乎每天都读莎士比亚的作品。

——柯勒律治

莎翁之前，没有人。

——哈罗德·布鲁姆

【作者简介】

莎士比亚（William Shakespeare，1564—1616），英国文艺复兴时期伟大的剧作家、诗人。公元1564年4月23日生于英格兰沃里克郡斯特拉福镇，1616年5月3日（儒略历4月23日）病逝。每年4月23日是莎士比亚的辞世纪念日，1995年被联合国教科文组织定为“世界读书日”。英国文艺复兴时期杰出的戏剧家和诗人，欧洲文艺复兴时期人文主义文学的集大成者，代表作有四大悲剧《哈姆雷特》《奥赛罗》《李尔王》《麦克白》，四大喜剧《第十二夜》《仲夏夜之梦》《威尼斯商人》《无事生非》，历史剧《亨利四世》《亨利六世》《理查二世》等。还写过154首十四行诗，三或四首长诗。他是“英国戏剧之父”，本·琼斯称他为“时代的灵魂”，马克思称他为“人类伟大的天才之一”。被赋予了“人类文学奥林匹斯山上的宙斯”。

【内容简介】

在意大利维罗纳城，蒙太古和凯普莱特两大家族结下世仇，但两家的儿女罗密欧和朱丽叶却相爱了。由于家族的争斗，罗密欧杀死了朱丽叶的堂兄提尔伯特，遭到流放，朱丽叶被家长另嫁他人。两人计划一起逃亡，但却误得消息，最终先后殉情而亡。

【目录】

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

The Romeo and Juliet Narrative before Shakespeare

Myth

Novella

‘Romeo and Juliet’: The Play

Love, Death, and Adolescence

Patriarchy

Style and Genre

(a) Rhetoric

(b) Tragedy, Comedy, Sonnet

Performance History

Initial Staging

Restoration to the Late Twentieth Century

Date(s)

The Mobile Text

Quarto 1 (1597)

Quarto 2 (1599) and its Derivatives

Quarto 1 and Quarto 2: Provenance

Editorial Procedures

Abbreviations and References

THE MOST EXCELLENT AND LAMENTABLE

TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET

AN EXCELLENT CONCEITED TRAGEDY OF

ROMEO AND JULIET (q1)

Index

【文摘】

INTRODUCTION

The Romeo and Juliet Narrative before Shakespeare

In an age of virtual realities Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet can seem like a hologram. From one angle it appears to dramatize a love-story which transcends time and place. The youthful passion it enacts may cease like lightning, but it reflects an absolute, an ideal of sexual love expressed in the play’s most lyrical verse. From another angle the tragedy enacts a love-story shaped by the social and literary conventions of late sixteenth-century England. These give the narrative a political edge and historicity, moderating its idealism. Since the advent of modern psychology a third angle allows for a different construction formulated on change rather than absolutes. From this point of view Shakespeare traces a paradigm of adolescent behaviour.

These perspectives, one by one or in combination, reveal a complex and even contradictory play. With little adjustment they reveal similar complexities in the popular ?ction enacted by the play. Pre-existing novellas which transmitted the Romeo and Juliet story incorporate elements of myth and romance into narratives of a different kind. A new genre, they depended on a rhetorical tradition that promoted not only invention and variety but verisimilitude.

Shakespeare’s well-known alterations—telescoping events and coincidence, elaborating characters, heightening rhetoric—enhance the heterogeneous design, calling attention to the inconsistencies which form the narrative, the coexistence of the timeless and the timely.

As a result, the design of the ?ction has determined the play’s effect in different periods and cultures. It originated in archetypes which probably account for the emotional impact of Shakespeare’s tragedy and its derivatives in media such as music and drama. It adapted to changing historical circumstances—sixteenth-century Italian city states, Elizabethan England, America in the 1950s—and mirrored the world of each audience with varying degrees of realism. Its literature was at ?rst self-consciously rhetorical, attempting to win readers and achieve credibility. Once it became familiar in the sixteenth century, any artist could play on expectation by altering its prototypes. Shakespeare was the ?rst to modify not only events and characters but style, creating a version which would become the model for those to follow. In the process he left traces of his strategy. Recovering the ?ction will therefore permit a glimpse of the artist at work.

Myth. The primary source of the Romeo and Juliet ?ction is myth, the early narratives ‘obscure in origin, protean in form and ambiguous in meaning’. Despite this amorphousness, mythical narratives share certain features which help to de?ne them. They are simple, bold, and symbolical, epitomizing a vast number of analogous stories.

They deal in ideas or desires which are timeless, ‘ordering  . . . human experience at a level . . . wider, deeper, and more permanent than the rationalized scene and the literal facts of the moment’. According to Northrop Frye, ‘myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire’, in a space where the human encounters the divine.

There may have been half a dozen myths that governed all the rest, narratives concerned with rites of passage in this world and upheavals among the gods.

Whatever shape they took, these stories became the matrix of literature.

Wagner gave the name Liebestod to the myth which informs the ?ction of Romeo and Juliet. Although the meaning of this term shifts—love-in-death, death-in-love, love’s death—it refers to a speci?c narrative format and psychological event. Two young lovers face insurmountable obstacles; they encounter the obstacles with de?ance and secret plans, but their resistance fails because of accident or misjudgement; ?nally both die for love.

By linking passion with death the Liebestod myth sets the limits of desire at the highly charged point where lovers feel they have transcended ordinary human experience, driven to union which means dissolution of self, a permanent metamorphosis. Paradox dominates a narrative in which the compulsion to love is a compulsion to die, and death is the price for an absolute. In this psychological con?guration suffering becomes aphrodisiac and passion is brief.

Between antiquity and the Middle Ages the Liebestod myth took shape not only in folklore but in literature. A range of storytellers from the anonymous to Ovid and Malory related the misadventures of Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe, Tristan and Isolde. In their variety the stories qualify Denis de Rougemont’s view that the myth descended into ‘profane’ life from the thirteenth century: they quickly became particularized through their settings and obstacles; the medieval versions immediately absorbed the conventions of chivalry. During the early Christian era components of the myth circulated through Greek romance, notably the separation plots and character types such as young lovers and opposing parents. Romance included other elements which would attach themselves to the Romeo and Juliet legend, specifically the sleeping potion and premature burial. Whether they transmitted the myth whole or piecemeal, all of the literary versions were rhetorical to different degrees of sophistication.

If Liebestod is the keynote, other myths resonate with the Romeo and Juliet legend. For instance, Marjorie Garber has identi?ed correspondences with the story of Cupid and Psyche, which also connects marriage and death: the love-relationship takes place in a surround of darkness; a young woman becomes free of paternal control; she undergoes a series of trials which mark her progress to maturity.

Typically both of these myths centre on rites of passage, those crucial advances in an individual life from one biological or social condition to another. The most widely accepted description of such rites enumerates three phases: separation from the old state, transition between old and new, incorporation into the new. During the middle phase initiates hover in liminality, a period of suspension or ambiguity which is both dangerous and liberating.

In fact and ?ction young lovers exist in this liminal phase on the verge of adult commitment to both a sexual partner and society. The Liebestodmyth and its literary versions catch them at that moment of change, failing to make a transition into the community, alone at the turning-point. The story of Cupid and Psyche focuses on the initiation of the young woman. In both cases the rituals which normally accompany such rites of passage become part of the narrative, incomplete in various ways or conspicuous by their absence. Marriage is the most striking of these rituals: Pyramus and Thisbe never reach this state; Hero and Leander take a private vow; initially Psyche weds Cupid without seeing him; Tristan and Isolde marry other partners and consummate their own relationship in adultery. By the sixteenth century the Romeo and Juliet story would incorporate night visits and funeral in addition to marriage. Decades before the sixteenth century, however, the combination of traditional myth and contemporary ritual manifested disturbance not only in the private sphere of the lovers but in the public sphere represented by their social world.

Novella. The Romeo and Juliet story familiar to Shakespeare’s audience originated in Italy during the ?fteenth century.Masuccio Salernitano included most of the plot in the thirty-third tale of his Novellino (1476), the story of Mariotto and Ganozza. During the ?fty-odd years between this version and Luigi da Porto’s Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti . . .  (c.1530), a legend which corresponds with the Romeo and Juliet narrative seems to have grown very popular, especially in northern Italy. Stories extant in manuscripts from the ?fteenth and early sixteenth centuries preserve the topos of love and death, combining it with details from romance. When da Porto assembled the full-scale narrative, he probably drew not only on Masuccio, but on the legendary material, an anonymous ?fteenth-century novella (‘Ippolito e Lionora’), Ovid’s account of Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses 4.67–201), and Boccaccio’s  Decameron. Da Porto showed originality less through inventiveness than through con?ation of the various models. As motive for the secret marriage he incorporated a feud analogous to civil disturbances in late medieval Italy; and he attributed this state of affairs to the Montecchi and Cappelletti, names of political factions which ?rst appeared in Dante’s

Purgatorio 6.106–8…

The Most Excellent and Lamentable

Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

Prologue Enter Chorus

Chorus

Two households both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love,

And the continuance of their parents’ rage—

Which but their children’s end naught could remove—

Is now the two hours’ traf?c of our stage;

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Exit

1.1 Enter Samson and Gregory, with swords and bucklers, of the house of Capulet

SAMSON Gregory, on my word we’ll not carry coals.

GREGORY No, for then we should be colliers.

SAMSON I mean, an we be in choler we’ll draw.

GREGORY Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.

SAMSON I strike quickly being moved.

GREGORY But thou art not quickly moved to strike.

SAMSON A dog of the house of Montague moves me.

GREGORY To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand:

therefore if thou art moved thou runn’st away.

SAMSON A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will

take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.

GREGORY That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest

goes to the wall.

SAMSON ’Tis true, and therefore women being the weaker

vessels are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push

Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to

the wall.

GREGORY The quarrel is between our masters and us their

men.

SAMSON ’Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I

have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids,

I will cut off their heads.

GREGORY The heads of the maids?

SAMSON Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads,

take it in what sense thou wilt.

GREGORY They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMSON Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis

known I am a pretty piece of ?esh.

GREGORY ’Tis well thou art not ?sh; if thou hadst, thou

hadst been Poor John. Draw thy tool, here comes of the

house of Montagues.

Enter two other Serving-men

SAMSON My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee.

GREGORY How, turn thy back and run?

SAMSON Fear me not.

GREGORY No, marry, I fear thee!

SAMSON Let us take the law of our sides; let them begin.

GREGORY I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as

they list.

SAMSON Nay, as they dare: I will bite my thumb at them,

which is disgrace to them if they bear it.

ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

SAMSON I do bite my thumb, sir.

ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

SAMSON (to Gregory) Is the law of our side if I say ‘Ay’?

GREGORY No.

SAMSON (to Abraham) No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you,

sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

GREGORY Do you quarrel, sir?

ABRAHAM Quarrel, sir? No, sir.

SAMSON But if you do, sir, I am for you; I serve as good a

man as you.

ABRAHAM No better.

SAMSON Well, sir.

Enter Benvolio

GREGORY Say ‘better’—here comes one of my master’s

kinsmen.

SAMSON Yes, better, sir.

ABRAHAM You lie.

SAMSON Draw if you be men. Gregory, remember thy

washing blow.

They ?ght

BENVOLIO (drawing) Part fools, put up your swords; you

know not what you do.

Enter Tybalt with his sword drawn

tybalt

What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?

Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.

BENVOLIO

I do but keep the peace. Put up thy sword,

Or manage it to part these men with me.

TYBALT

What, drawn and talk of peace? I hate the word

As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.

Have at thee, coward.

They ?ght.

Enter three or four Citizens with clubs or partisans

officer

Clubs, bills, and partisans! Strike, beat them down!

Down with the Capulets, down with the Montagues!

………………

………………