莎士比亚——赞誉与质疑并存

在他去世150年之后，关于莎士比亚戏剧原作者的争议接踵而至。学者和文学评论家列出了一系列名字，推断他们为戏剧的真正作者。其中包括克里斯托弗•马洛、爱德华•德•维尔和弗朗西斯•培根，这些人拥有更知名的背景，更具文学水准或灵感更丰富。这一现象大部分是由于对莎士比亚的生平描述得不够详细，而且那一时代的资料来源很缺乏。圣三一教堂和斯特拉福德政府的官方记录记载了威廉•莎士比亚这个人的存在，但是没有一处资料能证实他是个演员或剧作家。

怀疑者也质疑，教育背景如此平庸的人却能在莎士比亚的作品里展示出那么敏锐的洞察力和诗歌表现力，到底是如何做到的。几个世纪以来，涌现出了一些团体，他们对莎士比亚戏剧的原作者提出了疑问。

最严重、最广泛的怀疑开始于19世纪，那时人们对莎士比亚的崇拜达到了顶峰。批评者认为，对于这个来自埃文河畔斯特拉福德的威廉•莎士比亚，唯一确凿的地方就是，他一开始身份卑微，年纪轻轻就结了婚，后来做房地产生意很成功。莎士比亚牛津学会（成立于1957年）的成员们说，身为牛津第17代伯爵的英国贵族爱德华•德•维尔是“威廉•莎士比亚”诗歌和戏剧的真正作者。牛津学者说德•维尔出身贵族，学识渊博，教育背景深厚，而且他的诗歌与被认为是莎士比亚的作品在结构上很相似。他们主张，威廉•莎士比亚不具备应有的教育背景和文学修养，写不出如此雄辩的散文，也创造不出如此丰富的人物。

About 150 years after his death, questions arose about the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays. Scholars and literary critics began to float names like Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere and Francis Bacon—men of more known backgrounds, literary accreditation, or inspiration—as the true authors of the plays. Much of this stemmed from the sketchy details of Shakespeare's life and the dearth of contemporary primary sources. Official records from the Holy Trinity Church and the Stratford government record the existence of a William Shakespeare, but none of these attest to him being an actor or playwright.

Skeptics also questioned how anyone of such modest education could write with the intellectual perceptiveness and poetic power that is displayed in Shakespeare's works. Over the centuries, several groups have emerged that question the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

The most serious and intense skepticism began in the 19th century when adoration for Shakespeare was at its highest. The detractors believed that the only hard evidence surrounding William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon described a man from modest beginnings who married young and became successful in real estate. Members of the Shakespeare Oxford Society (founded in 1957) put forth arguments that English aristocrat Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the poems and plays of "William Shakespeare." The Oxfordians cite de Vere's extensive knowledge of aristocratic society, his education, and the structural similarities between his poetry and that found in the works attributed to Shakespeare. They contend that William Shakespeare had neither the education nor the literary training to write such eloquent prose and create such rich characters.

However, the vast majority of Shakespearean scholars contend that William Shakespeare wrote all his own plays. They point out that other playwrights of the time also had sketchy histories and came from modest backgrounds. They contend that Stratford's New Grammar School curriculum of Latin and the classics could have provided a good foundation for literary writers. Supporters of Shakespeare's authorship argue that the lack of evidence about Shakespeare's life doesn't mean his life didn't exist. They point to evidence that displays his name on the title pages of published poems and plays. Examples exist of authors and critics of the time acknowledging William Shakespeare as author of plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors and King John. Royal records from 1601 show that William Shakespeare was recognized as a member of the King's Men theater company (formally known as the Chamberlain's Men) and a Groom of the Chamber by the court of King James I, where the company performed seven of Shakespeare's plays. There is also strong circumstantial evidence of personal relationships by contemporaries who interacted with Shakespeare as an actor and a playwright.

What seems to be true is that William Shakespeare was a respected man of the dramatic arts who wrote plays and acted in some in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But his reputation as a dramatic genius wasn't recognized until the 19th century. Beginning with the Romantic period of the early 1800s and continuing through the Victorian period, acclaim and reverence for William Shakespeare and his work reached its height. In the 20th century, new movements in scholarship and performance have rediscovered and adopted his works.

Today, his plays are highly popular and constantly studied and reinterpreted in performances with diverse cultural and political contexts. The genius of Shakespeare's characters and plots are that they present real human beings in a wide range of emotions and conflicts that transcend their origins in Elizabethan England.