第六章：重写文艺复兴

原书及其作者：Jerry Brotton 的 “The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction”，大主题，小开本。文艺复兴对于欧洲，是从不假思索的中世纪世界中出离的年代，它就和现代性本身一样复杂。

系列上一篇：Science and philosophy｜科学与哲学

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Chapter 6 Rewriting the Renaissance

p116 It is only towards the end of the 16th century that the concept of the professional writer develops with the growth of the theatre in countries like Spain and England, and the financial success of printing, that allowed poets and pamphleteers to consider creative writing as a full-time career. The different types of literary expression – poetry, drama, and prose – responded to these social and political changes in a variety of ways, all of which had regionally specific manifestations.

Poetry

p117 Alongside epic, lyric poetry was esteemed as the pinnacle of literary creativity in the Renaissance. The rise of courtly culture in Italy and northern Europe provided scope for the cultivated sensibility of lyric poetry, with its focus on a beloved mistress, whilst also reflecting on the subjective status of the lover-poet. …… Petrarch refined the sonnet, a heavily stylized poem of 14 lines, broken down into two sections (the octave, or first eight lines, and sestet, or final six lines) with a highly specific rhyme structure. The Petrarchan sonnet idealized the female subject at the same time as it explored the emotional complexity of the poet’s identity. Petrarch complained in one sonnet that ‘In this state, Lady I am because of you’. This intimate, introspective poetic style, which allowed the poet to explore his own moral state in relation to either his beloved or his religion (and the two were often conflated) came to influence courtly Renaissance culture and poetry throughout the 15th and 16th centuries.

• 文艺复兴时期的抒情诗（lyric poetry）和史诗，文学成就非常之高。十四行诗的结构得到改进并固定，各地的方言逐渐成为文学创作的主流语言（拉丁语 -> 法语，英语，德语，意大利语，等等等等…）。

p118 The sonnet’s language draws on the specifically Elizabethan experience of legal obligation and financial indebtedness. Its execution is peculiarly English in its rhyme and punning. Shakespeare has moved a long way from the Latinate and classical influence of Petrarch. His poetry anticipates the development of later English poets like the Metaphysical Poets, and signals a departure from the Renaissance style of poetic utterance to the national vernacular traditions of the later 17th century.

• 随着文艺复兴的进程发展，这些“方言”也逐渐开始了自己的发展，以英语为例，莎士比亚的创作就活跃于文艺复兴的末期，已经逐渐开始摆脱拉丁语和古英语的创作传统，开始形成新的风格了。
• 顺带一提，我下一本要读的VSI系列读本叫做 “Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction”，讲的基本就是17世纪的英国，这里提到的文化背景可以为下一本提供感性的理解。现代化的进程是所有这些文化、产业、政治经济等等变革的全方位综合体。

Kidnapping language: women respond

p118-119 While the poetry of Petrarch celebrated women as idealized but silent paragons of chaste virtue, Shakespeare’s sonnets reflected an increasing anxiety about women’s contradictory status in a male-dominated culture. Some women responded by taking advantage of the changing nature of humanist education and the rise of printing to offer a different version of femininity. Their writing suggests that many of the assumptions about relations between the sexes were more actively contested than the predominantly male literary canon has led us to believe.

Throughout the 16th century a range of women writers appropriated Platonic and Petrarchan conventions to question male assumptions about women and to try to define their own personal and creative autonomy.

p119-120 This sexual frankness was combined with an insistence upon women’s right to educational attainment and creative freedom. In The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573), the Elizabethan Isabella Whitney asserted some independence from the limitations of domestic life, arguing that ‘til some household cares me tie, / My books and pen I will apply’. …… Struggling with their relationship to the increasing religious persecution and political upheaval of mid-16th century Europe, writers like Franco (Veronica Franco) and Whitney adapted male literary traditions to present a very different perspective on the nature of women.

• 另，16-17世纪是欧洲猎巫风潮的顶峰。我以前应该是读到过什么文献，提到猎巫也和前现代社会中对女性在社会中的地位变化，礼仪和习俗的变化，甚至是结婚和生育意愿的变化——所感到的焦虑有关。

Printed tales

p120 Writers also took advantage of the relatively new medium of print to establish their distinctive literary voices. Print transformed literary expression, as it created demand amongst an increasingly literate and predominantly metropolitan audience that was looking for new forms to understand their changing world. …… Like prose writing, the development of the theatre, particularly in England, was increasingly based on investment and profit rather than courtly patronage or religious piety, a situation that allowed for increasingly complex and naturalistic representations of society and the individual.

p120-121 The flexibility of the printing process also allowed writers like François Rabelais to respond to criticism of his books and to insert contemporary events into later editions of his work. …… From 1533 the scholastics of the Sorbonne in Paris, who had been mercilessly satirized by Rabelais, took their revenge by condemning all his books as obscene and blasphemous. His publications were banned for the rest of his life. However, other writers adopted his irreverent, abundant style, including the English satirist and pamphleteer Thomas Nashe.

• 回看新兴科技在文艺复兴年间把以往不可能的事变成可能，就让我想起互联网在本世纪初的迅速发展，我们从只有邮箱和短信通讯，到各类论坛贴吧，到视频网站，到社交媒体，多少事物飞一样的发展！
• 通俗的读者群体出现，和让写作与作品传播更容易、更快速的技术出现，也催生了新的创作动态——比如讽刺小说和因为被讽刺而破防的人们开始大打口水仗。新的文化在形成，旧的秩序和标准在崩解。

Epic

• 史诗用一种磅礴而浪漫的语言去记述（一定程度上被艺术加工的）历史。从古早的荷马史诗和其他经典文学一路延续，到了文艺复兴这个年代，频繁的帝国扩张和各种冲突为史诗创作者提供非常新鲜的创作材料。
• 这些创作者也频繁的宣称，因为他们所记述的英雄故事更加戏剧化，涉及的荣光更多，地理范围更广，他们的史诗创作超越古人——这逐渐开创了文学帝国主义的风尚（literary imperialism）。这个时代也涌现了许多政治要角试图通过符合朝廷口味的史诗创作来巩固自己的政治地位。

p123 Edmund Spenser was a political administrator, like both Ariosto and Camões, but his epic creation celebrated an empire that did not even exist. Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene (1590–6) while enthusiastically colonizing Ireland on behalf of his English sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I, the ‘Goddesse heuenly bright, / Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine, / Great Lady of the greatest Isle’.

In deliberately archaic English Spenser follows the adventures of a series of individuals personifying specifically Protestant values, such as faith and temperance. He turns Elizabeth into a glorious ‘Faerie Queen’, and reclaims St George from his eastern origins as the patron saint of England. But this was another glorious myth. By the time Spenser completed his poem, Elizabeth was politically isolated in Europe and her only lasting colonial legacy was to have set the scene for subsequent centuries of sectarian violence in Ireland. Nevertheless, in creating an international epic in the vernacular on the birth of the Protestant English nation, Spenser turned away from the more mainstream European tradition, and heavily influenced Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Theatre

p124 Shakespeare’s drama is a fitting place to conclude this survey of the Renaissance because his career marks a decisive shift from the classical, humanist tradition, that drew its strength from southern European and Mediterranean influences, to the more local and national preoccupations that signalled the end of the Renaissance.

• 文艺复兴从统一的、古典的中世纪欧洲走向各地方言文学的兴起（指的是如英语、法语、意大利语之于全欧洲通行的拉丁语），是社会走入现代化前夜的惊奇和焦虑。一切都在复杂化，那人要怎么应付这种变化？

p124 Although both these early plays show Shakespeare’s debt to the classical past, they also reflect specific Elizabethan concerns and preoccupations. The comedy of mistaken identity and financial confusion in Comedy of Errors performs a growing English unease with the liquidity of money and the complexities of long-distance commercial transactions at a time when England was entering international markets in the Muslim-controlled Mediterranean. …… His cycle of history plays from Richard II to Henry V began to move from religiously inspired chronicle history to a more ambiguous and contingent understanding of England’s recent past and its relationship to the present.

p125-126 Theability to turn language inside out, and argue for and against a particular position was an inheritance of humanist rhetoric, but in the commercial theatre of Elizabethan London, such techniques were used to perform and enact issues of direct relevance to the play’s audience, be they rich or poor. …… The legacy of republicanism, discussed in the contrasting funeral orations of Brutus and Mark Antony, was a potentially dangerous subject to discuss within the context of Elizabethan absolutism. However, as with many of the comedies, Shakespeare is more interested in how rhetoric shapes and persuades an audience, rather than endorsing a particular political ideology. The hopes and fears of an agrarian society struggling to adapt to a credit economy, the concerns of the status of women and changing familial relations, and the ever-present religious concerns of political authority and personal salvation were all recurrent issues that shaped Shakespeare’s dramatic career.

p126 But we should remember that a defining feature of the Renaissance is the ability of its greatest artists to self-fashion a belief in the timelessness of their work. As much as Hamlet is the quintessential Renaissance man, a complex, multifaceted harbinger of modernity who prefigures the insights of Marx and Freud, he was created amidst the particular pressures and anxieties of Shakespeare’s time. It is easy to see his introspective speeches on death, and his puzzling inability to avenge the murder of his father, as reflecting the hopes and fears of every modern, alienated male teenager. However, it is important to understand that his actions were also shaped by England’s reformed Protestant sensibilities, and the consonant fears concerning salvation and the afterlife, ‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’.

• 历史类的读物看的越多，就越遇到没有答案的问题。没有答案怎么办？只能抱着困惑往前走。

p127 The play looks both ways, to the eastern Mediterranean and the classical world that provided such a rich source of inspiration for Renaissance thinkers and artists, and westwards to the Atlantic world that would increasingly shape later 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinking. If this shift in the literary, intellectual, and international outlook signalled the end of what defined the Renaissance, it also offered the beginning of a different, definably modern understanding of culture and society.

• 历史从不结束，一件事的影子在下一件事里轮回，如此往复。如果说文艺复兴的故事是人类从神的荣光之下看见了自己，接下来的启蒙运动和一系列革命（民主化或社会主义革命）就是人类开始纵情的发展自己的理性、并且试图基于这些新的思潮和想法真正重塑社会的故事。

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原书信息：Brotton, Jerry, The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Sept. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192801630.001.0001