Introduction
Once upon a time, probably in 1605, a man
called William Shakespeare, using a quill pen, wrote a play about the legendary
British King Lear and his three daughters. How often he drafted and redrafted
his script we do not know; the version that reached print in 1608, and which
seems to have been his first completed manuscript of the play, contains some
25,000 words.
Shakespeares
penning of these words has had consequences that he cannot have foreseen. It
has resulted in countless theatrical performances, many of them in languages
that he cannot have known and in countries of which he can have had no inkling.
It has enhancedand occasionally diminishedthe reputation of innumerable actors.
It has stimulated other writersplaywrights, novelists, poets, essayiststo
produce an enormous body of work. It has generated a multiplicity of works by
artists in other mediavisual art, music, opera, film and television. It has
provoked, especially in the twentieth century, a vast body of scholarly and
critical writing. And it produced a work which, at least since the Romantic
period (with its admiration for the Sublime), has come to be regarded not only
as its authors finest literary achievement, but also as one of the most
profound and challenging examinations ever undertaken of what it means to be
human, an examination conducted not discursively but in a text that requires
actors to represent men and women in action that is often violent, in extremes
of suffering, and in repose. In imaginative scope and in its power to generate
intellectual and emotional response, King Lear has been compared with the
greatest masterpieces of art, literature, and music. Coleridge wrote of the
storm scenes: O, what a worlds convention of agonies is here!...surely such a
scene was never conceived before or since. Take it but as a picture for the eye
only, it is more terrific than any which a Michel Anglo, inspired by a Dante,
could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed.
作者
威廉·莎士比亚（William
Shakespeare，15641616） 英国文艺复兴时期伟大的剧作家、诗人，欧洲文艺复兴时期人文主义文学的集大成者，全世界最卓越的文学家之一。英国戏剧家本·琼森称他为时代的灵魂，马克思称他和古希腊的埃斯库罗斯为人类最伟大的戏剧天才。他流传下来的作品包括约38部剧本、154首十四行诗、两首长叙事诗和其他诗作。他的剧本被翻译成所有主要语言，并且表演次数远远超过其他剧作家。直至今日，他的作品依然广受欢迎。
导读者
斯坦利·威尔斯（Stanley Wells）
英国伯明翰大学莎士比亚研究中心教授。
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