英语时差:喜剧家的莎士比亚-中
Li: What, for you, makes Twelfth Night special? Greg: Do you know, I think Twelfth Night is unlike Shakespeare’s other comedies. It’s a slightly later comedy. The earlier comedies don’t quite, for me, have the depth that Twelfth Night has. This may be because he wrote Twelfth Night after he had written Hamlet. In fact, I think it was probably the play he wrote next after Hamlet. The depth of the analysis of being in love and how close that love can be to obsession and how close that obsession is to madness. So many people in the play are described as mad in one way or another. Greg: There are two things I think relevantto this. One is of course that in Shakespeare’s day all the actors were men. And so the women were played by the boy actors. So, Viola looks at all the other characters in the play from a shifted perspective, which is not quite male but is not female either. And I think that makes her such an extraordinary character. So there are all sorts of really interesting themes about the characters that gain a kind of freedom by cross-gender dressing. William: But none of the characters have the same perspective as the audience, because it’s only the audience that knows everything in this play.
