真诚还是伪装?——莎士比亚对十四行诗传统的反讽式改写

Sincerity or Duplicity?Shakespeare’s Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition

《莎士比亚十四行诗》往往被视为英国十四行诗传统的集大成之作,但结尾叙事诗《情女怨》尽管在诗集结构中地位显要,却长期受到学界的冷落甚至质疑。通过细读16世纪90年代一组近期被归入“迪莉娅结构”传统的十四行诗诗集,可区分出维持、和解、反讽等三种诗集结尾模式。莎士比亚的诗集不仅在形式上可视为继承了迪莉娅结构,而且很可能和反讽的结尾模式形成了对话,这要求把结尾叙事诗把握为从整体上理解莎士比亚诗集的重要关节。借助对《情女怨》中一系列元文本意象的分析,可证莎士比亚在十四行诗和结尾叙事诗之间建立了丰富的互文指涉,进而发展了传统的反讽模式。此外,诗集中对文类传统修辞的戏仿和不可靠的叙述者也可佐证诗集蕴含彼此冲突的多声音视角,进而以一种隐秘的反讽形式改写了十四行诗传统。这一结构性考察为重审莎士比亚十四行诗中的真诚与伪装问题提供了新的角度,有助于说明十四行诗的抒情主人公体现出特定的自觉性和反思性。最后,《莎士比亚十四行诗》在文类上的原创性需要接受精细的语境化。考察伊丽莎白时期十四行诗文类的文化和政治意味——例如爱情话语作为政治欲望的讽喻性表达——可知,莎士比亚的诗集可被视为对十四行诗传统所植根的社会不平等秩序作出的伪装批评。

Shakespeare’s Sonnets has been generally hailed as a monument to the English sonnet tradition,while the concluding poem A Lover’s Complaint,which figures prominently in the collection’s formal patterning,has been mostly in disfavour,if not disrepute,with critics of Shakespeare.A closer look at a group of sonnet collections from the 1590s,within what has been recently identified as the tradition of the“Delian structure,”promises a typological division between three concluding patterns,namely the conformist,the conciliatory,and,most strikingly,the ironic.Shakespeare’s collection,itself formally recognized with a quasi-Delian structure,might have addressed itself to the ironic concluding pattern,which warrants a reappraisal of the narrative piece as integral to a proper appreciation of the book.By examining a set of metatextual images that register in the Complaint,the collection can be shown to have developed the ironic pattern by fashioning suggestive intertextual allusions between the discourses employed in the 154 sonnets and the concluding piece,which,coupled with parodic references to the genre’s clichéd rhetoric as well as a presumably unreliable narrator,informs the collection with conflicting voices,thereby rewriting the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in an implicitly ironic manner.Besides,such a structural investigation points to a new approach to the problem of sincerity and duplicity in Shakespeare’s sonnets,giving an edge to the reading that the poetic persona in the sonnets is essentially invested with a sense of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity.It is well advisable,moreover,for the generic originality of the Sonnets to be subtly contextualized with a revisiting of the Elizabethan sonnet genre’s cultural and political valences,including its amorous discourse as an allegorical articulation of politically-charged desires.In this light,the collection is arguably a masqueraded critique of the rigid social hierarchy the sonnet tradition is founded upon.