《哈姆内特》打破了现实生活与戏剧的界限 | 盖茨书评
玛吉·奥法雷尔的小说以优美的笔触深刻地描写了悲伤是如何撕裂一个家庭的。
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you can’t find a better place to see a play than the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’ve been six or seven times, and I’m always blown away by the productions they put on. Some of the shows take place in this gorgeous outdoor theater that’s decorated like it’s from the Elizabethan era. There’s something special about seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Othello under the stars.如果你住在太平洋西北地区，你不会找到比俄勒冈州的莎士比亚戏剧节看戏剧更好的地方了。我已经去过六七次了，但还是会反复被那里所上演的剧目所震撼。有些剧目是在一个华丽的露天剧院上演，其舞台布置完美地复刻了伊丽莎白时代的剧场。在星空下看《仲夏夜之梦》或《奥赛罗》有种别样的感觉。
The festival has made me even more of a fan of Shakespeare than I already was. I’m in awe of the timelessness and cleverness of his plays. It’s amazing how vivid, clever, and poignant his work remains centuries later.这个戏剧节让我更加喜欢莎士比亚了。我为他戏剧的永恒和智慧深感敬畏。他的作品在几个世纪后仍然如此生动、巧思和深刻，实在是令人惊讶。
But who was Shakespeare really? We know shockingly little about the man behind the plays, although there have been a lot of films and books speculating about his personal life. (I’m particularly a fan of Shakespeare in Love.) Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet is the latest, and I thought it was a beautiful, well-written look at how grief tears a family apart.但莎士比亚究竟是谁？尽管有很多电影和书籍对他的个人生活进行了猜测，但令人震惊的事实是，我们对戏剧背后的这个创作者知之甚少。(我特别喜欢《莎翁情史》这部电影。）玛吉·奥法雷尔的小说《哈姆内特》（中文名暂译）是（关于莎士比亚）最新的一部作品，我认为这本书以优美的笔触深刻地描写了悲伤是如何撕裂一个家庭的。
O’Farrell centers her book on two things that we know are true: Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died when he was 11 years old, and Shakespeare wrote a tragedy called Hamlet just a couple years after his passing. (Many scholars believe that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in his era.) She explores the days leading up to Hamnet’s death and hypothesizes about how that event may have influenced the writing of one of the greatest plays of all time.奥法雷尔的这本书基于两个我们已知的事实之上：莎士比亚的儿子哈姆内特在11岁时去世，而莎士比亚在儿子去世仅几年后就写出了一部悲剧《哈姆雷特》。(许多学者认为，在莎士比亚那个时代，哈姆内特和哈姆雷特这两个名字可以互换）。奥法雷尔描写了哈姆内特去世前的那段日子，并设想了这一事件可能对这样一部有史以来最伟大戏剧的创作造成什么影响。
The most interesting choice she makes is to focus not on Shakespeare himself but on his family instead. The words “William” and “Shakespeare” are never used, and if you didn’t know what the book was about, I don’t know if you would recognize who “the husband” is until the end. You develop sympathy for him, but it’s really his wife, Agnes Hathaway, and their three children who are at the center of the story.她做出的最有趣的选择是其描写不聚焦于莎士比亚本人，而是围绕他的家人。“威廉”和“莎士比亚”这两个词从未在书中出现，如果你不知道这本书是关于什么的，我不确定读到最后你是否能知道书中的“丈夫”指的是谁。你会对他产生同情，但故事的主人公实则是他的妻子艾格尼丝·海瑟薇，以及他们的三个孩子。
Agnes (whom most people probably know as Anne) is a fascinating character. She’s been painted by history as a calculating woman who trapped the much younger Shakespeare into marriage by getting pregnant, but O’Farrell has a different take on her. This Agnes is a mysterious and almost supernatural figure who has a deep connection with nature. She’s a talented healer who can see the future—she knows her first child will be a girl and that only two of her children will live to watch her die.艾格尼丝（大多数人可能更熟悉安妮这个名字）是一个迷人的角色。她被历史描绘成一个精于算计的女人，通过怀孕让比她年轻得多的莎士比亚被迫成婚，但奥法雷尔对她有不同的看法。艾格尼丝是一个神秘的、几乎超自然的人物，她与大自然有着深厚的联系。她是一个能预知未来的天才治疗师——她知道自己的第一个孩子将是女孩，也知道自己的孩子中只有两个能见证她离世。
Most of Stratford-upon-Avon is afraid of her, but Shakespeare is drawn to the things that make her different and falls in love with her. When telling his sister about Agnes, he says, “She is like no one you have ever met... She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.”埃文河畔斯特拉特福的大多数人都害怕她，但莎士比亚却被她与众不同的特质所吸引，并爱上了她。当他向妹妹介绍艾格尼丝时，他说：“她不像你见过的任何人……她能看穿一个人的灵魂。她性格中没有一丝一毫的苛刻。她会接受一个人的本来面目，而不会认为他们不是或应该是什么样的人。”
When two of their children fall ill—first their younger daughter Judith, and then her twin Hamnet—Agnes is forced to care for them on her own. Shakespeare is in London working in the theater, and he only finds out that they’re sick once it’s too late. 当他们的两个孩子生病时（首先是他们的小女儿朱迪思，然后是她的双胞胎兄弟哈姆内特）艾格尼丝被迫独自照顾他们。莎士比亚在伦敦的剧院工作，等到他发现孩子们生病时已经太晚了。
No one knows what killed the real Hamnet. O’Farrell proposes that it was the bubonic plague, which is plausible for that era. It’s interesting to read about the plague right now, because it was such a different kind of pandemic than the current one. You wouldn’t see big outbreaks across entire communities. It would seem to show up randomly in a household, which is what happens to Agnes’s family.没有人知道历史上的哈姆内特真正的死因是什么。奥法雷尔认为是鼠疫，这在那个时代是合理的。当下读到鼠疫很有意思，因为那是一种与现在的新冠肺炎完全不同的大流行。你不会看到整个社区暴发大规模疫情。鼠疫似乎会随机出现在某个家庭中，这就是发生在艾格尼丝家的情况。
You know from the beginning that Hamnet’s story is going to end in tragedy. It’s a testament to how talented of a writer O’Farrell is that you can’t but believe it might turn out differently and that Agnes might save him. It reminded me a bit of the George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Both books imagine how historical figures would’ve responded to the loss of a child, although Bardo is a lot more fantastical. Sadly, this wasn’t an uncommon situation. Only two-thirds of children lived to their see their fifth birthdays in Lincoln’s time, and the odds were much worse in Shakespeare’s day. O’Farrell and Saunders capture how devastating and shocking it is to lose a child, even in an era when it was somewhat expected.你从一开始就知道，哈姆内特的故事将以悲剧收场。这侧面证实了奥法雷尔是一个多么有才华的作家，她让你情不自禁地相信，结果可能会有所不同，艾格尼丝可能会拯救他。这让我想起了乔治·桑德斯的小说《林肯在中阴界》（中文名暂译）。这两本书都想象了历史人物失去孩子后会作何反应，但《中阴界》明显更具幻想性。可悲的是，（失去孩子）这种情况并不少见。在林肯时代，只有三分之二的孩子能活到五岁，而在莎士比亚时代，这个比例更是要小得多。奥法雷尔和桑德斯捕捉到失去孩子是一件多么令人绝望和震惊的事情，即使是在一个对此有一定预期的时代。
Hamnet is ultimately a story about how the death of a son haunts his parents, while Hamlet is a tale about how the death of a parent haunts his son. O’Farrell cleverly ties the two together and offers a moving explanation for how Shakespeare channeled his grief and guilt into writing. She makes me want to go back and re-read the play.从根本上讲，《哈姆内特》是一个关于儿子的死亡如何困扰父母的故事，而《哈姆雷特》则是一个关于父母的死亡如何困扰儿子的故事。奥法雷尔巧妙地将这两者联系在一起，并为莎士比亚如何将悲伤和内疚转化为写作的动力提供了动人的解释。她让我想回头重读一遍剧本。
If you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s writing—even if you haven’t read or seen any of his work since high school—I think you’ll enjoy Hamnet. It’s surprisingly easy to read, even though the subject matter is heavy. I would describe it as emotional rather than depressing. At the end of the book, Agnes says she wishes she could “pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.” O’Farrell has done a remarkable job crossing that line and imagining how real life may have influenced one of history’s greatest plays.如果你熟悉莎士比亚的作品（即使你自高中后就没有读过或看过他的任何作品）我想你也会喜欢《哈姆内特》。它出人意料地容易阅读，尽管其主题很沉重。但我倾向于把这本书描述为情绪化，而不是压抑。在书的结尾，艾格尼丝说她希望自己能够“打破观众和演员、现实生活与戏剧之间的界限。”奥法雷尔在这方面做得非常出色，她打破了界限，想象了现实生活是如何影响这部历史上最伟大的戏剧的。
