April 23 is World Book Day, as well as Shakespeare's birthday and death, and this great writer who died more than 400 years ago is still read and interpreted by future generations. Professor Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University is an influential Shakespearean scholar and editor-in-chief of the Norton Edition of Shakespeare, one of the most authoritative works of Shakespeare, and this article is excerpted from his newly introduced Chinese edition of shakespeare's book Shakespeare's Freedom, which tells how beauty is expressed in Shakespeare's works and how beauty is defined. It is published with the authorization of the publisher, Social Science Literature Publishing House.
Written | Stephen Greenblatt
Excerpt from | Xu Wei
Shakespeare's Freedom (United States) by Stephen Greenblatt, translated by Tang Jianqing, Social Sciences Literature Press, Oracle, May 2020
Leon Battista Alberti
(Leon Battista Alberti)
In The Architecture
（Art of Building）
In one influential passage, beauty "is the reasonable harmony of the parts of a thing, so that nothing can be added, taken away, or changed, or it will only get worse." The ingenuity of this definition lies in its pair of characteristics
（specificity）
Total rejection. It is not this or that particular feature, but the interrelationships between all the parts of a whole that make things beautiful. Nothing superfluous and nothing missing. For example, Alberti's façade for Florence Santa Maria Novella, built in the 1650s, derives its beauty from the symmetry, balance and elegant proportions between its constituent elements. In Alberti's view, what is added to the existing whole, no matter how attractive and eye-catching, cannot be counted as beauty, but only as decoration. "Beauty is an intrinsic property, and if a thing is considered beautiful, then beauty permeates the whole of the thing; ornamentation, which is not intrinsic, has the property of an appendice or an extra."
This last intelligent description, which also applies to a building, a face, or a sonnet, helps explain why Renaissance depictions of beauty, including Shakespeare's, have little to do with features. In Shakespeare's work, people's reactions to beauty are ubiquitous, and often very strong, but to borrow Muzier
(Robert Musil)
In other words, they are mostly "unconstrained". "Your unblemished face," begins the 69th sonnet, "and no one's mind can be changed again." The young man's behavior caused others to have a different view of his inner life—"and he added to your flowers the stench of weeds." Ironically, this fact frame does not diminish the pale perfection of his outward image. The visible beauty of the beloved does not leave anything to the imagination, and the fact that no part is explicitly pointed out reinforces the feeling that the effect is not produced by this or that attractive attribute, but by a harmonious combination of ideal proportions. This combination was the dream of Renaissance artists, and we can do so in Leonardo da Vinci's The Woman with the Silver Sable.
(Lady with an Ermine, see color image)
— Especially in the lines used to depict the lady's clothes, jewelry, and hair — glimpse it, and it brings to life the abstract lines of the perfect image. The painting has an extraordinary, highly personal, disturbing expressiveness, but this expressiveness does not exist in the almost expressionless face of the woman in the painting, but in her very strange hand and the silver mink she is holding. Similarly, in Da Vinci for Ginevira Banchi
(Geneva deBenci)
In the portraits, the thorny juniper trees in the background have a special, continuous expressive intensity that is conspicuously lacking in the flawless and psychologically inaccessible features of the heroine in the painting.
As literary historians and art historians have demonstrated, these features are carefully calibrated to produce a harmonious overall effect, which requires the removal of any distinctive, individual imprint, resulting in a substantially systematic non-personalization
（Programmatic impersonality）
。 After Petrarch and Boccaccio, Renaissance poets and painters established an ideal set of standards of beauty, with each component, from the earlobes to the feet, carefully drawn and classified. Of course, gifted artists understand that beauty cannot be mechanically copied – the entire effect will depend on things like vaghezza
(Fuzzy)
prettiness
(Elegant)
grace
(graceful)
These qualities. But the preference for the lightness of an elusive, unique existence did not prevent them from taking the so-called blazon
(Boasting)
, i.e., by taking pleasure in the form of descriptive enumerations of the parts of a perfect whole.
Portrait of Shakespeare.
By the late 16th century, the enumeration game had become so familiar and obsolete that ambitious artists often distanced themselves from it. While Shakespeare occasionally indulged in flowery rhetoric, he largely satirized the rhetorical means of making lists. Of course, for a playwright who expects many different actors to play the characters in his script, it makes sense to omit the character details, even if it is an idealized one. At the same time, the sonnet writer also had his own social motives, which were that it was difficult to identify his lover. But in addition to the factor of professional skill, there is a more general aversion to characteristics in his praise of beauty. The princess in The Futility of Love says:
Good Lord Baoyi, although my beauty is humble,
But it also doesn't require your rhetorical rendering.
Beauty can be judged by the eyes,
It is not the sharp mouth of the trader who can suppress it arbitrarily. (Act 2, Acts 1, Acts 1, 13-16)
"The eye can judge" contains what Alberti calls the "reasonable harmony" of the whole, while the vulgar trader boasts of this or that characteristic. In the same spirit, Olivia laughed at the words of praise that Viola or Hissario had painstakingly remembered:
I can make a list of my beauty, display them one by one, and write every detail on my will, for example: one, two pieces of vermilion lips of moderate thickness; one, a pair of gray eyes, attached eyelids; one, a jade neck, a soft one, and so on.
(Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5, Line 214~218)
Viola immediately understood the social and aesthetic significance of Olivia's mockery: "I understand what kind of person you are, you are so proud. ”
(Act 1, Scene 5, Line 219)
But at least in this respect, Olivia is merely reflecting a broad consensus that too much praise for details reveals business intent. Balon's praise for the beauty of his beloved's cheeks—
Her delicate cheeks
A collection of all outstanding beauty,
Her magnificent whole body
Can't find the slightest flaw -
It only allowed him to grasp the market meaning of the pun he used, so he suddenly stopped praising:
Ah, no! She didn't need exaggerated rhetoric.
Only goods to be sold need praise.
(Acts 4, Act 4, Scene 3, Lines 230-236)
Because Balon was not selling goods at the market, he suppressed the urge to list the elements of Rosellen's beauty and gave up what he later called "maggot-like ornamentation"
(Act 5, Scene 2, Line 409)
。
Such ornaments are well suited to the commodities of the market, and Shakespeare should be very familiar with the market place where his father opened a shop to sell gloves. It is no accident that one of the best passages in Shakespeare's play describes a horse:
Round hooves, short skulls, furry distance, clumpy and staggered;
Broad chest, round eyes, small head, wide nostrils, breathing stool;
The ears are small and pointed, the head and neck are high and curved, and the four feet are straight and strong;
The mane is thin, the tail hair is dense, the skin is smooth, and the buttocks are fat and round. [Venus and Adonis (lines 295–298)]
Human beauty cannot be so nakedly counted, for it will be captured by the captivated eye. In fact, the perception of beauty rarely depends on individual features, so the eyes themselves may be closed. Venus of Acacia said to Aduni, "If I have only two ears and no eyes / Then the beauty within you, though I cannot see it, my ears can hear." ”
(433~434 lines)
For Hamlet, man himself is "the essence of the universe, the primate of all things."
(Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 296~297)
And Iago painfully recalls Caseio's "personable personality/dwarfs me"
(Act 5, Scene 1, Lines 19-20)
。 These affirmations of beauty are equally strong and equally unconfigured.
Prosaic
（featurelessness）
It is the ideal form of human beauty in Elizabethan culture. In many portraits of the Queen, her clothes and jewels are depicted very specifically, but her face is always like a pale, expressionless mask
(See color picture)
。 Perhaps, despite the great emphasis on the representation of clothing on the importance of material, the mask is a hint of the Renaissance, symbolizing Schiller
(Schiller)
In the mouth of a truly beautiful work of art, the "destruction of the material", or Winkelmann
(Winckelmann)
Said blank
（Unbezeichnung）
Beauty— "Beauty is like the most perfect water drawn from a clear spring, the lighter its taste, the healthier it is, because it purifies all impurities." The image of beauty that Shakespeare extolled cannot freely wander outside of matter, but in his writings the word "beauty" clearly lacks substance, and it is a gesture of constantly approaching this freedom.
To be sure, there are two qualities that Are often identified with as beauty by Shakespeare. One is brilliance
（radiance）
。 As a result, Suffolk was dazzled by Marguerite in Henry VI (Part I):
It's like the sun caressing the smooth surface of the water,
The refracted waves are dazzling,
Her beautiful posture dazzled me.
(Act 5, Scene 3, Lines 18-20)
Thus, Romeo also compares Juliet in the tomb to a lantern in the darkness:
Because Juliet slept here, her beauty
Turn this tomb into a hall full of light and feast.
(Act 5, Scene 3, lines 85-86)
Shakespeare often used the word "fair" to convey the brilliance of beauty, appearing more than seven hundred times in his works. "Fair" can mean cute, clear, delicate or clean, and it also has a distinct sense of brilliance. Bright hair and fair complexion in turn set off crimson cheeks and rosy lips.
The second recurring quality of beauty is smoothness
（unblemished smoothness）
。 "Have you ever seen a more delicate lady?" Petruccio asks, forcing Cade to greet the elderly Vincennes as a "young and delicate girl." After a few moments, however, he corrected his mistake: "This is a gray-haired man with a wrinkled face. ”
(Acts 4 of The Taming of the Dead, Acts 5, Lines 30-44)
Wrinkles are repeatedly used as the antithesis of beauty in Shakespeare's work. The beautiful boy in the sonnet is urged to have children to ensure that his beauty is not destroyed by time:
When forty winters besieged your Zhu Yan,
Dig deep ditches in your beautiful garden,
Your youthful costume, so envied by others,
It will become a ragged defeat, and no one should look at it.
(Sonnet 2)
These signs of old age are abominable because they mean death:
This mirror must not make me believe that I am old,
As long as the great Shaohua and you are still the same year;
But when you have a deep groove of time on your face,
I hope that death will come and end my days.
(Sonnet 22)
In Shakespeare's world, at least for some, wrinkles speak louder than age. 17th century astrologer Richard Sanders
（Richard Saunders）
Drawing on an ancient facial tradition, he invented his "phase technique"
（metoposcopy）
, a kind of interpretation of the face
(especially the forehead)
A guide to lines. "If he or she has such a line on his forehead," Sanders said as he observes a figure, "it is fickle, impermanent, false, deceitful, and vain." "But people's fear and contempt for wrinkles have nothing to do with what wrinkles foreshadow." In keeping with his featureless dreams, Shakespeare, like Winkelmann, repeatedly portrayed beauty as unmarked
（unmarked）
As a result, the hostility in his plays is often expressed as a desire to leave a mark. "If only I could get close to you beautiful child," cried the angry Duchess of Gloucester to Queen Marguerite, "I will slap you twice with a bow left and right." [Henry VI (Novella) Act 1, Scene 3, Lines 45-46] Richard claimed that her beauty led him to "not care about the world, but only wanted to stay by your crispy chest for a moment" (
Richard III Act 1, Scene 2, Lines 123-124)
To this, Mrs. Ann angrily replied:
If I had known this, I would have told you, murderer,
I must have scratched my red face with my own hands.
(Act 1, Scene 2, lines 125~126)
Pollikhinis' son falls in love with a country girl, which infuriates Polichinis, who threatens to break her face:
I'm going to scratch your beauty with thorns
Your face is colder than your identity. [Winters Tale, Act IV, Scene 4, Lines 413-414]
Stills from the film Richard II, based on Shakespeare's work.
Scars, like wrinkles, are defined as ugly. But in the culture of medieval and modern Europe, there are two important exceptions. One is the wounds on the martyrs and Christ. These scars are the focus of mourning, but they are also the object of intense religious meditation as well as aesthetic attention. In countless images of this period, wounds are highlighted—such as the depiction of Jesus drawing attention to his cracked wound, or Catherine of Siena
（Catherine of Siena）
The act of kissing the wound. In some of these portraits, the body itself disappears completely, leaving only scars on the devout viewer, immersing them in emotions of sympathy, admiration, and love-likeness. The concept of beautiful wounds is in Francis of Assisi
（Francis of Assisi）
Holy Marks
（Stigmata）
The Christian's body shows the same wounds as the five wounds suffered during Christ's passion. But this concept of "paganism" was too closely related to Catholicism to be easily transferred to Protestant England. Shakespeare's characters often swear by God's wounds
(At least until the examiners forbid them to do so)
, but these wounds were used in curses, not as ornaments.
There is a second exception: on soldiers, scars are a symbol of honor. Hence the Piero della Francesca
(Piero della Francesco)
Painting of the famous Federico da Montevertro
(Federico da Montefeltro)
In the profile portrait, the sword wound wound on the bridge of the latter's nose is highlighted. Shakespeare at least vaguely agreed that war trauma can bring pride. "Show us the scars on your body," York said contemptuously to Suffolk, "and whoever doesn't have a single scar on his body will win any battle." "[Henry VI (novella) Act III, Acts III, Acts III "Those who have lived today," King Henry told the British on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt,
Every year on the eve of the Crispin Festival will serve wine to his neighbors,
Say: "Tomorrow is St. Crispin's Day!" ”
Then he rolled up his sleeves to reveal the scars,
"These scars were all made on Crispin's Day," he said. ”
(Henry V, Act V, Scene 3, Lines 41, 45-48)
Volenia even more enthusiastically blessed her warlike son with "great scars" on his body.
(Coriolanus Act II, Scene 133-134)
。 But only 7 Piero della Francesca, Federico da Montefeldro (c. 1465), Uffizi Gallery, Florence
（TPG）
It is the terrible mother of Coriolanus who would call these scars beautiful:
When Heckaber was nursing
Hector's time, her plump breasts
Not as good as Hector's bleeding forehead horns.
(Act 1, Scene 3, Lines 37-39)
Her beautification and erotic attitude towards wounds is her problem. And Shakespeare certainly didn't have the idea that scars on a woman's body could make her look better.
Even the only true female warrior in Shakespeare's work, Joan of Arc prided herself on her flawless appearance. Although she was the daughter of a shepherd, she told the Prince that she was transformed by the apparition of the Virgin Mary during "my cheeks were exposed to the scorching sun" [Henry VI (Part I) Act 1, Scene 3, Line 56]:
I was born dark,
But she injected her holy radiance into me,
Turn me into a wonderful woman, as you can see.
(Act 1, Scene 3, lines 63 to 65)
Similarly, the warrior Othello, though intending to take his wife's life, could not bear to destroy her polished body:
I don't want to shed her blood,
Nor do they want to destroy her, which is purer than snow,
Smoother skin than plaster.
(Acts 5, Act 5, Scene 2, Lines 3-5)
In his stranglehold of Desdemona, there is a perverse, distorted fantasy of removing the terrible stain he thinks she has brought to herself, and to turn her back into the perfect goddess of the slate and perfection he desires:
May you be like this until you die,
I'm going to kill you and love you again.
(Act 5, Scene 2, lines 18-19)
It was the tragic end of a beautiful dream that was not affected by time and experience, and that was not affected by the scars of age and injury. For Othello, leaving a scar on Desdemona's skin was worse than Desdemona's death.
The Royal Shakespeare Company performed Richard II.
But in Shakespeare's world, the ugliest scars don't come from age or injury, but from flaws that exist at birth. When King John
（King John）
When Constance thinks of the defects that make people "look bad and ugly, and lose your mother's face," the birthmark is one of the notable factors:
You are full of nasty spots and ugly scars,
Crippled, curved back, black, stupid, like a monster,
It was all dirty moles and harsh sarcomas.
(King John, Act II, Scene 2, Lines 44-47)
A remarkable birthmark can be understood both as a personal misfortune and as a miracle, a harbinger of an impending public catastrophe. It can be seen as "throwing away your mother's face" because it can be caused by what your mother did, gazed, or dreamed about during pregnancy. It was out of a strong sense of fear of this shame that, at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream—when the couple went to bed and should be having sex—O'Brown sent out a blessing to the newlyweds, and the blessing was very strongly focused on not having flaws in the child. O'Brown sang in the house like a fairy:
All ominous birthmarks,
will not be found on the body,
No black moles, no lack of lips,
There is no half-scarring;
Giving birth to boys and girls,
No vain and no disasters are blessed.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 5, Scene 2, Lines 39-44)
Of course, all of this is perfectly in keeping with tradition, that is, it is part of an intrinsic cultural capacity that governs patterns of discrimination, reactions and manifestations in a given period. Thousands of Renaissance portraits, as well as the large number of nude portraits hanging on the museum's walls, rarely depict birthmarks, though birthmarks were certainly as many at the time as they are now. The urge to erase these marks was extremely strong, and perhaps this was one of the motivations that made it possible to paint portraits in the first place. There are exceptions – such as Mary Tudor in 1554
（Mary Tudor）
Portraits – but these exceptions often mark the abandonment of dreams of perfect beauty, thus only confirming their cultural hegemony.
This dream marked the key difference between Roman portraits, especially those of the Republic, and Renaissance portraits. The excavated busts of the classical period embody the technique of displaying aesthetic individuality, and it is certain that Renaissance artists were attracted to these techniques, so some sculptors of the 15th and 16th centuries imitated them brilliantly. The same is true of the painters, who in Italy and further north make astonishing representations of specific faces,35 which have an indelible imprint on the personality, age and experience of their owners. But when trying to express the presence of beauty with paintings, Renaissance artists usually erase all distinctive marks.
Among the many factors that have contributed to this transformation over the centuries, the chief is the transformative force of Christianity. For centuries, both literally and metaphorically, Jesus and the Virgin Mary have been described as pure and unblemished, born without blemishes or stains. An English priest in the mid-17th century wrote that beauty "consists of three details: the perfection of the lines, the proper proportions between them, and the excellence and purity of the colors." They are complete in the soul of Christ." 6 The preacher also says that not only the soul of Christ is the embodiment of perfect beauty, but also the body of Christ. We think children have the sweetest beauty we may encounter, but "even this beauty must have some kind of stain or nevi, or some kind of undetected defect." Although we do not know what this defect is or how to call it, it is not in his body."
This flaw is seen in the age-old Christian vision
(This vision effortlessly crosses the line between Catholicism and Protestantism.)
It is the outward sign of inner sin that has defiled all human beings from the very beginning. If we could see it with our eyes, we would not find anything to praise in mortals:
Those seemingly rosy and beautiful cheeks, which have nothing but the color of our sins; those lips for which we weep for sweetness, decay in our conceit and become stinky; teeth that look as white as ivory, blackened by slander and slander, and black ash regarded as the dirtiest chimneys; beautiful curly hair, which look like snakes, young offspring of red dragons; white and tender hands, which look dirty, bloody and unclean.
Our non-dislike of each other is simply the result of our birth defects in vision: "We, poor us, are but blind moles and bats." "If we are not blind, we will see that only Christ is truly beautiful." There is no body other than the Body of Christ. ”
Therefore, it is only through Christ and in Christ, in the resurrected bodies of those who are saved, that humanity is washed away from their ugly imperfections. According to theologians, in the Final Judgment, all scars, wrinkles, and other marks on the flesh of the blessed will disappear, and everyone's body will reach its perfect form. "Spots" in all its forms, as in John Wilkins
（John Wilkins）
The "blemishes, stains, stains, dusts, nevi, freckles, spots, stains, stains" are removed. Everything lost in a lifetime will be fully restored – according to Aquinas, including the enamel of the teeth.
(However, as a symbol of honor, the wounds of the martyrs are still visible.) ）
What helped shape the Renaissance portrait was the imagination of a redeemed or restored face, which was purified by the defects of its flesh and repeatedly
(Considering the high frequency of the model's actual age range)
Depicted as belonging to about 33 years old
(i.e. the age at which Jesus died)
People. This age is often considered to represent the period of a man's perfection—"the most beautiful of human beings, and through their eyes, faces, hands, and whole bodies, the radiance of divine beauty burst forth continuously." "Therefore, all those who are saved, regardless of their actual age of death, will be resurrected to this age. It is only after realizing the long history of this practice of removing blemishes and the desire for a perfect body that we can understand the Puritan Cromwell
（Cromwell）
How unusual the words are. It is said that he was married to Sir Peter Riley
（Sir Peter Lely）
Say, "Dear Riley, I hope you can use all your skills to draw pictures that are truly like mine, not to flatter me at all, and to pay attention to all my bumps, rashes, warts, or I will not pay a penny." In his aesthetic and political thought, Cromwell subverted the existing order.
Stills from the movie Shakespeare Love.
In the Middle Ages and modern Europe, there was an important field in which the birthmark of the person and other immutable features of the body were usually carefully recorded, and that was the field of human identification. Historian Valentin Grobner
(Valentin Groebner)
A wonderful account is given of the identity mark of people in this period. He noticed that there would be special teams that would go to the battlefield after the battle, taking all the clothes and weapons from the dead bodies for sale. As a result, the dead are all naked and illegible, so determining which body should be buried decently and which body should be thrown into a hastily dug ditch is a challenge. ["Nothing Goes Wrong" opens with a short conversation.] Leonardo asked don Pietro's emissaries, "How many soldiers have you broken in this battle?" "Not much," replied the Messenger, "not one of some fame." ”
(Act 1, Acts 1, Acts 1, 5-6 lines)
Friends, relatives, and domestic servants are called to identify the remains of the "somewhat famous" deceased. And so, in 1477, the naked and stiff bold Charles
（Charles the Bold）
The body was recognized by his servant, who noticed that he was missing his front teeth, that he had a sore on his stomach, extremely long nails, and a visible scar on his neck. Man's identity is established through the imprint of his physical appearance.
In modern Europe, in addition to the physical characteristics of elite warriors, there are a number of other categories of people whose permanent physical characteristics are considered important and therefore carefully recorded for identification. Renaissance officials were particularly interested in those who were considered private property—similar to domesticated animals—and those who were actually the property of the state. The ledger detailed the physical characteristics of the slaves, including skin color, hair color, scars, and the shape and location of moles. Similarly, known as "stalkers"
（Watcher）
people, lurking in ports, hotels, or other public places, give precise descriptions of suspicious traitors and infidels. Gloucester was furious with his son Edgar:
See where this beast has fled,
I'm going to teleport his little image around,
Let everyone in the whole country pay attention to him.
(King Lear, Act II, Scene 1, Lines 81-84)
In addition, criminals are often branded and maimed so that they will leave an indelible criminal record for the rest of their lives.
This preoccupation with the flesh does not contradict our view of beauty in the slightest: characteristics and beauty are different, even opposite, in this period. A smooth, flawless, radiant, and largely featureless face and body is a cultural ideal. On this ideal tone, Shakespeare surprisingly made many remarkable creations.
But before we examine these highly individualized and distinctly unconventional figures more closely, it is worth noting that Shakespeare's imagination of traditional, idealized beauty always evoked a hint of anxiety. "What's in here?" Bassanio asked when he chose the lead box. "A copy of the beautiful Portia." This is followed by a very peculiar description:
Her split lips
Opened by a luscious aromatic scent.
Only such a luscious breath,
To be able to separate such sweet friends.
The painter transforms into a spider when he draws her hair,
Weave this web of golden hair to seduce the man's heart,
The man saw it faster than a moth into the net.
But her eyes—how could he draw them with his eyes?
After drawing one, I think he must be dazzled,
I can't paint the rest of it anymore.
(The Merchant of Venice Act III, Scene 2, lines 114-115, 118-126)
It was probably a moment of ecstasy, both beautiful and sexy, but there was also a feeling between the lines that was more disgusting: cracked lips, cobweb-like hair, and one eye that could dazzle onlookers. If it's beauty, then what's ugly? What's going on?
Perhaps the discomfort expressed by Bassanio is not directed at beauty, but at the presentation of beauty, after all, he is talking about a portrait of Portia, not Portia herself.
(In fact, the plot itself is a bit strange, as Portia has to stand and wait while Bassanio harks about the image in her portrait.) ）
This "picture talk"
(ekphrasis)
Focus on the mysterious power of the painter – "Whose deified pen is this/depicting such an extraordinary beauty?" ”
(Act 3, Scene 2, lines 115-116)
And the sense of fear that this power causes. A few years later, in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare returns to the artist's eerie ability to compete with the creativity of great nature, and tries to resist the anxiety caused by this ability: "If this is magic, then make it an art / as reasonable as eating." ”
(Act 5, Scene 3, Line 110~111)
But in The Merchant of Venice, it's not just the presentation of beauty that's disturbing; beauty itself has a problem. Before making his decision, Bassanio elaborated on the issue in a large monologue, convincing himself not to choose the obviously tempting gold and silver boxes, but to open the "cold lead" box
(Act 3, Scene 2, Line 104)
。 He said:
Look at the so-called beauty of the world,
That miracle that is completely decorated by fat powder,
The more frivolous the woman,
The fat powder is also heavier.
(Act 3, Scene 2, lines 88~91)
The so-called "miracle" – a phenomenon that violates the laws of physics – is, of course, a joke: the heavier the fat powder applied to the beauty, the more frivolous the woman becomes
(And the more debauchery it becomes)
Misogynistic anxieties and hatreds emerge here as part of a long tradition of denigrating beauty. "Blinded by passion," Lucretius
（Lucretius）
In The Theory of MaterialIty
（On the Nature of Things）
A famous passage of the book states that men endow women with qualities that women do not actually possess. In this respect, beauty is a projection of desire; the moment when the lover thinks he sees best is precisely the moment when he is completely blind. To such a man, Lucretius wrote a series of euphemisms in a mocking tone: "Dark skin is 'honey yellow', a scruffy slut 'plain and unpretentious'... A stout and stupid country maid is like an 'antelope', obviously short and chubby but is said to be 'elegant, charming', and a huge female giant is 'pure miracle, the embodiment of majesty'. ”
Shakespeare in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
（Two Gentlemen of Verona）
Using this mocking technique again, Valentine sighs at the lovesickness of the beautiful Sylvia, and he has a conversation with his servant Sphied.
Sbiid: You haven't seen her since she was crippled.
Valentine: When did she become crippled?
Spideer: She's crippled since you fell in love with her.
Van Lundin: I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, but I always saw her beautiful.
Sbiid: If you love her, you can't see her.
Valentine: Why?
Speder: Because love is blind.
(Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 56-63)
In classical philosophy, the way out of blindness—back to a state of calm and indifference, free from undulating and distorted passions—is to understand that beauty, in Bassanio's words, is "decorated." Even the most beautiful woman, Lucretius writes, made full use of artificial reinforcement: the poor woman "smeared herself with such an unpleasant perfume, and her maids turned away from her and giggled behind her back." And her lover, with flowers in both hands, stood outside the door, "offering acacia kisses on the door." But if the door is opened, he "will smell a smell when he enters the door, and he will make a suitable excuse to say goodbye... Then he would admit that he was a fool, for he realized that he had given her more qualities than a mortal should have."
In this regard, in order to see clearly and make the right choice, Bassanio faces different boxes and tries to cool his fiery desires. The problem is that when he makes the choice to find the portrait of the lady, his words of praise are poisoned by the irony of the healing function he has just had, and the ecstasy and appreciation he is trying to express become disgusting.
There are many similar scenes in Shakespeare's plays, often associated with an obsession with cosmetics. Hamlet said to Ophelia:
I also know how you will grease and powder, God has given you a face, and you have made another one for yourself. You are smoking and flirting, making obscenities, naming creatures created by God, and showing off your ignorant manners. Forget it, I don't dare to learn it anymore; it has gone mad.
(Act 3, Acts 1, Acts 1, 142-146)
But the misogynistic mood that disgusted Hamlet was a symptom of his soul's illness, not a sign of his philosophical wisdom. Anxiety about beauty is repeatedly expressed in Shakespeare's plays, but it is always denied. For Shakespeare acknowledges the compulsive, irrational, demagogic power of desire—everything implied by love juice in A Midsummer Night's Dream—and embraces them. Although these plays repeatedly explore the psychological power of the projection of desire, I don't think the author invites the audience to mock the beauty of Portia, Juliet, Sylvia, or Ophelia. Instead, the viewer is invited into a state of illusion, subject to the magic of beauty.
What makes Shakespeare's great innovation is that this magic is even enhanced when he turns over and over again to forms of beauty that violate the norms of mainstream culture: the witty Rotherine, whose dark skin makes Balon assert, "The face of splashing ink is the ultimate in beauty."
("The Futility of Love", Act IV, Scene 3, Line 249)
The Queen of Egypt, with her irresistible allure, described herself as one who was "blackened by the passionate eyes of Ferbos / Time has left a deep wrinkle on my forehead"
(Anthony and Cleopatra Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 28-29)
Above all, the radiant lady in the sonnets, her eyes not at all like the sun
(Sonnet 130)
。 These images are not entirely a repudiation of the ideal type, for the glorification of the ideal type is always understood as a paradox, a revelation of the power of desire to disturb the normal order of things. But beauty survived the paradox.
In life, "tanning"
(so)
The word has a completely negative connotation, and as sonnet 115 laments, the accident of time "tanning beauty"—a compliment to black is a luxury of the blind power of the obsessive mind:
To be honest, my eyes don't love you,
They see a thousand mistakes in you;
But the eyes can't see, but the heart is fascinated,
It is obsessively spoiled, regardless of what the eyes see.
(Sonnet 141)
Here at least the eyes are not deceived; in other sonnets, the "sick desire" for the black lady
(Sonnet 147)
Impairs a lover's ability to correctly observe or judge:
Alas, love puts something in my head,
I couldn't recognize the real scene at all!
Even if you recognize it, where does reason run,
Wrongly judged the truth that the eye sees?
(Sonnet 148)
The National Centre for the Performing Arts performs Shakespeare's plays.
Misjudgment is the perception of what is "knowingly" ugly as beautiful, thus contradicting the evidence seen by the eye, or as Shakespeare said in sonnet 152: "Let the eye swear and speak falsely of the foreground of the eye." ”
This vow is reminiscent of a strange and significant shift, not only in Shakespeare's description of his beloved, but also in his own voice. The poet objects to his own opinions or judgments, that is, he has a "false eye":
I swear you're beautiful! There's nothing more ridiculous than that:
Obliterate the truth to insist on such a black lie!
(Sonnet 152)
This novel, compulsive, contradictory, strongly self-aware voice did what the poet never did to a pretty lad: he identified himself by name. He calls himself "Will"
（Will）
Shakespeare's most ardent celebrations of beauty repeatedly violated his cultural ideals of blandness. From this transgression arises an identity, a distinctive, distinctive, peculiar identity, which becomes not only the poet, but also the black lady, and other images of contradictory beauty in Shakespeare's work. The description of them is no more detailed than regular beauties—dark is no more exotic than white—but deviating from the convention is itself a manifestation of personalization.
In relation to the black lady or Cleopatra in the sonnets, Shakespeare seems intent on distancing himself from the perfect beauty, the qualities of which are defined by Aquinas as integritas, consonantia, claritas
(Joyce's Stephen Daedalus translates it as "complete, harmonious and clear".)
。 We see not the embodiment of symmetrical proportions, harmony, and symmetry, but characters tainted by the concept of the times, yet their stains are part of their irresistible and disturbing attraction.
At the time there was a concept of beauty that was markedly different from what Alberti expounded at the beginning of this chapter. In this concept known to Shakespeare, in order to evoke beauty more intensely, the element of ugliness is deliberately used slightly. Star, crescent and diamond motifs cut from black taffeta or very thin Spanish leather were affixed to the face, a practice that began in the late 16th century
(See Figure 9)
。 "Venus has a mole on her face, which makes her even more cute." Keep an eye on the latest fashions
(Lyly)
It is written, "Helen has a scar on her chin, which Paris calls Cos amoris, the whetstone of love. Such "love spots," as the 17th-century people called it, were meant to highlight the beauty of the human body.
Shakespeare understood this principle of prominence and contrast very well. Anzhelu, who was aroused by sexual desire, told Isabella:
If your beauty is veiled with black,
It will be ten times more beautiful.
("One Newspaper and One Newspaper" Act II, Scene 4, Line 79~81)
But Shakespeare's dark-skinned beauties were not just meant to set off the white and sleek. Beauty exists in the characteristics of the beloved, including those that do not conform to normative expectations—strange, weird, imperfect. It's a kind of wild, accidental, and encounter pornography, not organic perfection. Thus, it creates space for the union of the art of love and the art of identity in the idealized language of praise.
This combination is crucial because it is closer to the overall aesthetic of Shakespeare's plays than to the "reasonable harmony" and completeness of the perfect form. For these plays, it cannot be said that "nothing can be added, taken away or changed, or it will only get worse". On the contrary, Shakespeare seems to have fully realized that successful performances inevitably lead to change, cuts and additions. In fact, all of his plays transcend the limits of tradition. Shakespeare seems pleased with the expansion of boundaries, refusing to stay within fixed boundaries, just as he delights the audience with a series of characters who don't meet expectations—the audience's expectations are expressed by other characters in the same play: Catherina instead of the beautiful Bianca; Betrice instead of Hiro; Rotherine instead of Celia; Cleopatra instead of Octavia. At the end of One of his most uniquely structured plays, The Tale of Winter, Shakespeare depicts the virtual resurrection of the beautiful Hermiewine, and it is clear that he deliberately emphasizes parts that Renaissance artists would carefully erase. A horrified Leontis said:
But, Paulina,
Hermi Winnie didn't have so many wrinkles on her face,
It's not as old as this statue.
(Act 5, Scene 3, Lines 27-29)
What makes all these heroines so attractive — and makes them so beautiful — is a personalized quality that shatters the ideal of "featurelessness."
In Shakespeare's play, the perfect symbol of the shattering of ideals is the scene in Simberlin, where the evil Aquimo closely observes the sleeping Imogen so that he convinces her husband Posemus that he has seduced her. At first, Aekimo described her body in ecstatic but perfectly traditional language, and as we can see, Shakespeare was skeptical of this orthodox boast: skin color like "fresh lilies / whiter than bedding!" ”
(Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 15-16)
Lips like "incomparably beautiful carnelian jade"
(Act 2, Scene 2, Line 17)
Eyelids "pure white and azure / That's the color of the sky itself"
(Act 2, Acts 2, Acts 2, 22-23)
。 But then he noticed what he called "credentials."
（voucher）
, which is a piece of evidence that applies to the court:
On her left breast
There is also a plum-shaped mole,
It's like the red dot in the heart of the lotus flower.
(Act 2, Scene 2, lines 37-39)
The mole is part of Shakespeare's adaptation of the story: the story of Boccaccio
(English translation from 1620)
The heroine "has a small mole on her left breast", and the anon.m. "Jenny's Frederick"
（Frederyke of Jennen）
In the middle, the heroine has a "black mole" on her left arm. And these stories continue with the 13th-century Violet Legends.
(Roman de la Violette)
As a microcosm of an ancient legendary tradition, this tradition has repeatedly become the material for illustrations. As can be seen from the 16th-century drawings reproduced in this book, these illustrations carefully depict black moles that reveal inner secrets.
In Shakespeare's Simberlin, a play full of disguises and errors, the symbol of the flesh is an indelible sign of identity, and not just for Imogen. Xin Bailin recalled his abducted son
There is a red mole in the shape of a star on the neck,
It was an extraordinary mark.
(Act 5, Scene 6, line 365~366)
Peralus replied:
That's exactly what he is.
He still has that natural mark on his neck,
The wise Creator gave him this characteristic,
It is to make it the immediate evidence.
(Act 5, Scene 6, line 366~369)
Imogen's mole is also a "natural marker," but its description—a plum-shaped mole, like a red dot in the heart of a lotus flower—exhibits a strange intensity of attention that conveys an emotion somewhere between longing and disgust, which goes beyond the function required to present evidence. Aegimo said to Posemorus at the height of his vicious slander:
If you're looking for further evidence,
Underneath her breasts, which deserve to be caressed,
There's a little mole,
I was proud to lie in the place where my soul had been destroyed.
Swear by my life, I couldn't help but kiss it,
Although that gave me a lot of satisfaction, it was extraordinary
Makes me hungry and thirsty. Do you remember this mole on her body?
(Act 2, Scene 4, lines 133-139)
Posemus remembers.
The mole on Imogen's chest is not an invention of Shakespeare himself, but a plot booster that he borrowed from others and carefully arranged, and it seems to become sexually intimate in the play, and therefore the decisive evidence of Imogen's infidelity. It was a stain that led her heartbroken husband to make the most intense misogyny of all of Shakespeare's plays—which he believed confirmed that "she still has a stain that fills the whole hell."
(Act 2, Scene 4, Line 140)
。 Then it becomes like the handkerchief found in Othello, a symbol of the genitalia of a woman (in this case, Imogen); more broadly, a "woman's sin."
(Act 2, Scene 5, Line 20)
The symbol, in the eyes of the misogynistic Poseidon, is also the abyss of all the evils that corrupt human life. But "Simberin" makes it clear that this is only a paranoid delusion, the result of malicious slander. The slanderer Aekimo describes the mole as pornographic—nothing in the play can deny this possibility—but to see it as a peculiar symbol of a moral stain is a lie, just as it is a lie when he claims to have kissed it. On the contrary, just as it bears a resemblance to the delicate inner design of a flower, the mole of imogen is completely natural, as embodied in the plot, and it is something that is both naïve and personal.
Imogen was beautiful, but she was not a beauty without character. Her mole is not a perfect part of any form, but it is also not a decoration, either in the sense of an obvious ornament, or in the sense that it is merely added and therefore dispensable. This is the indelible sign of Shakespeare's discovery of all beauty in his uniqueness, and of all the indelible uniqueness and beauty that we identify in his work.
This article is an excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare's Freedom, published with permission from the publisher, Social Science Literature Press.
Written by Stephen Greenblatt
Excerpt 丨 Xu Wei
Editor 丨 Zhang Jin
Proofreading 丨 Chen Diyan