主旨发言预告（四）|| Wolfgang G. Müller：The Happy Ending in Shakespeare..

国际文学伦理学批评研究会

第九届文学伦理学批评

国际学术研讨会

—— 中国·杭州 ——

2019年11月8日-10日

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      第九届文学伦理学批评国际学术研讨会将于2019年11月8日至10日在浙江大学外国语言文化与国际交流学院召开，热忱欢迎国内外学者与会。会议报名的截止日期是2019年9月20日，请有意与会的学者朋友将参会回执提交至会议专用信箱[e-mail]。

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      本届年会将邀请30余位国内外知名学者出席会议，另设38个分论坛。了解更多，请点击：

主旨发言预告（四）

Wolfgang G. Müller

国际文学伦理学批评研究会副会长，耶拿大学教授

      Wolfgang G. Müller教授是德国耶拿市弗里德里希·席勒大学的英语文学教授。该大学原名耶拿大学，创立于1558年，是德国最古老的大学之一，曾是德国古典主义的中心，培养出马克思、谢林、黑格尔、费希特等诸多著名哲学家，席勒和歌德等文学巨匠也曾任教于此，该校享有很高的世界声誉。Wolfgang G. Müller教授曾出版大量的学术专著和论文，其研究主要集中于抒情诗、民谣、莎士比亚戏剧和诗歌、中世纪文学等方面，尤其钟情莎士比亚和简·奥斯丁的文学作品。目前，他的学术兴趣和关注点主要转向伦理叙事、文学与哲学、文学与认知等领域。  

The Happy Ending in Shakespeare’s Comedies

There has been a tradition since Aristotle that one of the differences between tragedy and comedy lies in the contrasting resolutions of the plays’ plot lines into negative or positive closure. Aristotle’s apparently simple characterization of the plot of drama as consisting of beginning, middle and end has its inner logic in that the constitutive elements of the plot are built on one another. A comedy is targeted to a good end, which is the generically expected result of the events in the main body of the play.

Shakespeare’s comedies may have a happy ending, but they do not end in a state of happiness. Marriage is the expected aim, but married life is of no account in the plays. A notion like “They lived happily ever after” is alien to Shakespeare. If the happy ending is no more than a destination or endpoint, if it has no duration beyond the end of the play, it is doubtful if we can really speak of happiness in this context. It is also questionable if the happy ending can be called a momentary experience of happiness, because it presupposes a continuation, while the classical momentary experience of happiness would be an “episodic phenomenon”. (Röder 2015, 82) It is the first aim of the proposed paper to carry out a critical discussion on the concept of the happy ending and its relation to the notion of happiness. The second aim is to have a critical look at the great variety of happy endings in Shakespeare, and ask if notions or moments of happiness emerge in their context. Also the phenomenon is examined that Shakespeare calls the happy ending in doubt or even subverts it.

The complexity and the surprise effects closure may assume in Shakespeare’s comedies will be examined in a number of examples. In the early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost the love-game of the lords of Navarre and the ladies from France is prevented from fulfilment by the news of death. The lords have to wait for a year to win their love, which Browne calls “too long for a play”. This is already a meta-discourse on the happy ending. At the very moment when in Much Ado About Nothing Benedick and Beatrice confess their love, the young woman confronts her lover with the demand “Kill Claudio!” which represents an astonishing moment in a love-scene. Intensive discussion is required on Isabella’s silence as a reaction to Vincentio’s marriage proposals in Measure for Measure.  The most spectacular happy ending occurs in As You Like It, where Rosalind, disguised as a man, arranges four marriages as a brilliant stage-manager. That she should continue to live in subjection to a husband (“To you I give myself, for I am yours”), is a paradox, which is ingeniously solved in the play’s epilogue, which is spoken by Rosalind.

  责任编辑 | 任洁、汤轶丽

审校| 尚必武

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