Shortly before the reinterment of the remains of King Richard III in Leicester Cathedral on March 22,2015, the Guardian historian, David Priestland, lamented what he termed "the hullabaloo over the bones of a king dead for over 500 years" to be followed by an "archbishop-led re-interment service"--events he found to be "reminiscent of the saints' cults of the middle ages," a "reboot of the medieval craze for relics." (2) Other broadcasters expressed astonishment that the journey of the king's remains through the streets of Leicester should have produced pavements thronged with onlookers. It is tempting to speculate that such rare events might have stirred deep-seated collective cultural memories of a time when such relics were venerated and superstition stalked the land. Indeed, Anne E. Bailey has traced significant parallels between the medieval rituals surrounding the translatio of a saint's remains to a new shrine, and the studiedly ecumenical ceremonial given to King Richard's remains together with the care afforded to their location so as to accommodate the reception of "pilgrims." (3) In this spirit of renascent medievalism, would it be too fanciful, I wonder, to suggest that the language and stage mise-en-scene that attends human mortality in Shakespeare's plays sometimes carries strong resonances of material images that conjure the imagination to construct the funerary iconography of a former time? Martin Luther had declared that "Christ's kingdom is a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom," (4) a position supported by scriptural authority since Romans 10:17 has, "Then faith is by hearing, & hearing by the worde of God." (5) The second commandment alone reinforced the contention that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century in Europe should be represented as the triumph of the word over the image, notwithstanding the fact that Luther himself came to moderate his scorn of images by arguing that they might be retained as long as they were understood not to be sacred in themselves but merely serving as reminders or teachers of gospel truths. Notwithstanding the moderation of the Lutheran stance, the pretext had been supplied for an iconoclasm that owed as much to policy as to doctrinal purity. In such a climate it was perhaps inevitable that the theft, destruction, or obliteration of popish paraphernalia--what Eamon Duffy has famously termed the "stripping of the altars"--should extend not only to tombs within the church but also to the cemetery beyond. Indeed, "during early and mid-sixteenth-century outbreaks of iconoclasm, English Protestants demolished or mutilated many funerary monuments." (6) Thus, the carved effigies of intercessionary angels and other perceived idolatrous and superstitious Catholic elements were ruthlessly expunged, though when the destruction of the tombs of aristocratic families was thought to challenge a social hierarchy based on lineal succession, a royal proclamation of 1560 relating to the "breaking or defacing of monumentes of antiquitie" deplored the "extinguyshyng of the honorable and good memorye of sundry vertuous and noble persons deceased" while making a careful distinction between those monuments "being set vp ... for memory" and those "for superstition." (7) Shakespeare is generally careful to exclude from both the verbal and the visual iconography of his death tableaux any suggestion of Catholic idolatry, and yet at times he seems to encourage his audience imaginatively to construct images that draw upon elements of a shared, universal "Catholic" memory. Martha Fleischer is discussing the incidence of pageantry on the Elizabethan stage when she identifies the inherent "emblematic eye" or the habit of "analogical thinking" as imparting meaning to the received iconography of the history play genre. (8) Since profound cultural change arguably emerges from a process of evolution rather than revolution, Shakespeare--in common with his audience--inevitably retained a store of powerful visual cultural memories relating typically to traditional societal rites of passage--particularly marriage and death--upon which it was natural to draw, irrespective of metaphysical subtleties. …

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“不要说这是迷信”：莎士比亚、记忆和死亡肖像

2015 年 3 月 22 日，在莱斯特大教堂重新安葬理查三世国王的遗骸之前不久，卫报历史学家大卫普里斯特兰哀叹了他所谓的“对死去 500 多年的国王遗骸的喧嚣”，随后是“大主教领导的重新安葬服务”——他发现这些事件“让人想起中世纪的圣徒崇拜”，“中世纪对遗物的狂热重新启动”。(2) 其他广播公司表示惊讶，国王的遗骸穿过莱斯特街道的旅程本应在人行道上挤满围观者。人们很容易猜测，这种罕见的事件可能激起了人们对这些遗迹受到崇敬、迷信席卷这片土地的时代根深蒂固的集体文化记忆。事实上，安妮 E. 贝利追溯了中世纪将圣人遗骸迁移到新神殿的仪式与理查国王遗骸经过研究的普​​世仪式以及对其地点的照顾以容纳“朝圣者”的接待之间的重要相似之处。(3) 本着这种重生的中世纪精神，我不知道，认为莎士比亚戏剧中伴随着人类死亡的语言和舞台布景有时带有强烈的物质图像的共鸣，这些图像唤起了人们的想象力构建过去的葬礼图像？马丁路德曾宣称“基督的国度是一个听道的国度，而不是一个看道的国度，”(4) 自罗马书 10:17 以来，圣经权威支持这一立场，——不仅应该延伸到教堂内的坟墓，还应该延伸到外面的墓地。事实上，“在 16 世纪早期和中期的反传统运动爆发期间，英国新教徒摧毁或毁坏了许多丧葬纪念碑。” (6) 因此，代祷天使和其他被认为是偶像崇拜和迷信的天主教元素的雕刻肖像被无情地删除了，尽管当贵族家庭的坟墓被摧毁被认为挑战了基于直系继承的社会等级时，1560 年的皇家公告关于“破坏或污损古代纪念碑”，对“逝去的各种贤明和高贵的人的光荣和美好记忆的熄灭”表示遗憾，同时仔细区分了这些纪念碑“被设置为...以纪念” 和那些“迷信”。(7) 莎士比亚通常谨慎地从他的死亡画面的语言和视觉图像中排除任何天主教偶像崇拜的暗示，但有时他似乎鼓励他的观众富有想象力地构建图像，利用共享的、普遍的元素“天主教”记忆。玛莎·弗莱舍 (Martha Fleischer) 正在讨论伊丽莎白时代舞台上盛大表演的发生率，当时她将固有的“象征性眼睛”或“类比思维”的习惯视为赋予历史剧类型的公认图像以意义。(8) 由于深刻的文化变革可以说是从进化过程而不是革命过程中出现的，莎士比亚——与他的观众一样——不可避免地保留了大量强大的视觉文化记忆，这些记忆通常与传统的社会仪式有关——尤其是婚姻和死亡——无论形而上学的微妙之处如何，都可以很自然地将其画在上面。…