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  3. There is a perfect symmetry in what remains of William Shakespeare: the immensity of his plays and the lack of biographical info

There is a perfect symmetry in what remains of William Shakespeare: the immensity of his plays and the lack of biographical info

admin2016-10-15  19
问题     There is a perfect symmetry in what remains of William Shakespeare: the immensity of his plays and the lack of biographical information about the man. From a canon as rich as his, and a documentary record as meager as his, you can infer almost anything. When it comes to privacy, Shakespeare out-Salingers Salinger and out-Pynchons Pynchon. Go looking for the man, and you will find only the person doing the looking.
    The hunger for more is always there, which is why a portrait—a painting of a very well-dressed Elizabethan man—taken from the private collection of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, the Cobbes, has drawn so much attention. Physical evidence confirms the painting’s antiquity, and its provenance links it to Shakespeare’s only literary patron. But while provenance may be a good guide to ownership, it is a very weedy indicator of identity.
    The most that can really be said is that the Cobbe portrait, which was revealed in London this week, was probably painted in Shakespeare’s lifetime and that it bears a likeness to other reputed Shakespeare portraits—that lengthy nose, those side-glancing eyes, the hairline beginning its retreat over the bedrock of that skull. But given the stylized conventions of Elizabethan portraiture, a police dragnet in London circa 1610 might have turned up many dozens of men with a resemblance to this image. What we have, as always with Shakespeare, is a trail that leads us back to the past and dissolves into uncertainty.
    The perennial search for a portrait of Shakespeare is really a search for an image that justifies our idea of Shakespeare, our idea of writing. We somehow want the young Shakespeare to look like Joseph Fiennes, fiery and slashing. But what if he looked like Ricky Gervais? Would the plays mean less to us?
    In a way, the paucity of what we know about Shakespeare’s life is an antidote for our times. We cannot view his Facebook profile or follow him on Twitter. We do not have the phone logs or the financial records. As a man, he is not, to our knowledge, better or worse than any of us. He represents the force of the creative mind, but he also embodies the pastness of the past. Every claim to have found some relic of the original Shakespeare is just another reminder that his work needs no biography at all.
The lack of biographical information about Shakespeare means that ______.
选项 A、it’s unlikely to find his phone logs anywhere
B、his plays remain great though he may be plain
C、you can infer anything good or bad about him
D、his Facebook profile cannot be found on the net
答案B
解析 根据最后一段中的“As a man，he is not，to our knowledge，better or worse than any of us”和“Every claim．．．is just another reminder that his work needs no biography at all”，B应为答案。
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