A Comparative Study On Three Chinese Versions Of Shakespeare's King Lear

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), who is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of all times, occupies a unique position in the world literature. Throughout his life, he not only wrote splendid long poems and sonnets, but also left the world 37 plays, which cover a wide range of subjects and themes, and create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth. Among those plays, King Lear occupies a special and unique status in his tragedies. It boasts the greatest scale and the grandest vigor and has catholicity and immutability both in theme and description. So far it has transcended national barriers to different readers in many different languages. For over eighty years in China, more than ten Chinese versions have been produced. Among them, Liang Shiqiu, Sun Dayu, and Zhu Shenghao's versions of King Lear are especially outstanding. Liang's prosaic version for its fluency and elegance enjoys great popularity among readers, Sun's poetic version with archaic style, rhythm and musicality has brought new impetus to the translation of Shakespeare in the 21^st century, and Zhu's version prosaic but verging on the poetry wins popularity both among readers and audiences. All these efforts have contributed to the popularization of King Lear and Shakespeare as well as the development of translation studies in China. With the aim of exploring the three versions' differences and their relative causes, this thesis will conduct a relatively detailed comparison of the three versions and adopt skopos theory to analyze their intended purposes as well as results caused by the intended purposes. Besides introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into four chapters.The introduction gives a short literature review of the existing researches on Shakespeare and briefs the theme and the basic structure of this thesis.Chapter One introduces Shakespeare and King Lear from three aspects: a short account of the dramatist, a brief history of translation in China, and an introduction of King Lear and its textural characteristics.Chapter Two conducts an extrinsic study aiming at exploring the outside influence on the three versions.Chapter Three makes an intrinsic study of the three versions and draws a conclusion that the three versions differ from each other in many aspects and thus bring us different effects.Chapter Four adopts skopos theory as the theoretical basis to explore the three translators' intended purposes and how their translations are affected by their intended purposes.The conclusion sums up the whole thesis and emphasizes that translators' intended purposes play a role in determining their translation types, cultural distance, text effect and thus will produce different results.