Kosto Ostrausko „Shakespeariana“: „Hamleto“ perrašymas „Šančių kalba“
“Shakespeariana” of Kostas Ostrauskas: Rewriting “Hamlet” in the “Šančiai dialect”

Summary/Abstract: The present article discusses witty and playful ways of conveying meaning in Kostas Ostrauskas’ drama Shakespeariana – as an attempt to ‘rewrite’ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The author’s chosen approaches display a kind of upside-down portrayal, and do so in a variety of ways, with mirror-reflected images put forward, with ‘hide-and-seek’-type action, and with unconventional scenic transformations, which make Hamlet an active participant of the inter-textual dialogue – on different levels and in a number of imagery types. The play of Ostrauskas manifests a three-fold approach to the Renaissance tragedy: first, it is an attempt to come up with a kind of parody by way of reducing its original meaning, and emphasizing the linguistic and cultural distance from the original; second, it presents a kind of extension of the original idea by completing its logical sequence of events, and by making the philosophically-sounding dilemmas truly topical on the stage of the contemporary theatre; third, a clear evidence of meta-linguistic and meta-literary interpretation in the theatre language is offered, by stepping into the value-based/axiological dispute through the metaphors of life, theatre, and the author’s death. The creative dialogue between Ostrauskas and Shakespeare’s Hamlet serves as a convincing and valid example of the communication among cultures in the post-modern times, in the process of which the isolation between the ‘higher’ English Renaissance literature on the one hand and the ‘lower’ Lithuanian suburban culture on the other hand is overcome.

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