Rebranding Shakespeare for the „Brave New World“
Rebranding Shakespeare for the „Brave New World“

Summary/Abstract: “Is Shakespeare still our contemporary?“, asked Shakespearean scholars celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jan Kott’s famous book Shakespeare Our Contemporary. The year 2016 seems to be appropriate for this discussion, 400 years after Shakespeare’s death. This paper is an endeavour to present how tradition was and can be transformed, built upon and re-evaluated. Various disciplines have been applied to deconstruct and explain Shakespeare, to “pluck out the heart of his mystery”, as his Hamlet put it – notably, medicine and its mental health branch, psychiatry. What was solely within the prerogatives of religion, has with Shakespeare and his critics become contestable and accountable for in manifold ways. How audacious, provocative and progressive Shakespeare was, is perhaps best seen by recognising that new trends in the interpretation of his works mainly come from the political left. Issues that remain unresolved in the present-day society, after all the revolutions and reconfigurations of the world, pervaded his plays: racism, gender, subjectivity, subconsciousness, passion and reason, manipulation, political power, dysfunctional families – this is what makes Shakespeare “our own”, as Coleridge jealously underscored, but also what makes him timeless and everyone’s. We will never know to what extent Shakespeare was aware of all these questions and how much we read into his plays, enveloping him in the veils of our own knowledge, experience and presentism. But one thing is certain – his characters have grown into impressive personalities of their own, remarkable in their virtue or tragism, with many lives and roles that we give them, recognising them around us, thus rewriting Shakespeare’s plays and making them our own chronicles.

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