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Czarne lustra: Opowieści afrykańskie Krzysztofa Warlikowskiego

Author(s): Elżbieta Baniewicz / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

This article (Czarne lustra – Black Mirrors) attempts to discuss and describe Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production Opowieści afrykańskie według Szekspira [African Stories According to Shakespeare] with the actors of the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw in collaboration with several European theatres. Warlikowski and his dramaturge, Piotr Gruszczyński, use some of European culture’s archetypal themes and situations embedded by Shakespeare in King Lear, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, but they also spin off certain continuations inspired by the works of J.M. Coetzee, Eldrige Claver and Wajdi Mouawad in order to complement the familiar European themes and to throw them into sharp relief against interpretations of other cultures. The Lebanese writer W. Mouawad, the African-American writer E. Claver and the South African writer and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee are able to raise questions from a non-European/African perspective with its experience of centuries-long humiliation and slavery. Europe and Africa have a long tradition of mutual questioning, and now that traditionally “white” countries have come to increasingly contain black and coloured populations, the resulting blend of cultures, races, religions and customs results in thorny issues and complex conflicts. Warlikowski’s production narrates this cultural intersection in time and space, taking a range of human perspectives to discuss issues such as solitude, sexuality, power and dominance.

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Hamlet and the Travelling Players

Author(s): Daniel Gerould / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

This article discusses depictions of itinerant actors as a key to the innermost essence of theatrical art. In particular, it touches on productions of Hamlet and the experience of Eastern European theatre. In Hamlet, the wandering players perform several functions. Firstly, they reflect the political tensions of the day and the economic competition from children’s companies which Shakespeare was facing at the time. Secondly, they may be a reminiscence from Shakespeare’s own childhood, when similar itinerant companies visited Stratford. Thirdly, these scenes introduce the theme of theatre, even if the nature of Hamlet’s own stage experience remains open. It should be noted that historical attitudes to itinerant actors have not been stable. Initially very much an underclass occupation, the stigma was gradually replaced by a rhetoric of rebellion: a homeless actor turns into a dissenter, a poor but free vagabond, a pariah, a scapegoat, an occasional martyr. All these options are present in productions of Hamlet. The actors at Elsinore are chroniclers of the events, but also participants, even instigators of the events. Characteristically, Eastern European productions in countries marked by the experience of totalitarianism sometimes depict the actors as tragic figures, ensnared in political intrigue against their will, brutally abused and severely punished for naively siding with Prince Hamlet.

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The Face as a Stage: Roberto Bacci’s Hamlet

Author(s): Jerzy Limon / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

This article touches upon theoretical issues of the theatre, and the basic source used to exemplify the thesis is Roberto Bacci’s Hamlet. In this production, the actors wear fencing masks and costumes, and when they uncover their faces, they become particular fictional figures. However, after they have played their role in a given scene, and put the masks back on, the meaning they carried evaporates or is reset. This means that when they uncover their face again, they can assume the role of someone else. The essay analyses the rules of the theatre that enable transformations of this kind.

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Hamlet spod znaku globalizacji

Author(s): Patrice Pavis / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Peter Brook’s 2000 Hamlet (filmed in 2001) is an example of a globalised production where great pains are taken to make sure that the diverse backgrounds of its international cast can gel homogeneously. The interpretation is a sort of net force far removed from a critical reengagement of the text. The production seems to be guided by the impulse to try and come up with a versatile production fit for viewing and appraisal in a wide range of contexts. Is this shortage of vision and interpretive ambition a sign of humility, or is it a symptom of slick directing which fails to rise to the task of achieving critical engagement with the text?

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Mirrored Image and the Dislocation of Culture in Ninagawa’s Shakespeare

Author(s): Manabu Noda / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Yukio Ninagawa (b. 1935) is one of the most internationally known Japanese theatre directors for his productions of Western classics. However, he often seems defensive about directing them. My essay tries to argue that his defensiveness can be interpreted as a form of self-imposed Orientalism which consigns the mind to the West, the body to the East. For instance, in his praise of Tatsumi Hijikata’s 1972 butō piece Shiki-no tameno Nijūichi-ban [Twenty-seven Nights for the Four Seasons], Ninagawa showed his strong sympathy with the way Hijikata mixed the intellect of the West with the physicality of the East. Hijikata’s dances were broadly regarded as an unsightly form of parading and grotesque physicality, but as Ninagawa saw it, Japan’s origins were in this dark deformity. The dark origins of the indigenously Japanese was to Hijikata what the archetypal populace is to Ninagawa. The volatility of the crowd which Ninagawa loves to stage reflects the ambivalent modernity of post-World War II Japan. Ninagawa looked back on some imagined past for the origin or archetype of their nationality which he hoped might serve as an alternative to the kind of modernity of their undeniably westernized country. My paper examines ambivalent modernity in the way Ninagawa stages Shakespeare and other plays as mirroring the populace of the post-World War II political milieu of Japan.

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Metafory i praktyki teatru

Author(s): Georges Banu / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

The attempts at describing theatre inform all works of Shakespeare though he never offers a consistent and homogeneous declaration of principles. The article is a brief survey of the multiplicity of references to the theatre and various practices known by men of the stage such as Shakespeare himself along with the metaphorical, or even symbolic use of these theatrical patterns, stage sets, actors and manners of characterization. If for Shakespeare all the world’s a stage, it is reasonable to explore the distribution of patterns underneath the plentitude of theatrical allusions scattered over his whole work.

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“My dreams presage too true”: Dreams as a Dramatic Device in Elizabethan Drama

Author(s): Pavel Drábek / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Throughout the entire period of Elizabethan drama dreams were used as a powerful dramatic device. They served as a means of character development (an early type of psychology), popular metaphysics as well as techniques of drama construction. This paper discusses dreams and their role in several plays by Shakespeare, The First Part of the Contention (also known as King Henry VI, Part II), King Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and in the apocryphal Arden of Faversham and Sir Thomas More. These plays – although not a full list of Elizabethan plays that have dreams in them – may be read and understood within a single context, historically, that of the years 1590–93, in which they were all written and performed. As the dramatic function of the dream is analogical in those plays, the group may be referred to as forming a subgenre of the Elizabethan dream play.

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Conflict and Rhetoric. On the Structuring of Roles in Conflict in Shakespeare’s (Non)dramatic Poetry

Author(s): Jacek Fabiszak / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

It appears that conflict, so fundamental in drama and theatre, assumes a theatrical vest in Shakespeare’s dramatic and non-dramatic poetry. It does not matter what the nature of the conflict is: be it military, moral, ethic, etc. It does not matter either whether there are at least two conflicted characters, as the conflicted parties, especially in the case of poetry, can be contained within a single lyrical I. The key issue in the structuring of roles in conflict is of course the omnipresent rhetoric, which was an obligatory subject in the English Renaissance education system. For this reason, neither Shakespeare (who probably did go to King’s New School in Stratford) or his contemporaries (e.g. Christopher Marlowe) were well versed in it and purposefully or inadvertently employed it in their works, especially in the situation of VERBAL conflict when one party tried to argue with another. In such a conflict, characters, or their alter egos, posed as if they were actors on stage. The scrutiny centres on two examples of Shakespeare’s poetry: a sonnet (nondramatic verse) and a monologue from Macbeth (dramatic poetry). I will try to show how in each case, with the help of rhetorical rules, the speaker constructs his interlocutor in the process of solving a conflict.

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Shakespeare’s Unhistorical Inventions and Deviations from Holinshed, and Their Dramatic Functions in Richard II

Author(s): Yun-Cheol Kim / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Much of the dramaturgical genius of Shakespeare’s later master tragedies is already to be found in Richard II, especially in his treatment of the main source: Holinshed’s Chronicles. This essay aims to explore Shakespeare’s departures from Holinshed in terms of characters and structure, and to see how they function in the drama. Shakespeare has changed Holinshed’s self-seeking Gaunt into an aged patriot to emphasize Richard’s weaknesses as King. He has matured Queen Isabel from a historical seven-year-old child to a fully grown woman, and facilitated Richard’s journey into self-discovery. In the garden scene that Shakespeare has invented, he even lets her, as Richard’s proxy, eavesdrop on the gardener’s admonitions on royal governance, in which Richard has failed. Most importantly, in terms of structure, Shakespeare puts the deposition scene before a large assembly in Westminster Hall, unlike historic Richard whose resignation was tendered by letter in the Tower of London. This invention, or deviation, enhances Richard as a tragic hero who has finally achieved self-knowledge, reconciliation to his fate, and victory in defeat. Shakespeare’s inventions and deviations from Holinshed in Richard II have foreshadowed some dramaturgical principles of his later great tragedies and surely put the play into a drama of truly tragic stature.

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Szekspirofobia? Mowa krótka w Jana Śniadeckiego obronie

Author(s): Anna Janicka,Jarosław Ławski / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

This article focuses on Jan Śniadecki (1756–1830), an eminent Polish philosopher of the late Enlightenment period, and on his attitude to Shakespeare. Jan Śniadecki was a major figure in the debate on the shape of modern literature and culture in Poland in 1818–1825. A representative of classicising Enlightenment values, Śniadecki was seen as a conservative and an opponent of Romanticism, and as such he famously makes an appearance in Adam Mickiewicz’s ballad “Romantyczność”, a poem whose motto is taken from Shakespeare. Śniadecki has been accused of harbouring an aversion to Shakespeare, and he has met with ridicule for a passage in one of his treatises where he wonders if a more polished and well-educated 19th-century Shakespeare would have made a better playwright. As shown by the authors of this study, Śniadecki was not actually hostile to Shakespeare, whose genius he hailed on numerous occasions. What he found objectionable was the unquestioning adulation for the author of Richard III, a phenomenon we now call Bardolatry, as distinct from the more positive term of “Shakespeare mania” which denotes a broad fascination with the assimilated heritage of the English playwright. It appears that Śniadecki has fallen victim to a stereotype made permanent by the lasting success of the Romantic aesthetic in Polish culture.

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Sen, Słowacki, Szekspir i inni

Author(s): Michał Kuziak / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

This article focuses on the problem of dreams and the related cognitive, ontological and linguistic disorientation which leads to the experience of illusion. The article makes use of several highly intertextual plays including "Ślub" [The Wedding] by Witold Gombrowicz, "Balladyna" [Balladine], "Sen srebrny Salomei" [Salome’s Silver Dream] and "Samuel Zborowski" by Słowacki, and Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" and "Calderon’s Life is a Dream". These musings on 19th- and 20th-century literary texts invite reflection on the problem of the illusory nature of existence in post-modern thinking. Special attention is drawn to the diverse depictions of illusion in the plays and to their potential meanings.

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„Co będzie tam?”, czyli Hamleci Dostojewskiego (z rzutem oka na szekspiriana rosyjskiego geniusza)

Author(s): Tadeusz Sucharski / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

This short article presents the multi-dimensional links between the thoughts and works of Dostoevsky and the plays of Shakespeare. In one way or another, Dostoevsky lived his whole life under Shakespeare’s spell. He saw in Shakespeare an artist endowed with the power to reveal the ineffable aspects of reality, and his fascination is palpable in his numerous inter-textual allusions, quotations and cryptic references to Shakespeare’s plays as well as in his approach to characterisation (Stavrogin in The Possessed). Hamlet was a particularly important play to Dostoevsky, who saw Prince Hamlet as a champion of metaphysical rebellion. To him, Hamlet’s lines contained some of the most important existential dilemmas such as reflections on man’s place in the cosmos and musings on “existence” beyond the grave. From his youngest days suicide was always a lasting influence on Dostoevsky’s thinking; his best novels tend to contain characters who are “logically” drawn to suicide and have to undergo a variety of trials as if trying to find an ultimate answer to Hamlet’s famous question. To Dostoevsky, however, suicide was part and parcel of the human experience in a hopeless world stripped of all transcendence and stranded in a limbo between “the truth of science” and “the truth of faith”. Unlike the times of Hamlet, when things may have been chaotic but faith still prevailed, Dostoevsky’s characters exist in a period of empty transcendence and wanton free will, where suicide becomes a desperate attempt to find metaphysical consolation.

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Norwidowska „zbrodnia stanu”. Szekspir w twórczości Norwida (O Kleopatrze i Aktorze)

Author(s): Sławomir Rzepczyński / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

A lasting presence in European culture and an important inspiration for the Romantics, Shakespeare’s works were nevertheless misunderstood by his 19th-century contemporaries, argued Norwid, and Shakespeare’s message had become lost over the centuries. Norwid’s comments on Shakespeare and his own dramatic works, notably Kleopatra and Aktor, call for a fresh re-examination of Shakespeare’s significance. In his historical tragedy Kleopatra, Norwid shows the dangers of settling for a cultural status quo and getting clammed up in one’s own period. In Aktor, a contemporary “comedic drama” (komediodrama), Norwid presents a critique of the 19th century which he believed had rejected the timeless values of the past, thus posing a threat to humanity and to the future of the world (Norwid derived his ideas on humanity’s development from the Bible and the teachings of the Church on the one hand, and from the philosophy of Hegel and Giambattista Vico on the other). The Shakespearean inspiration makes itself felt in Norwid’s works in a number of ways, including themes (notably man’s condition in the historical process), traditional genres, characterisation, and literary methods (plays within plays). To Norwid, Shakespeare was one of the “teachers of humanity” whose work should be continually re-examined to bring its historical detail in line with contemporary developments and universal categories.

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Measure for Measure: A Requiem for Humanity

Author(s): Małgorzata Grzegorzewska / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

The author of the article proposes to view one of William Shakespeare’s “dark” comedies, "Measure for Measure", through the philosophical writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Lévinas and Giorgio Agamben. The principle of “commanded” love formulated in Kierkegaard’s original existentialist reformulation of the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour, as presented in his "Works of Love", and the corresponding Levinasian concept of unconditional responsibility imposed on an individual by the appeal articulated in the “face of the other”, provide suitable grounds for reviewing the ethical implications of the play, which focuses on and juxtaposes the claims of “selfish” love with the demands of self-denial and sacrifice. Giorgio Agamben’s reflection on the tension between law and mercy, formulated in the apocalyptic, post-Auschwitz context, additionally highlights the manoeuvres of the hidden author(s) of martial law in the city of Vienna, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s drama.

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The Ghost of Shakespeare in the Poetry of Szymborska

Author(s): Anna Frajlich / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Shakespearean themes in Polish poetry offer a huge critical potential. Interestingly, following their disappointment with the aesthetic of socialist realism, poets turned almost en masse to the images of Shakespeare and Bruegel. References to Shakespeare became a sort of code for discussing the topic of tyranny in the face of a still oppressive censorship system. What interests me in particular is the inter-textual relation between Szymborska’s poems and Jan Kott’s essays on Shakespeare, since they both underwent the change of heart experienced by many writers who had been seduced by Communist ideology during the Stalinist era after World War II, and later experienced the need to cleanse themselves. Beginning in 1956, many writers in Poland, and in the Communist bloc as a whole, sought an opportunity to free themselves from the confines of ideology, to break away from the monoculture of the Stalinist years. Those writers included Jan Kott, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Wisława Szymborska, to name only a few from a much longer list. I examine Wisława Szymborska‘s poems dealing with this issue, and review the existing literature on the topic.

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Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare’s Blueprint for Tragedy

Author(s): Patricia Keeney / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Poet and theatre critic Patricia Keeney explores Ted Hughes’ monumental study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) from its genesis in Shakespeare’s long poem, Venus and Adonis. In his study, Hughes explores a mythic structure that binds the entire Shakespearian corpus into one vast, ever-evolving work. Hughes connects the myth of ‘the hero who rejects the love of the goddess and is killed in revenge by a wild boar’ with ‘the living myth’ of the English Reformation. Keeney discusses the way in which Hughes’ reading of Shakespeare in the light of goddess mythology also becomes part of a salvage operation attempting to resurrect the women from the myth of the dying god from their religious and political limbos as virgins, mothers and whores, to restore them as not only real women but, in many cases, power figures of history. Throughout this paper, Keeney references the strong role played by the goddess figure in her own creative works of poetry and fiction and from a similar perspective to the one Hughes takes.

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The Englishness of Shakespeare

Author(s): John Elsom / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Shakespeare’s plays are celebrated for their ‘universality’. They have been translated into most of the world’s languages and they can be seen in cities as far apart as Tashkent, Valparaiso and Novosibirsk. It has been said that some translations are even better than the originals or closer to the circumstances of their society than Shakespeare is to modern Britain. In this essay, Dr. Elsom turns this argument inside out and reclaims Shakespeare as an English dramatist. Drawing on his childhood memories, where he grew up in a Cotswold village not far from Stratford-upon-Avon in the years just after the Second World War, he describes how Shakespeare evokes the landscape of middle England, its plants, village life and pastoral celebrations. He points out the way in which Shakespeare has dramatised the history of Britain, not only its kings and queens, but its regions and place names. As a student of history, he found the accounts of British history from academic historians less gripping and even less ‘real’ than the stories in Shakespeare’s plays. Finally, he argues that Shakespeare expresses the British attitude towards the monarchy and regal celebrations, respecting the crown as a symbol of national pride and identity, but not over-respecting the people who wear the crown. He can be highly critical of the people who were kings, but not critical of national sovereignty itself, a very British compromise.

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Hamlet jednorożec

Author(s): Jarosław Komorowski / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Shakespeare’s "The Tempest", "Julius Caesar" and "Timon of Athens" all contain references to the unicorn, a fabled beast whose existence was nevertheless taken seriously by some of the learned Elizabethans. The unicorn made its first appearance in European culture in the writings of classical Greeks and Romans, and it attained a symbolic significance early in the first millennium, as attested in "The Physiologus". The creature was believed to be too wild to capture unless a virgin was at hand to tame it, as the beast would approach her meekly and lay its head on her pure lap, where it became exposed to the hunters’ attack. By analogy to the Virgin Mary, who “captured” Jesus Christ for humanity, the unicorn became a symbol of the Saviour. Bestiaries paved the way for plentiful iconographic depictions of a unicorn with its head on a virgin’s lap in medieval paintings, carvings and sculptures, including strictly Christian versions of the Visitation featuring the unicorn where the Archangel Gabriel visits Mary as a hunter, with the animal symbolizing Christ climbing onto Mary’s lap. In "Hamlet", Shakespeare uses this popular theme in the Mousetrap Scene at a purely visual level, without actually naming the animal. In a stage transposition of the iconographic motif, the Prince of Denmark approaches Ophelia and lays his head on her lap following a brief exchange (“Lady, shall I lie in your lap?”) before "The Murder of Gonzago" can begin. In this way the play makes elegant use of the unicorn legend as the exchange links back to an earlier scene where Claudius and Polonius were trying to hunt Hamlet down using Ophelia as bait.

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„Z ciebie pewnie muzyk całą gębą…”

Author(s): Piotr Kamiński / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

Greek mythology and Shakespeare are European culture’s two inexhaustible treasure houses. Although myth obviously dwarfs all other sources in its impact, the very fact that the output of a single poet can be mentioned in a single breath with the collective work of generations is a testament to Shakespeare’s influence on European musicians. Music pervaded every aspect of theatrical production in Shakespeare’s day, and we may only regret that Shakespeare never collaborated with the greatest composers of his time. The 17th-century musical embellishments of Shakespeare’s plays relied on adaptations instead of his original works, and the 18th century was very much a blank page: Shakespeare’s great music career began in the 19th century and continues to this day. The breakthrough came in 1827 with the premiere of "The Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture" by the 17-year-old Mendelssohn, and the visit of the Kemble company in Paris, which sparked a Shakespeare craze in a generation of French artists. Shakespeare themed operas continue to be written, and three masterpieces by Giuseppe Verdi ("Macbeth", "Otello" and "Falstaff") still vie for popularity with Shakespeare’s originals. Verdi’s success remains unmatched by other Shakespeare-themed operas, but there have been some excellent orchestral scores written for the theatre ("The Tempest by Sibelius", 1925) or for ballet (Prokofiev’s "Romeo and Juliet", 1935).

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O znaczkach z Szajlokiem

Author(s): Mieczysław Abramowicz / Language(s): English,Polish Publication Year: 0

The first postage stamp bearing the image of William Shakespeare was issued 24 years after the world’s first ever stamp, the Penny Black, came out on 6 May 1840. Today, a complete collection of Shakespeare-themed stamps from all over the world would have to include almost a thousand items (stamps, stamp series, souvenir sheets, commemorative postmarks, first day covers, postcards) with hundreds of themes ranging from portraits of Shakespeare to scenes from his plays, including "The Merchant of Venice". Shylock first appeared on a postage, stamp issued by the Emirate of Fujeira as part of a nine-piece series (1969), followed by two Senegalese stamps (1972) and a Sierra Leone series (1989). The most recent Merchant of Venice-themed stamp is part of a ten-stamp series issued by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a tiny island nation in the Caribbean. The stamp shows Portia who is played, rather surprisingly, by the Disney character of Minnie (the series also shows Donald Duck as Hamlet, Mickey Mouse and Daisy as Romeo and Ophelia, Goofy as Mark Antony and Clarabell Cow as Titania). The Polish Post Office has never come up with Shakespeare-themed stamps, so the author takes the liberty of recommending a virtual series to feature portraits of famous actors appearing in performances of "The Merchant of Venice" in Gdańsk, including Siegfried Gotthilf Eckhardt (1780), Ludwig Devrient (1818, 1821), Ira Aldridge (1854), Marija Vera (1917), and others.

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