The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (review)

Few Shakespeareans have been as brave, inspiring, and amiable East-West go-betweens as Zdeněk Stříbrný, professor emeritus of English and American literature at Charles University, Prague. He has lived through as many political and intellectual upheavals as any citizen of the last century and has experienced more than his fair share of time's whirligig. As a promising young scholar from the former Czechoslovakia, he was invited to work and study in the liberal and richly stimulating atmosphere of the Stratford Shakespeare Institute under Allardyce Nicoll and C. J. Sisson, and he established contacts with Christopher Hill, John Dover Wilson, and (later) Arthur Humphreys and Harold Jenkins, among others who remained lifelong friends. In the early sixties, he was also invited to the Folger and the Huntington libraries and spent an academic year teaching in the United States. Back in Prague, however, he came increasingly under fire from the communist authorities: after the collapse of the Dubček government, he was banned from teaching for several years, denied access to his university, and forbidden to travel to the West. Fortunately, he survived this period of inhuman isolation and political oppression; as soon as the ban was lifted, he rejoined the international Shakespeare community.

It is a particular pleasure to welcome a collection of his contributions to Shakespeare studies, reflecting some of the intellectual developments hinted at in the title and valuable documents of a lifelong engagement with the work of the bard under conditions that can fairly be compared with the world portrayed in some of Shakespeare's histories. The long autobiographical essay at the head of the collection is a moving record of a scholar's life in such surroundings, usefully supplemented by a bibliography of his impressive work as critic and observer from 1949 to 2003.

The essays, written between 1962 and 2002, most of them published in various journals, fall into two groups. The first group is devoted mainly to the problem of time in the histories, Troilus and Cressida, and The Winter's Tale. Time in the two tetralogies is seen as dynamic and "antithetical to the static traditional concepts of 'order,' 'degree,' and the 'divine right of kings' " (109). With Henry V, Stríbrný recognizes the deliberate contrast between the celebration of a famous national victory and the inhuman horrors of war anticipated even in the play's epilogue. Similarly, in his fine essay on Troilus and Cressida, the author argues against Caroline Spurgeon and G. Wilson Knight for a complex vision of time as a destroyer of illusions: the "high, exhilarating, and invigorating tension between myth and motion, illusion and reality, old order, both social and moral, and the irresistible progress of time" (146). In a very sympathetic account of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's Bohemia is associated more with Illyria and other enchanted regions than with the Hussite Wars and other historical memories.

The second group of essays assembles a series of first-hand accounts of Shakespeare reception in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, particularly interesting for their timing as lectures. The first, "Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia," an address presented in 1964 at the Folger, is a brief historical survey of Shakespearean links with the region, from a visit by strolling English actors in 1617 to the beginning of the Cold War. "Recent Hamlets in Prague" (1984, with a postscript from 2004), is a lively account of some rather unorthodox productions, showing what could actually be accomplished by adventurous directors even in a Stalinist era. "Shakespeare and Perestroika," a lecture presented to various American and British universities and used in 1990 as his inaugural lecture after his reinstatement in the Department of English and American Studies at Charles University, is a fascinating review mainly of Shakespeare production in retrospect. It is supplemented by "Shakespeare in the Cold: Production and Criticism in Former Communist Countries," a paper given at the Folger in 1994.

Stříbrn...