Take It or Leave It

Jan Kott had a habit of clicking his tongue while thinking through his questions. The more provocative the question, the more audible the clicking of the tongue, which punctuated his words and unarticulated thoughts like random castanets. As a graduate student, I had become used to the syncopated rhythm of these questions, which invariably prefaced his lectures, but I could never predict their content. At once gnomic and visceral in utterance, these questions physicalized Shakespeare. They brought out his theatrical animal by making him intensely human, if not promiscuous.

I remember one such question that prefaced Jan's introductory lecture to As You Like It: "Is it possible to think of the Forest of Arden as a massage parlor?" Facing our somewhat stupefied silence with perceptible disappointment, he added: "Perhaps it is not such a good idea." A few minutes later, after some futile attempts to sound academic, he slammed the text on the table and affirmed: "No, it is a massage parlor." Take it or leave it: this is how he saw Shakespeare.

Idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, and, more often than not, audaciously off the mark, Jan brought a performative dimension to his reading of the dramatic text long before performativity got theorized in academia. The primary site for any of his readings was his own biography, intensely lived and relived, through many adventures and retellings of stories from his peripatetic life. As a long-term immigrant to the United States, Jan never quite accepted the norms of assimilation, preferring to live across the borders, both imagined and real. Likewise, though he earned his living in the university system, he was never comfortable as an academic. His rigor as a scholar was constantly being challenged through his uncanny ability—and desire—to open the enigmas of a text through the sensations of everyday life.

At times, these insights were surreal in their banality—for instance, his illumination of the Theater of the Absurd through the ceaseless permutation of pinball machines in Las Vegas gambling halls. But more often than not, the insights were grim reminders of totalitarian regimes, memorialized through sinister sounds like the midnight knock on the door by which Jan linked contemporary modes of surveillance to the arbitrary power and terror evoked in Shakespeare's history plays.

Like many other Polish intellectuals and critics of his generation, Jan was haunted by World War II. Instead of being traumatized by its memory, he catalyzed its immediacy through a rich repertoire of images and anecdotes that triggered his understanding of the inner life of dramatic texts. In this regard, I can never forget the emotional risk with which he revealed his own observation of two young lovers in an army camp where he was an educational instructor. Abruptly—and violently—the young man was killed. Instead of responding to his death with conventional signs of loss and sorrow, his lover submitted to relentless promiscuity, attempting to forget—and transform—her grief through a series of sexual encounters. In the self-transformation of this woman's life Jan acknowledged how much he had learned about Shakespeare's Cressida, branded a whore but perhaps more clearly perceived as a survivor driven by a sexual necessity confronting the brutality and senselessness of death.

Through such inscriptions of human tragedy within the hidden layers of a dramatic text and, occasionally, through intertextual connections between two seemingly dissimilar plays like Endgame and King Lear, Jan opened up new possibilities of reimagining Shakespearean dramaturgy. Very few critics can claim the kind of theatrical influence that he wielded over directors like Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz, among many other lesser-known experimenters of the theater, not just in Europe but in other parts of the world as well. At its worst, this influence resulted in shallow conceptualism and visual gimmickry—one-to-one equations between critical commentary and a particularly fixed construction of the mise-en-scène. However, read with a little more patience and against the grain of their occasionally sensational rhetoric, Jan's essays...