Last Words

Excerpted from Jan Kott, Szekspir wspólczesny 2. Plec Rozalindy i inne szkice, edited and with an introduction by Tadeusz Nyczek (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999), 272-74.

When Shakespeare, Our Contemporary 2 reaches the reading public, I'll be almost eighty-five years old. My first book on Shakespeare came out more than three decades ago. But I had started to write about Shakespeare in performance even earlier, and in that first edition of my book about Shakespeare our contemporary I included many of those reviews. Now I can honestly say that Shakespeare has kept me company throughout my relatively long life, from my youth to advanced old age, in my personal life as well as my literary life; the boundaries between the two have never been sharply drawn.

That first book of mine on the subject came out in Polish as Sketches about Shakespeare; the office of censorship would not agree to the title Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. The astute censor read the book correctly; he knew that "contemporary" meant "political" and that contemporary Shakespeare was Shakespeare read after the Holocaust and Stalinism. How could it be otherwise? After all, it was my experience of the contemporary, and not mine alone.

But it was not only the contemporary in a political sense. In Troilus and Cressida I tried to find an image of the world in which Troilus is pulled out of the bed of his beloved after their first night together. Juliet was just twelve years old at the time of her first and last night of love; Cressida was probably somewhat older. Shakespeare's astonishing contemporaneity reveals itself in the two endings: Juliet's suicide on Romeo's corpse and Cressida's whoring in the Greek camp seen through Troilus's eyes.

I have repeatedly attempted to read Shakespeare as he is reflected in the mirror of other playwrights: Beckett in King Lear, for example, and, in Shakespeare, Our Contemporary 2, Caesar's death at the hands of conspirators in Georg Büchner's Danton as he is led to the guillotine on Robespierre's orders. I have tried to show how, contrary to what the naive defenders of chronology believe, the great playwrights converse with one another or rather mutually infect one another. In this second Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, I have traced Brecht as well as Genet. In Twelfth Night, and not only on that splendid Shakespearean night, but perhaps most clearly in As You Like It, the love triangle of the Sonnets is replicated onstage, when between a pair of adult lovers there appears the boy/girl: Viola/Cesario is indistinguishable from Sebastian, and Rosalind is Ganymede. Desire is not once and for all determined by gender or color. It is, or can be, a matter of choice.

Since the sixties, theaters have returned to this practice of the English Renaissance and the possibilities that the Shakespearean stage offers to the art of acting. At times perhaps they have done so too literally and insistently, as for example when Hamlet was played by the great tragediennes, or, more recently, when Hamlet was done by an all-male cast. As far back as my first Shakespeare book and long thereafter I intended to deal with The Winter's Tale, but I wasn't up to the task; I couldn't grasp exactly why it is a winter's tale, since it ends not only with the triumph of love but also with the miraculous rejuvenation of the body. And only now it seems as if this late play of Shakespeare, in its unusual mixture of tragedy and comedy, drama, opera, and ballet, has revealed its new contemporaneity. Time, like corrosion, frequently eats away at even precious metals; great works fade or become moldy, but then once again time restores their luster and contemporaneity.

But what is this contemporaneity about which I have been writing so insistently? My book, translated into many languages, has invariably borne the title Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. Only ours? Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Shakespeare...