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Comparative Literature Studies 38.3 (2001) 253-257



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Book Review

Shakespeare and Eastern Europe


Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. By Zdenek Stribrny. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. iv + 161 pp. 2 maps.

This wide ranging, compact volume, appearing in the wonderful "Oxford Shakespeare Topics" series, is no one's first book on Shakespeare or on the geopolitical intricacies of Central Europe. But it offers fascinating facts and stories. In six chapters that combine performance history with literary analysis, Stribrny discusses the spread of Elizabethan drama to the continent by troupes of "English Comedians" during and after Shakespeare's time (ch. 1); the use and misuse of Shakespeare by Russia's great cultural figures from tsarist times--from Empress Catherine II to Karamzin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov (ch. 2); Shakespeare as a focal point for nineteenth-century National Revivals among smaller or occupied Slavic peoples--Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, as well as the non-Slavic Hungarians and Romanians--through their important Romantic poets and composers (ch. 3); "Shakespeare after the Bolshevik Revolution," a survey of Russian actors and directors precariously plying their trade at home or with uneven success in emigration (Ch. 4). Chapter 5 covers Soviet adaptations: Pasternak's lifelong passion for Shakespeare, Grigori Kozintsev's films of Hamlet (1962) and Lear (1970), Robert Sturua's cynical, bloodless Richard III produced in Stalin's native Georgia (122). Pre- and post-1968 Central Europe is represented by chilling productions mounted in Prague (by Otomar Krejca as well as by the dissident directors of the Balustrade, the theater where Vaclav Havel began as a stage-hand), Germany (the stylized didactic adaptations of Bertold Brecht), and Romania (a Bucharest Hamlet resonant with allusions to the corrupt Ceauçsescu, on the brink of his overthrow and execution). Chapter 6 samples "Post-Communist Shakespeare": first confusion, then a burst of creativity, then the familiar lament that Eastern European theaters, now liberated from "oppressive political control," are hurting from a lack of state subsidies, from the irregular tastes of a consumer market, and from the unanswerable paradox that freedom so often trivializes high art.

Stribrny's study, it appears, has two aims. One is overt: to introduce the Anglophone world to the richness and intensity of Shakespeare as appropriated in the eastern reaches of Europe. The other is unstated but infuses the whole: to remind us that in Shakespeare's time, Central Europe--with its heart in Prague--was Europe. The seventeenth-century [End Page 253] "English Comedians," strolling the continent with their jigs and their obscene carnivalesque anti-hero Pickleherring, found welcome home stays in Gdansk and Warsaw while the Puritans were closing down public theatres in London. Since the language of Elizabethan plays was lost on the new continental audiences, body gestures (and the bawdier the better) were crucial; to such antics the ethnically diverse, unsentimental Eastern Europeans were highly receptive. Their love affair with Shakespeare has proved to be of long duration. In the mid-1600s, the Polish court in Warsaw boasted an Italian theatre hall that could stage productions far better than anywhere in England at the time; in 1999, a replica of the London Globe opened in Prague with a Czech version of Romeo and Juliet, which, after Hamlet, is probably the most popular Shakespeare play among Slavic peoples.

How are we to explain this passionate appropriation? Stribrny hints that Eastern Europe--for all its appetite for low comedy--also hungers for highminded texts through which its own impossible political anguish can be expressed. He notes that Sumarokov, in his neoclassical adaptation of Hamlet in the mid-eighteenth century, characteristically recast the soliloquy "To be, or not to be" as "What should I do now?" Sumarokov's Prince Hamlet resolves to remain alive and help his "oppressed people by punishing the tyrants" (29). As tyranny became more severe over the next two centuries, however, remaining alive became increasingly fraught with moral compromise. Exemplary is Pasternak's Stalin-era translation of Hamlet as "a tragedy of duty and self-denial" (99). The subtly re-accented Russian text does not...

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