Relektüre Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary W. B. Worthen (New York) Shakespeare Our Contemporary: a catchy title. The first time I heard it was in an undergraduate Shakespeare class at the University of Massachusetts, taught by the distinguished scholar of nineteenth century British theatre, Joseph W. Donohue, Jr. It was the era of “ relevance ” in US higher education, and though for me Shakespeare at the RSC was no more familiar, or accessible, than melodrama at the Adelphi, the sense in which literature spoke to the issues of the present was nonetheless a persistent theme in many of my classes, though not, interestingly enough, in this one. That wasn't to last, and rightly so. And yet the belief that Shakespeare directly addresses the contemporary world, either through the timeless purchase of the thematics of the plays or through the plays' participation in an essentialized dynamics of performance continues to mark a faultline between academic and popular Shakespeare, a fissure that perhaps defines Shakespeare Our Contemporary as well. Kott, too, speaks of the universal claims of Shakespeare's drama on our attention, and both Shakespeare Our Contemporary and its now-familiar impact on British stage Shakespeare in the 1960s - Peter Brook's King Lear, Peter Hall's work at the RSC - have come in for sharp critique. 1 For Alan Sinfield, Kott's location of Shakespeare in history, while “ skeptical and pessimistic ” in fact merely flips a “ conservative coin ” shared with E. M. W. Tillyard: whether conceiving Shakespeare as part of the Grand Mechanism of power politics or an anodyne World Picture, both Kott and Tillyard predicate their Shakespeares “ on the ideas of an essential human nature and the desirability of ‘ order ’“ and both imagine the plays as “ hostile to positive political action. ” 2 Despite Kott's tactical location of Shakespeare as an instrument of anti-Stalinist engagement in Poland, the invocation of Kott in the theatre in works like The Wars of the Roses was politically “ doubtful, ” “ siphoning any residual idealism into deference towards the magnates who perpetrate oppression and reverence for the social system which sustains them. ” 3 In this sense, however it betrayed Kott, the “ radical impetus ” of the RSC can also “ be attributed to Kott, whose criticism was certainly more political than the main western academic tradition (though not in the Lear-Beckett chapter); to the intermittent invocation and influence of Brecht; and above all to the confused political awareness of the time. ” 4 As Sinfield's exception of the “ Lear-Beckett chapter ” implies, some of these tensions are reflected in Kott's work, too: Kott made Shakespeare our contemporary by claiming that the plays' (in Poland, resistant) use in history arises from their transcendent perspective on history. As Leanore Leiblein argues, Kott's repositioning of Shakespeare in the cultural field, which removed “ the exclusive power to interpret Shakespeare from the institutions that had claimed him - the universities and their scholar critics - and returned him to readers and spectators, whoever they might happen to be, ” was offset in Kott's critical practice by a kind of “ private hermeneutics in which interpre- Forum Modernes Theater, 25/ 2 (2010), 205 - 211. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen tation fulfills expectation. ” 5 Tracking the convergence between Kott and Brook, Leiblein also notes the tension between an instrumental and essential account of Shakespearean meanings running through Kott's writing: “ a Shakespeare that can be made to speak (albeit differently) in many times transcends all time. ” 6 Still, Kott's provocation remains provocative. The burgeoning of editions of Shakespeare's plays; the explosion of Shakespeare festivals in the theatre; the ongoing filming of Shakespeare plays and their many knockoffs; the appearance of books by Stephen Greenblatt, Marjorie Garber, James Shapiro and others on the trade lists of major publishers; the (sigh) apparently increasing media enthusiasm for the authorship “ controversy ” : Shakespeare remains our contemporary in extraordinarily vivid ways. Kott's approach to Shakespeare is - and this is where he's least sympathetic to contemporary historicism - motivated by his overt belief in the identity of the plays, an identity that can be seized, however, only in contemporary ( “ presentist ” would perhaps be our word for it now) terms: “ Shakespeare is like the world, or life itself. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see. A reader or spectator in the mid-twentieth century interprets Richard III through his own experiences. He cannot do otherwise. ” 7 As his blending of “ reader or spectator ” suggests, performance provides a critical paradigm for Kott's Shakespeare. For in the theatre, the plays urgently occupy the present tense; even when they assert their pastness, they do so in our accent. Indeed, as Allen J. Kuharski observes, the “ paradox of Kott's influence and stature ” finally leads back to the “ quintessential theatricality of his analyses and often visionary proposals for the plays in performance ” ; in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, originally written in Polish before Kott “ had any knowledge of English, ” the reading of performance is based entirely on Polish productions. 8 Moreover, Kott's Shakespeare is richly, instrumentally involved in the immediate discourse of Polish cultural politics. Kott presents “ Shakespeare's history plays, for example, as a variety of Brechtian Lehrstücke, or ‘ learning plays ’ , ” a rigorous, antisentimental reading of Shakespeare that, while generally part of the “ Marxist humanist school of cultural criticism that emerged in reaction against Stalinism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere, ” often “ owed little to Marx, but proved immensely popular with young British and western European directors at the time. ” 9 Perhaps symptomatically, Shakespeare Our Contemporary evinces Kott's easy mobility, the subtle ways he moves from a thematic or formal reading of the drama to a critical engagement with stage production, a form of critique widely regarded in the Anglo American academy as only modestly capable of speaking to Shakespeare. Kott's title marks its own historicity, not only Kott's situation of Shakespeare in Stalinist Poland, but in our history, from Joe Papp's 1959 battle with Robert Moses to keep his populist Shakespeare festival free, to the desire for “ relevance ” in literary pedagogy in the later 1960s and early 1970s, to the controversially “ Brechtian ” radicalism of the RSC, to what we might call the discursive/ political (new historicist) and economic/ political (cultural materialist) strategies for mapping the function of Shakespeare across the ideological force fields of early modern England and the many cultures that have succeeded it, including those - India, China, Nigeria, among many others - in which “ Shakespeare's ” historicity and contemporaneity is part of a specific dynamic of political and cultural imperialism. For the past three decades, though, historical critique has been imaginatively preoccupied with exhuming the alien conceptual and affective dynamics of early modern 206 Relektüre social discourse. Much of the energy of the New Historicism arises from an effort to reframe the impulse toward thematic relevance in the ideological dynamics of nowdistant political and cultural negotiations, in which power circulated through the representational forms of - among many other practices - literature and theatre. The transformation of “ the aesthetic analysis of verbal artifacts to the ideological analysis of discursive practices, ” a sensitivity to both “ the instability and the instrumentality of representation ” is, as Louis Montrose argues, pervasively concerned with “ writing, reading, and teaching as modes of action, and it is in this broad sense that its perspective can be characterized as ideological. ” 10 In this sense, teaching demonologies against King Lear or the discourses of power latent in A Midsummer Night's Dream alerts students both to the structures of power inscribed in representation then, and the different shaping of power informing Shakespeare's circulation in pedagogy, literature, theatre now. The rich literature on contemporary Shakespeare - in film, education, pedagogy, digital media and popular culture - is in a sense part of this logic, illustrating not so much that Shakespeare's thematics might also be ours, but the instrumental value of Shakespeare, the ways we fashion ourselves by making Shakespeare our contemporary. 11 When I first read Shakespeare Our Contemporary as a (very) callow teenager, what was most striking were the images I would reencounter for some years to come: Gloucester and Hamm; the bloody staircase, and so on. Yet Kott's historicity was visible enough: the Norton edition of the 1970s is framed by introductory essays by Martin Esslin and Peter Brook, marking the book's simultaneous positioning both in literary and in theatre history. Brook describes Kott as an “ Elizabethan. Like Shakespeare, like Shakespeare's contemporaries, the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit are indivisible ” ; for Brook, Kott embodies a primitivizing modernism, defying the disabling “ dissociation of sensibility ” that was, for Eliot at least, the crisis of modernity itself. 12 Following a related modernist trajectory, Esslin's essay carefully positions Kott as a Marxist whose Marxism doesn't really matter (recalling a familiar strategy for domesticating Brecht in the 1950s and 60s), identifying Kott with Shakespeare through the purely aesthetic rigor of their politically autonomous vision. Pointing out that translations of Shakespeare were central to the fashioning of a number of eastern European national literatures, Esslin suggests that “ there may be, that is, for each epoch an optimum place from which to view the great autonomous work of art - a place, in fact, from which the experience of an epoch is most intensely felt and epitomized, a place from the experience of which the significance of the great work of art may emerge most clearly for an entire age. ” 13 Tracing out Kott's evolving dissatisfaction with Stalinism, Esslin also urges a discursive reciprocity between Shakespeare's positioning and Kott's: once Kott could dissever himself from the “ preordained goal ” of both Marxism and conventional Marxist critique, he would be able - as perhaps only Marxist critics were trained to do - to direct his attention on “ the violence and mutability of history, ” “ the historical process itself, stark, violent, and relentless. ” For Esslin, Kott's value lies in his (un Marxist) antimaterialism: Kott's historical process is “ totally free of any vulgar teleological [or material] conception, a great wheel of power, endlessly revolving. ” 14 In the rush to depoliticize and so redeem Kott, both Brook and Esslin assimilate Kott to a canonical literary modernism; in so doing, they occlude our view of the distinctive situatedness of Kott's discourse, not why 1950s Poland provided an ideal vantage on an autonomous Shakespeare, but what Shakespeare's political utility might have been in 1950s Poland, when the assertion 207 Relektüre of different models of history and historical change clearly had immediate, personal and political consequences. They also reflect the politics of Kott's reception, in which an identity with Shakespeare guarantees the apoliticality of critique. While Sinfield is surely right to see Kott's adoption by Brook, the RSC, and others as enabled by the readiness with which his avowedly “ universal ” claims could be deracinated from their moment of articulation, perhaps now this reciprocity is more evident, a more consequential element of our late/ post/ modern Shakespeare. Endlessly revolving, Kott's wheel seems to anticipate the impact of Foucault on new historicism in the 1980s, itself sometimes charged with generalizing the thematics of “ power ” - I'm thinking here of Stephen Greenblatt's famously controversial final sentence to the deservedly celebrated essay “ Invisible Bullets ” : “ There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us. ” 15 While there has been more pervasively influential scholarship by eastern European scholars - Robert Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in Theater comes to mind, published in the GDR in 1967, and extensively revised for its 1978 English version - Kott's study marks an early juncture of the political and the aesthetic in Shakespeare critique, a moment where a “ universalizing ” claim was, perhaps, doing distinctive work in the representation of the state, history, ideology, and art. Joining art and politics, the academic to the popular, the literary to the theatrical, Shakespeare Our Contemporary addressed dynamics that were, in the 1960s, outside the dominant critical practice in the west; Kott was, in a sense, both exciting and illegible, though his conjunction of interests has sustained a significant strain of Shakespeare studies ever since. 16 Returning to Shakespeare Our Contemporary this time, I was impressed by how Kott's writing now seems deeply located in a divided temporality: his 1950s and 60s and our 1950s and 60s. Kott attends to Shakespeare's formation in the present in a specific, implicitly politicized mode of cultural production: theatre. Though his emphasis on the Grand Mechanism strikes us as transhistorical, Kott's series of images are typically drawn from the modern stage (the bloody staircase of Jessner's 1920 Richard III) and indeed from the stage of a largely-unknown Poland in the 1950s. Now, Kott's “ Shakespeare ” seems to register a specific time and place. This Shakespeare is not “ dematerialized, or rather, disembodied ” ; instead, “ power has names, eyes, mouth and hands. It is a relentless struggle of living people who sit together at one table. ” 17 Stalin died in 1953, and it's hard not to feel the internecine power struggles across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe reverberating in Kott's account of the death scene of Shakespeare's kings: the four or five men who surround the dying monarch “ have already laid a plot, brought their loyal troops to the capital, communicated with their vassals. They have given orders to hired assassins [. . .] only one of them may remain alive. ” 18 Kott's history is not marked by dramatic climax, but as an endless process of purge and revision: its “ most terrifying ” dimension “ is its natural matter-of-factness. ” 19 Without discounting the urgently universalizing dimension of Kott's Shakespeare, perhaps now the present-tense historicity of the application of that Shakespeare is more visible. It's probably correct to see “ King Lear or Endgame ” as one of the least politicallyinflected essays in Shakespeare Our Contemporary; though, remembering that Endgame had premiered (in the UK) only in 1957 (its manuscript blue-penciled by the censor), the range and suggestiveness of Kott's reciprocal reading here - of Lear and Endgame, but also of Godot, the Book of Job, and other Beckett and Shakespeare plays in passing - is remarkable, not least for imaginatively redrawing the map of stage genre. For the “ theatrical 208 Relektüre paradox ” of Gloucester's clown-show suicide at Dover is, as Kott elaborates, entirely foreign to the dominant mode of stage naturalism; much as Poel and Barker alerted audiences to the pace of Shakespeare's plays on the bare stage, the “ philosophical buffoonery of the sort found in modern theatre ” alerts us to the ways the grotesque might meaningfully sustain both the medieval morality play and the modernist clown show. 20 But of course the grotesque also has a more sinister register. But what did in fact the Grand Mechanism mean for Shakespeare? A succession of kings climbing and pushing one another off the grand staircase of history, or a wave of hot blood rising up to one's head and blinding the eyes? A natural order that has been violated, so that evil produces evil, every injury calls for revenge, every crime causes another? Or a cruel social order in which the vassals and superiors are in conflict with each other, the kingdom is ruled like a farm and falls prey to the strongest? (30) Gloucester traverses Pozzo's stage: Shakespeare's history is not located in the past. The history plays outline a paradigm of social change continuous with our own, modern history. And while the staircase implies an inevitable progress, it's composed of steps, moments of stasis, in which progress and change depend on blinding bloodshed: the critique of Stalinism here is clear enough. To Kott and his original Polish readers, this paradigm of progress was surely familiar. Hastings is awakened at four in the morning, and “ Shakespeare's genius shows itself also in the way he depicts the events occurring at four a. m. Who has not been awakened in this way at four a. m. at least once in his life? ” 21 Through “ Shakespeare's text we ought to get at our modern experience, anxiety and sensibility. ” 22 Kott's our here strikes me as a moment of productive disidentification, marking not only the distinctive modernity of socialist eastern Europe, but more rigorously the instrumental locality of Shakespeare, his plays, and what they were used for. Kott's translated words - experience, grotesque, Beckett, Shakespeare - signified differently across the Iron Curtain, and the testament to this difference often emerges less in his grand thematic statements (where the familiarity of the terms renders alternative meanings and situated uses opaque) than in the comments on theatrical production. “ Hamlet of the Mid-century ” opens with a translation of Czeslaw Milosz's “ Elegy of Fortinbras, ” in which Hamlet is succeeded by a grimly bureaucratic Fortinbras, with his sewer projects and decrees on prostitutes and beggars. 23 Inasmuch as Kott's political, textual, and theatrical Hamlet bleeds into one another, it's perhaps fitting that when, in Kott's account of the 1956 production in Cracow, Hamlet returns from Wittenburg, he returns to Poland. 24 The “ dead sound of the words ‘ Denmark's a prison ’ , three times repeated ” jibes, then, with a world in which being rousted at four in the morning for interrogation or execution is familiar. The words “ watch ” and “‘ enquire ’ were the words most commonly heard from the stage, ” and Kott carefully positions the production, without comment, “ a few weeks after the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. It was light and clear, tense and sharp, modern and consistent, limited to one issue only. It was a political drama par excellence. ” 25 How should we relate these two sentences? Something is rotten in the prison/ state of Denmark, a Denmark that much else in the essay identifies with contemporary Poland: its younger generation hungry for news, its politicians mouthing dead sounds, spies everywhere, everyone “ corroded by fear. ” This production can never, now, be my experience, and it was never really our experience in the west, other than through Kott's brilliant account of it. Absent as performance, it nonetheless returns as cri- 209 Relektüre tique, testifying to the work that Shakespeare could do, was doing, then and there, across a curtain that rendered “ our ” Shakespearean contemporaneity a fiction of history. Hamlet reads books, and the appearance of the books he reads speaks to the rhetoric of any production of the play: is he reading an antique looking, leather-bound quarto? a tome of some kind? a paperback Hamlet? As a college student in the 1970s, largely innocent of Shakespeare in the theatre, I was fascinated by Kott's remark that in Cracow in 1956, Hamlet's “ words, words, words ” were materialized onstage in newspapers. It seemed right that a newspaper-reading Hamlet must be “ a rebellious ideologist ” (the inspiration, perhaps, of Peter Hall's production with David Warner in 1965); but now, for me, it's not the black sweater and blue jeans but the newspaper - a figure for the anticipation, the appetite, the disappointment, the emptiness, the fear promised by the quotidian round of public life - that marks how the theatre made Shakespeare Kott's contemporary, regardless of whether that Shakespeare ever became ours. 26 Recording a moment of asynchrony between east and west in the Cold War, Kott marks the ways Shakespeare not only catalyzes and conceals the political potentiality of theatre, but also marks a differential utility, instrumentality, contemporaneity. Shakespeare Our Contemporary remains unique, troubling, and essential reading. Notes 1 See Dollimore, Jonathan/ Sinfield, Alan. “ History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V. ” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London, 1985, 208 - 10; and Sinfield, Alan. “ Introduction: Reproductions, Interventions, ” and “ Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology. ” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca, 1985. 2 Sinfield, Alan. “ Introduction: Reproductions, Interventions. ” Dollimore, 1985, 131. 3 Sinfield, Alan. “ Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology. ” Dollimore, 1985, 162. 4 Sinfield, Alan. “ Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology. ” Dollimore 1985, 164. 5 Lieblein, Leanore. “ Jan Kott, Peter Brook, and King Lear. ” Journal of Dramatic Criticism and Theory 1.2 (1987): 41, 42. 6 Lieblein 1987, 43. 7 Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. New York, 1974, 5. 8 Kuharski, Allen J. “ Jan Kott in Exile: Arden and Absolute Milan. ” New Theatre Quarterly 18 (2002): 122. 9 Kuharski 2002, 123. 10 Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago, 1996, 2. 11 Two recent collections come to mind illustrating this perspective: Newstock, Scott and Thompson, Ayanna, eds. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York, 2010; and Shaughnessy, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare in Popular Culture. Cambridge, 2007. The notion that “ like it or not, all we can ever do is use Shakespeare as a powerful element in specific ideological strategies, ” sustains Terence Hawkes's Meaning by Shakespeare. London, 1992; I cite here from 3. 12 Brook, Peter. Preface to Kott 1974, np [viii]. Eliot, T. S. “ The Metaphysical Poets. ” Selected Essays. San Diego, 1978, 247. As Richard Halpern notes in a slightly different context, “ Modernism constructs a Shakespeare lodged firmly in the twentieth century - what Jan Kott calls Shakespeare Our Contemporary. ” Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare among the Moderns. Ithaca, 1997, 3. 13 Esslin, Martin. “ Introduction, ” to Kott 1974, xii-xiii. 14 Esslin 1974, xix. 15 Greenblatt, Stephen. “ Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V. ” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. 210 Relektüre Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca, 1985, 45. 16 Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore, 1978. 17 Kott 1974, 8. 18 Kott 1974, 9. 19 Kott 1974, 15. 20 Kott 1974, 146, 147. 21 Kott 1974, 23, emphasis W. W. 22 Kott 1974, 59. 23 Kott 1974, 57. 24 Kott 1974, 69. 25 Kott 1974, 60, 59. 26 Kott 1974, 68. 211 Relektüre