homeissueseditorscontributionssubscriptionsNo. 20 | Vol. 10 | 2000 |contents
SHAKESPEARE GOES EAST: FROM PICKLEHERRING TO POST-COMMUNISM
Martin Procházka | contact
The uniqueness of Støíbrný’s book consists in discussing both past and present aspects of Shakespeare’s impact on culturally so diverse territories as Austria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bohemia and Moravia (present Czech Republic), Slovakia, most Balkan countries, Russia and some of the former Soviet republics, including Latvia, Armenia and Georgia. Though this vast scope seems more or less to coincide with the limits of the Soviet expansion responsible for the political label ‘Eastern Europe’, Støíbrný finds many other features than the Soviet-style totalitarian system defining the range of Shakespeare’s impact.
After Jerzy Limon’s Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe 1590-1660 (1985) and more recent publications, e.g., Simon Williams’ Shakespeare on the German Stage, vol. 1 (1990) or Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996), Chapter 1 of Shakespeare and Eastern Europe retraces the routes of English comedians in the seventeenth century, connecting “Vienna, Graz, Prague, Warsaw and Königsberg [...] thriving international centres such as Gdansk, and [...] many other larger or smaller towns in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Silesia, Poland, Prussia, Pomerania, or Livonia” (24). Although these international links forged by the English actors did not connect all cultures discussed in the book, they testify to an extreme mobility of and demand for Shakespeare’s plays as well as to their adaptability to local cultural contexts.
Støíbrný’s discussions of seventeenth-century Shakespeare productions in Central and Eastern Europe are valuable and revealing for their emphasis on the specificity of the communication between predominantly English actors (led by Robert Browne, John Green, John Spencer, Richard Jones, Robert Archer, or Robert Reynolds) and their continental audiences. While the literary qualities of Shakespeare’s art were almost impossible to impart (playing for the public that did not understand English led to “general deterioration of language” of Shakespeare’s texts which were “drastically [...] garbled in the process of adaptation to the demands of continental audiences” - 21, 16), it was mainly the tradition of the Fool, and its specific offshoot, Pickleherring, that was responsible for the dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays on the Continent. Støíbrný quotes ample and convincing evidence of Pickleherring’s popularity, including the comments of the Archbishop of Prague on the 1658 production of Romeo and Juliet, saying nothing at all about Shakespeare’s tragedy but praising Pickleherring who “was very good and funny” (21). The fact that Pickleherring appears in some crude seventeenth century German versions of Shakespeare’s plays (e.g., Romeo and Juliet in the Court Library of Vienna) proves that this character was more than a mere entertainer. Though “Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear easily surpasses all continental Pickleherrings by the subtlety of his wit and the significance of the role he plays in the structure of his tragedy” (21), it was Pickleherring that became both a sign of the assimilation of Shakespeare’s plays and a theatrical go-between among widely different historical forms, aesthetic levels, cultural perceptions and social functions of theatre. Moreover, Støíbrný indicates that the mediatory function of Pickleherring was not restricted to the continental reception of Shakespeare’s plays: even Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale might have been influenced by this popular clown. According to this interesting hypothesis Shakespeare’s drama might have interacted with other than domestic practices of popular theatre.
Another important common feature of many diverse cultures in Støíbrný’s scope is the emergence of the so-called national revivals in the course of the nineteenth century. In these movements claiming a cultural and political independence of many Central, Southern and Eastern European nations from old feudal empires, such as Austria and Turkey, or from domineering early modern cultural influences like French Classicism, or, later, German-language culture, Shakespeare had an extremely high status. His work was a universal value whose possession in the form of translations, productions and influences was thought to justify the right of nascent or revived cultures for the acknowledgement and esteem of European cultural and political powers. Chapter 3 of Shakespeare and Eastern Europe shows similarities of Shakespeare’s impact on different revival movements, such as the influence of eighteenth-century prose adaptations of his plays in the beginnings of Polish, Czech or Hungarian national revivals, but also differences in political implications of individual uses and perceptions of Shakespeare. Thus, for instance, the 1790 Hungarian adaptation of Hamlet by Ferenc Kazinczy transformed the play into a transparent allegory of liberation from the Austrian sway, but the 1786 Czech rendering of Macbeth by Karel Ignác Thám, who stressed the didactic importance of reading and watching plays for “the enlightenment and education of the nation” (60), was suppressed by the Austrian authorities “alarmed by the recent events in America and France” (61).
It is a pity that the format of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series does not allow a more detailed comparison of the translations of Shakespeare and their cultural or political functions in the individual revival movements. Nevertheless, Støíbrný at least highlights interesting individual cases, such as a translation of Hamlet into “archaic biblical Czech” (the language of the Bible translation made by the Moravian Brethren in the latter half of the sixteenth century and used until mid-nineteenth century by the Protestant churches in Slovakia) “tinged with current Slovak words” (63) by Michal Bosý, a student of A.W. Schlegel at the University of Jena.
Apart from these, the chapter lists the most important events in the appropriation of Shakespeare by most Central, Southern and Eastern European revivals, including the movements in Transylvania, Wallachia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Moreover, Shakespeare’s impact on Polish and Hungarian romantic poetry and drama and on Russian, Hungarian and Czech music is discussed. Strangely enough, there is no mention of Shakespeare’s influence on Czech romantic literature (for instance on the poet K.H. Mácha or the dramatist, and also translator of Shakespeare, J.K. Tyl). But Støíbrný makes amends for this discussing Shakespeare’s impact on the music of Bedøich Smetana. One of the works of this composer, the Shakespearian March, became an important event of the Prague Shakespeare tercentenary festivities, an evidence of the integration of Shakespeare into the culture of the emancipating nation.
Still another general feature of the East European impact of Shakespeare is discussed in Chapter 5, “Shakespeare beyond the Iron Curtain”. During the nineteen-sixties, -seventies and -eighties Shakespeare’s drama and theatre had an important role in the resistance of all central and eastern European cultures to the repressive Soviet system and ideology, which could neither ban Shakespeare nor achieve full control over the subversive potential of his texts. Støíbrný discusses the development of this potential in Shakespeare scholarship, translations and in an astonishing number of stage productions. These range from Brecht’s double-dealing with the theme of popular insurrection in his influential adaptation of Coriolanus (1953), whose rehearsals coincided with the crushing of mass demonstrations in East Berlin by Soviet tanks, to the 1987 staging of Love’s Labours Lost at the National Theatre in Prague where the ironies of the Russian Masque (or Masque of the Muscovites) became consonant with the prevailing Czech attitudes to the protracted Soviet military occupation. Other stimulating discussions include Boris Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, an “original interpretation” of the tragedy where the hero becomes “a judge of his own time and a servant of the future” (99), Grigori Kozintsev’s film versions of Hamlet and King Lear and the 1979 production of Richard III by the Georgian director Robert Sturua. It is a pity that Støíbrný omitted a very interesting chapter in the history of staging Shakespeare under Communism, the “living-room theatre” of Czech dissidents which produced Macbeth at the end of the nineteen-seventies under the surveillance and with the intrusion of the secret police. This event became the theme of Tom Stoppard’s one-act play Cahoot’s Macbeth, which should at least deserve a mention in Støíbrný’s survey. However, the probable reason of this omission is the format of the Oxford series, since Støíbrný has both lectured and published on the performances of Macbeth staged by Czech dissidents.
Despite the great diversity and documentary value of Støíbrný’s accounts of Shakespeare’s subversive roles in Soviet-style Communist regimes, the most important part of the chapter is the section on Jan Kott’s Shakespearean studies. Justly acknowledging Kott’s originality and immense impact in the East as well as in Britain as “a liberating incentive to overcome all forms of stagnation and dogmatism” (105) Støíbrný undertakes a detailed analysis of the errors and omissions in Kott’s essays demonstrating that the emphasis on analogies between the representations of history in Shakespeare’s drama and in the drama of the absurd led Kott to reductive interpretations (e.g., his reading of King Lear suppressing the important part of Cordelia in the tragedy - 104) and “sweeping generalizations”, such as “Shakespeare’s conception of history as a ‘Grand Mechanism’” (102). Making well-balanced comments on the representations of history in Shakespeare’s dramas, on “his new ideas and images, of which perhaps the most remarkable are some aspects of Time which bring movement and tension into both individual lives and history” (102), Støíbrný points out the crude and trivial features of Kott’s approach (“For there are no bad kings, or good kings; kings are only kings.” - 102) showing that the tremendous impact of Kott’s thought in the East and West was also due to its petrification in “a new kind of dogma, being used by less creative directors as a violently anti-Romantic imperative of contemporariness” (105).
Støíbrný’s study of Shakespeare’s functioning as a means of cultural contacts and emancipation, as well as political liberation, is counterbalanced by analysis of the uses of his art by repressive regimes, such as Tsarist Russia in Chapter 2 or Stalinism in Chapter 4. The former part shows the possibilities and limits of Enlightenment didactic uses of Shakespeare (e.g., in the revealing analyses of Tsarina Catherine II’s adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Timon of Athens) as well as the diversity of readings of Shakespeare’s plays by nineteenth century Russian intellectuals, ranging from Pushkin’s creative development of Shakespeare’s characterization in Boris Godunov to Tolstoi’s violent refusal of King Lear and other plays as the expression of “irreligious and immoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his time and ours” (52).
Though it might be expected that Chapter 4 discussing “Shakespeare after the Bolshevik Revolution” will show the excesses of ideological manipulation of Shakespeare under totalitarian regimes, it often reveals an interesting and frequently dangerous interaction of contemporary productions with the ideology and repressive power of Stalin’s regime, for instance in the “iconoclastic, grotesque” Hamlet, produced in 1932 at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow, anticipating “both the grotesque and the tragic features of Stalin’s monstrous show” (85). The only disputable aspect of this chapter is the discussion of Austrian, Hungarian and Czech productions and adaptations of Shakespeare in the 1930s and after 1945, which should appear under a different heading. Although E.F. Burian, one of the chief avant-garde directors of that time, was influenced - like many intellectuals in the time between the wars - by the Communist ideology, both his theoretical concepts (for instance that of the “Theatre of Labour”) and his adaptations of Shakespeare (e.g., Hamlet III or Romeo and Juliet) have grown from his own idea of lyrical theatre shaped by modern music, jazz and dadaism and developed in dialogue with Brecht rather than under Russian or Soviet influences. It can be regretted that Støíbrný’s book does not include another chapter on the fate of Shakespeare in Central Europe between the wars. As it is, the book does not present Brecht’s early Shakespearian adaptations in their historical context (discussing The Roundheads and the Peakheads and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in the chapter “Shakespeare beyond the Iron Curtain”), and underestimates the influence of German expressionist theatre, western avant-garde and modern music on the productions of Shakespeare’s plays in Central Europe after the First World War.
Last chapter on “Post-Communist Shakespeare” makes, despite its brevity, a balanced comparison of different approaches to Shakespeare after the downfall of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91. The contrast of the late Brechtian offshoots in the post-modern 1990 Hamlet/Maschine by Heiner Müller and of the “thoughtful consciousness” in the treatment of “the themes of resurrection, restoration, and expiation of crimes” (145) in the Czech 1992 production of The Winter’s Tale illustrates the range and diversity of recent and contemporary impact of Shakespeare in the East.
It can be concluded that despite a considerable width of scope and heterogeneity of material Støíbrný’s book succeeds in demonstrating the richness and cultural diversity of approaches to Shakespeare in a number of central and eastern European countries and across a wide span of history. Though written and marketed as a survey for students and teachers, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe is a thought-provoking book, addressing important problems of contemporary Shakespeare research and theatre studies, such as the existence and the nature of relationships between historically, culturally and rhetorically different forms of dramatic and theatrical communication, relations between Shakespeare’s plays and their adaptations, and the impact of emancipatory and repressive ideologies on staging Shakespeare. It also shows that the term ‘Eastern Europe’ has a much richer and complex, culturally laden meaning than in the political terminology of the Cold War or in connection with Post-Communism.
Department of English and American Studies | Centre for Comparative Studies | Faculty of Arts | Charles University
© 2001 Charles University, Prague. ISSN 0862 - 8424