Overview

Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage-conceptions. Readers all over the world—Shakespeare Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961—have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched. Mary McCarthy called the work ""the best, the most alive, radical book about Shakespeare in at least a generation.""

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It is certainly odd that the most interesting Shakespearean criticism to appear in some time should come from Eastern Europe and from a Marxist to boot. But the country from which it springs is Poland, the freest and most Western-oriented of all the satellites, and the critic is Jan Kott, a thoroughbred intellectual who has spearheaded much of the current anti-Stalinist, even anti-ideological ferment. Indeed Kott's brilliant re-evaluation of Lear, included here, has influenced the recent Brooks-Scofield production, turning the traditionalisms of style almost upside down: the austere into the ambiguous, the heroic into the grotesque - a Beckettian approach which manages the grandeur of the human, all that might be considered reflective of our time and temper. Thus throughout Kott's startling transformations- Hamlet as politics, the dazzling world of Antony and Cleopatra merely an historical cage getting smaller and smaller, Coriolanus or the contradictions inherent in absolutism, The Tempest as existentialist wisdom- all point to the modern condition and in doing so illuminate both art and life. His work- so open and unorthodox, so far-ranging and fruitful- is a valuable import, a critical must. (Kirkus Reviews)

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