ABSTRACT
Shakespeare may remain our contemporary, but to recall Polish director Jan Kott’s massively influential book of that title (first published in Poland in 1964 and almost immediately translated into English) is to mark a sea change in our access to and imagination of Shakespearean drama. “The Kings”; “Hamlet of the Mid-Century”; “Troilus and Cressida—Amazing and Modern”; “King Lear or Endgame”; “Titania and the Ass’s Head”: the chapter titles thumbnail innovative Shakespeare performance at the mid-century. They recall both the brilliant productions Kott describes and those he inspired: the endless bloody staircase of murderous royal ambition; the excitement of finding contemporary irony in one of Shakespeare’s least popular, never clapperclawed plays; the discovery of King Lear’s Beckettian landscape of anomie; and the reality of theatrical magic deployed in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), perhaps the landmark production of the period. Yet much as Shakespeare would hardly recognize the technologies we use to realize his plays today, so too Shakespeare in the third millennium measures its distance from Jan Kott along the axis of technological innovation. And much as Kott worked to bring the critical discourse of contemporary theatre to bear on the isolated “literary” critique of Shakespeare, so too the rise of digital culture marks a potentially profound shift in the identities of drama, particularly the ways in which we imagine the interface between writing and performance.
