He was born in 1914 , he was a
Polish political activist, critic and theoretician of the
theatre.
He was born to a Jewish family, Kott was baptized into the Catholic Church at the age of five. He became a communist in the 1930s, and took part in the defence of Warsaw.
Kott travelled to the United States in 1965 on a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, and lectured at
Yale and
Berkeley. The Polish authorities refused to extend his passport after three years, at which point he decided to defect. He was stripped of his professorship at Warsaw University as a result. A poet, translator, and literary critic, he became one of the more prolific essayists of the Polish school in America. He died in
Santa Monica, California after a heart attack in 2001.As theatrical reviewer, Kott received praise for his readings of the classics, and above all of
Shakespeare. In his book, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964), he interpreted Shakespeare in the light of philosophical and
existential experiences of the 20th century.
Shakespeare Our Contemporary is not really an attempt to understand Shakespeare — indeed, it is not a work of literary criticism at all. It is, instead, a protracted reaction to certain of Shakespeare's plays by a man who has lived through the German and Russian occupations of Poland, and who has seen the irrelevance of Western Europe's traditional humanistic values under such conditions.Kott is convinced that Shakespeare shares this postwar philosophy.
The great
Elizabethan is our contemporary because he realized the absurdity of the
world and confronted it with an attitude of bleakly ironic despair , as
Kott sees it. Shakespeare's dramas are all dramas of
politics, and in them we find an accurate picture of 20th century
political life, especially as lived in Eastern Europe — a
meaningless series of tyrannies, betrayals, conspiracies, and apparent
liberations from tyranny that lead only to further t y r a n n y. Hamlet plans a coup d'etat to match that
perpetrated by Claudius, and the result of all his scheming is
the accession of Fortinbras, one more
king like all the others.
Jan Kott’s
notion of Shakespeare as our contemporary relies on his articulation and
understanding of a philosophy of history. How does history function? For Hegel
history functions as a dialectic of two opposing forces which propel us to
truth and progress. Kott sees history as an eternal cycle like a wheel.
Following the Nietzschean idea of the eternal return, Kott characterizes
history through the Grand Mechanism, a metaphysical machine that controls the
fate of men. Kott visualizes the
Grand Mechanism as a stair case by which tyrants rise to power. Each step up
requires treachery and killing until they reach the top and achieve power only
to fall victim to those climbing the stairs behind them. The actions that bring
them to the top bring about their demise.
The beauty of Shakespeare’s
plays is that they continue to resonate and touch certain aspects that seem to
remain true even in modern experience. This four hundred year old text can
still be presented and comment profoundly on our current circumstances: this is
what makes Shakespeare our contemporary.
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