Presencia de William Shakespeare en el teatro polaco del siglo XX

Laburpena

William Shakespeare’s theatre, poetry and thought have had an important and continuous influence on the Polish theatre of the 20th century. In particular, on Jerzy Grotowski and on Tadeusz Kantor, greatest exponents and renovators of the dramatic language of last century. Shakespeare is the essential and foundational paradigm of modern theatre, as well as the epitome of the amalgamation of literature and drama, of theatre and passion. This turns him into an ineluctable referent for Polish theatre, which is a Neo-Romantic, expressionist and existentialist theatre that deeply reveals the human identity and the conflicts of such an identity as regards its ancestors and destiny. Polish theatre delves into essences and universes that had inspired Shakespeare and that, in turn, he transformed and handed down to posterity. It also inherits myths and cultural archetypes created and recreated by Shakespeare, which currently make up the Western collective imaginary. Shakespeare’s influence may be observed in the metaphysical depth of the joyous delirium, of beautiful cruelty, of derision, of profanation and blasphemy, of sacred parody and of vast numbers of rhetorical and discursive forms that may be observed both in Grotowski and in Kantor. The direct reflection of such an influence is the play “Hamlet Study” by Jerzy Grotowski.