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This article focuses on Jan Śniadecki (1756–1830), an eminent Polish philosopher of the late Enlightenment period, and on his attitude to Shakespeare. Jan Śniadecki was a major figure in the debate on the shape of modern literature and culture in Poland in 1818–1825. A representative of classicising Enlightenment values, Śniadecki was seen as a conservative and an opponent of Romanticism, and as such he famously makes an appearance in Adam Mickiewicz’s ballad “Romantyczność”, a poem whose motto is taken from Shakespeare. Śniadecki has been accused of harbouring an aversion to Shakespeare, and he has met with ridicule for a passage in one of his treatises where he wonders if a more polished and well-educated 19th-century Shakespeare would have made a better playwright. As shown by the authors of this study, Śniadecki was not actually hostile to Shakespeare, whose genius he hailed on numerous occasions. What he found objectionable was the unquestioning adulation for the author of Richard III, a phenomenon we now call Bardolatry, as distinct from the more positive term of “Shakespeare mania” which denotes a broad fascination with the assimilated heritage of the English playwright. It appears that Śniadecki has fallen victim to a stereotype made permanent by the lasting success of the Romantic aesthetic in Polish culture.
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This article focuses on the problem of dreams and the related cognitive, ontological and linguistic disorientation which leads to the experience of illusion. The article makes use of several highly intertextual plays including "Ślub" [The Wedding] by Witold Gombrowicz, "Balladyna" [Balladine], "Sen srebrny Salomei" [Salome’s Silver Dream] and "Samuel Zborowski" by Słowacki, and Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" and "Calderon’s Life is a Dream". These musings on 19th- and 20th-century literary texts invite reflection on the problem of the illusory nature of existence in post-modern thinking. Special attention is drawn to the diverse depictions of illusion in the plays and to their potential meanings.
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This short article presents the multi-dimensional links between the thoughts and works of Dostoevsky and the plays of Shakespeare. In one way or another, Dostoevsky lived his whole life under Shakespeare’s spell. He saw in Shakespeare an artist endowed with the power to reveal the ineffable aspects of reality, and his fascination is palpable in his numerous inter-textual allusions, quotations and cryptic references to Shakespeare’s plays as well as in his approach to characterisation (Stavrogin in The Possessed). Hamlet was a particularly important play to Dostoevsky, who saw Prince Hamlet as a champion of metaphysical rebellion. To him, Hamlet’s lines contained some of the most important existential dilemmas such as reflections on man’s place in the cosmos and musings on “existence” beyond the grave. From his youngest days suicide was always a lasting influence on Dostoevsky’s thinking; his best novels tend to contain characters who are “logically” drawn to suicide and have to undergo a variety of trials as if trying to find an ultimate answer to Hamlet’s famous question. To Dostoevsky, however, suicide was part and parcel of the human experience in a hopeless world stripped of all transcendence and stranded in a limbo between “the truth of science” and “the truth of faith”. Unlike the times of Hamlet, when things may have been chaotic but faith still prevailed, Dostoevsky’s characters exist in a period of empty transcendence and wanton free will, where suicide becomes a desperate attempt to find metaphysical consolation.
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A lasting presence in European culture and an important inspiration for the Romantics, Shakespeare’s works were nevertheless misunderstood by his 19th-century contemporaries, argued Norwid, and Shakespeare’s message had become lost over the centuries. Norwid’s comments on Shakespeare and his own dramatic works, notably Kleopatra and Aktor, call for a fresh re-examination of Shakespeare’s significance. In his historical tragedy Kleopatra, Norwid shows the dangers of settling for a cultural status quo and getting clammed up in one’s own period. In Aktor, a contemporary “comedic drama” (komediodrama), Norwid presents a critique of the 19th century which he believed had rejected the timeless values of the past, thus posing a threat to humanity and to the future of the world (Norwid derived his ideas on humanity’s development from the Bible and the teachings of the Church on the one hand, and from the philosophy of Hegel and Giambattista Vico on the other). The Shakespearean inspiration makes itself felt in Norwid’s works in a number of ways, including themes (notably man’s condition in the historical process), traditional genres, characterisation, and literary methods (plays within plays). To Norwid, Shakespeare was one of the “teachers of humanity” whose work should be continually re-examined to bring its historical detail in line with contemporary developments and universal categories.
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The author of the article proposes to view one of William Shakespeare’s “dark” comedies, "Measure for Measure", through the philosophical writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Lévinas and Giorgio Agamben. The principle of “commanded” love formulated in Kierkegaard’s original existentialist reformulation of the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour, as presented in his "Works of Love", and the corresponding Levinasian concept of unconditional responsibility imposed on an individual by the appeal articulated in the “face of the other”, provide suitable grounds for reviewing the ethical implications of the play, which focuses on and juxtaposes the claims of “selfish” love with the demands of self-denial and sacrifice. Giorgio Agamben’s reflection on the tension between law and mercy, formulated in the apocalyptic, post-Auschwitz context, additionally highlights the manoeuvres of the hidden author(s) of martial law in the city of Vienna, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s drama.
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Shakespearean themes in Polish poetry offer a huge critical potential. Interestingly, following their disappointment with the aesthetic of socialist realism, poets turned almost en masse to the images of Shakespeare and Bruegel. References to Shakespeare became a sort of code for discussing the topic of tyranny in the face of a still oppressive censorship system. What interests me in particular is the inter-textual relation between Szymborska’s poems and Jan Kott’s essays on Shakespeare, since they both underwent the change of heart experienced by many writers who had been seduced by Communist ideology during the Stalinist era after World War II, and later experienced the need to cleanse themselves. Beginning in 1956, many writers in Poland, and in the Communist bloc as a whole, sought an opportunity to free themselves from the confines of ideology, to break away from the monoculture of the Stalinist years. Those writers included Jan Kott, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Wisława Szymborska, to name only a few from a much longer list. I examine Wisława Szymborska‘s poems dealing with this issue, and review the existing literature on the topic.
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Poet and theatre critic Patricia Keeney explores Ted Hughes’ monumental study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) from its genesis in Shakespeare’s long poem, Venus and Adonis. In his study, Hughes explores a mythic structure that binds the entire Shakespearian corpus into one vast, ever-evolving work. Hughes connects the myth of ‘the hero who rejects the love of the goddess and is killed in revenge by a wild boar’ with ‘the living myth’ of the English Reformation. Keeney discusses the way in which Hughes’ reading of Shakespeare in the light of goddess mythology also becomes part of a salvage operation attempting to resurrect the women from the myth of the dying god from their religious and political limbos as virgins, mothers and whores, to restore them as not only real women but, in many cases, power figures of history. Throughout this paper, Keeney references the strong role played by the goddess figure in her own creative works of poetry and fiction and from a similar perspective to the one Hughes takes.
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Shakespeare’s plays are celebrated for their ‘universality’. They have been translated into most of the world’s languages and they can be seen in cities as far apart as Tashkent, Valparaiso and Novosibirsk. It has been said that some translations are even better than the originals or closer to the circumstances of their society than Shakespeare is to modern Britain. In this essay, Dr. Elsom turns this argument inside out and reclaims Shakespeare as an English dramatist. Drawing on his childhood memories, where he grew up in a Cotswold village not far from Stratford-upon-Avon in the years just after the Second World War, he describes how Shakespeare evokes the landscape of middle England, its plants, village life and pastoral celebrations. He points out the way in which Shakespeare has dramatised the history of Britain, not only its kings and queens, but its regions and place names. As a student of history, he found the accounts of British history from academic historians less gripping and even less ‘real’ than the stories in Shakespeare’s plays. Finally, he argues that Shakespeare expresses the British attitude towards the monarchy and regal celebrations, respecting the crown as a symbol of national pride and identity, but not over-respecting the people who wear the crown. He can be highly critical of the people who were kings, but not critical of national sovereignty itself, a very British compromise.
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In Shakespeare’s art, visual perception is entwined with touch, taste, hearing, and smell: the colour terms stimulate other senses, recalling their symbolic meanings in both ‘colourful’ plays (such as "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Winter’s Tale") and those dominated by bleak and darkish hues (such as "Richard III" and "Hamlet"). The paper surveys Shakespeare’s contemporary perception of colours so that we can understand more clearly what his colour usage means in the play, describes Shakespeare’s use of colour in "Richard III" and specifies what kinds of colour appear at which points in the play. It also covers the translation of colour in Japan, while particularly focusing on blue in Odashima’s 1983 translation, comparing it with other important translations in the history of the Japanese reception of Shakespeare.
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The first postage stamp bearing the image of William Shakespeare was issued 24 years after the world’s first ever stamp, the Penny Black, came out on 6 May 1840. Today, a complete collection of Shakespeare-themed stamps from all over the world would have to include almost a thousand items (stamps, stamp series, souvenir sheets, commemorative postmarks, first day covers, postcards) with hundreds of themes ranging from portraits of Shakespeare to scenes from his plays, including "The Merchant of Venice". Shylock first appeared on a postage, stamp issued by the Emirate of Fujeira as part of a nine-piece series (1969), followed by two Senegalese stamps (1972) and a Sierra Leone series (1989). The most recent Merchant of Venice-themed stamp is part of a ten-stamp series issued by Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a tiny island nation in the Caribbean. The stamp shows Portia who is played, rather surprisingly, by the Disney character of Minnie (the series also shows Donald Duck as Hamlet, Mickey Mouse and Daisy as Romeo and Ophelia, Goofy as Mark Antony and Clarabell Cow as Titania). The Polish Post Office has never come up with Shakespeare-themed stamps, so the author takes the liberty of recommending a virtual series to feature portraits of famous actors appearing in performances of "The Merchant of Venice" in Gdańsk, including Siegfried Gotthilf Eckhardt (1780), Ludwig Devrient (1818, 1821), Ira Aldridge (1854), Marija Vera (1917), and others.
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This book is a brief manual of games and theatrical exercises that the team of the show Familia Offline used during a year in the workshops that were the basis of the development of the show. The book includes dramatic writing exercises adapted to the performance script, theatrical improvisation exercises, vocal training exercises and a text about the working method of one of the theorists and practitioners who revolutionized theater pedagogy of the 20th century – Dorothy Heathcote.
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This book is a brief manual of games and theatrical exercises that the team of the show Familia Offline used during a year in the workshops that were the basis of the development of the show. The book includes dramatic writing exercises adapted to the performance script, theatrical improvisation exercises, vocal training exercises and a text about the working method of one of the theorists and practitioners who revolutionized theater pedagogy of the 20th century – Dorothy Heathcote.
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This book is a brief manual of games and theatrical exercises that the team of the show Familia Offline used during a year in the workshops that were the basis of the development of the show. The book includes dramatic writing exercises adapted to the performance script, theatrical improvisation exercises, vocal training exercises and a text about the working method of one of the theorists and practitioners who revolutionized theater pedagogy of the 20th century – Dorothy Heathcote.
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This book is a brief manual of games and theatrical exercises that the team of the show Familia Offline used during a year in the workshops that were the basis of the development of the show. The book includes dramatic writing exercises adapted to the performance script, theatrical improvisation exercises, vocal training exercises and a text about the working method of one of the theorists and practitioners who revolutionized theater pedagogy of the 20th century – Dorothy Heathcote.
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Îmi amintesc cum stăteam la Replika în curte și eram bombardată cu idei. Era începutul rezidenței mele, alături de dramaturga Alexa Băcanu. Apucasem să expun doar câteva lucruri la care mă gândisem: tema educației sexuale în România și comunicarea între părinți și copiii lor.
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Și de aici a început documentarea. Știm că în școală nu se întâmplă de obicei, dar într-un fel sau altul, tinerii află totuși despre sex. Care sunt sursele? Sunt ele de încredere? Le oferă toate informațiile necesare? La nivel de țară, răspunsul la ultimele două întrebări e nu. Suntem pe primul loc în Uniunea Europeană la numărul de mame minore. Ăsta e unul dintre primele lucruri pe care le-am aflat în timpul documentării.
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“Totul e foarte normal” nu beneficiază de un decor în sensul comun al cuvântului, ci de o configuraţie a spaţiului de joc și un raport între acesta şi auditoriu, care determină şi servesc conceptului spectacolului. Tema de la care am plecat a fost declanşarea comunicării pe teme tabu între generaţii într-o formulă ludică, prietenoasă şi jovială cu care să rezoneze ambele categorii de vârstă.
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„Nu, nu am vorbit încă, să nu îi dau idei” sau „Acum au internet, știu ei mai multe ca noi” – acestea sunt două argumente între care oscilează scuzele adulților pentru a evita tematica educației sexuale – fie ei părinți, cadre didactice, directori de școli sau autori de programe școlare. Dacă în toate țările dezvoltate, educația sexuală se predă în școli de zeci de ani, în România, educația sexuală nu se predă decât opțional în cadrul materiei Educație pentru sănătate. În 2016, numai 2.000 dintre cei 19.000 de directori le-au propus părinților să-și trimită copiii la aceste ore. Pentru mulți adulți este dificil de acceptat trecerea de la copilărie la adolescență, faptul că tinerii devin ființe de sine stătătoare care își fac propriile alegeri, inclusiv în ceea ce privește sexualitatea.
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