Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What would it mean if the greatest playwright who ever lived were not a relic of the past, but a mirror held up to our most urgent modern anxieties? Jan Kott's landmark work of dramatic criticism argues precisely this, presenting William Shakespeare not as a monument to be reverently preserved, but as a fiercely relevant artist whose tragedies, histories, and comedies speak with uncanny directness to the brutality, absurdity, and political terror of the twentieth century. Drawing on his own harrowing experience living through Nazi occupation and Stalinist Poland, Kott illuminates the dark machinery within plays like King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, revealing a Grand Mechanism of history — an inexorable, crushing cycle of power — that resonates profoundly with the modern condition. Kott's prose is electrifying and unorthodox, deliberately bridging the world of Renaissance drama and the existentialist theatre of Beckett and Brecht, a connection that famously inspired Peter Brook's landmark 1962 production of King Lear. Shakespeare Our Contemporary permanently reshaped how directors, scholars, and audiences engage with the Shakespearean canon, stripping away centuries of comfortable academic tradition to uncover a playwright of visceral, almost violent immediacy. For anyone who has ever wondered why these four-hundred-year-old plays continue to feel so inescapably alive, Kott's answer is both thrilling and deeply unsettling.
Author: Jan Kott
Format: Paperback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What would it mean if the greatest playwright who ever lived were not a relic of the past, but a mirror held up to our most urgent modern anxieties? Jan Kott's landmark work of dramatic criticism argues precisely this, presenting William Shakespeare not as a monument to be reverently preserved, but as a fiercely relevant artist whose tragedies, histories, and comedies speak with uncanny directness to the brutality, absurdity, and political terror of the twentieth century. Drawing on his own harrowing experience living through Nazi occupation and Stalinist Poland, Kott illuminates the dark machinery within plays like King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, revealing a Grand Mechanism of history — an inexorable, crushing cycle of power — that resonates profoundly with the modern condition. Kott's prose is electrifying and unorthodox, deliberately bridging the world of Renaissance drama and the existentialist theatre of Beckett and Brecht, a connection that famously inspired Peter Brook's landmark 1962 production of King Lear. Shakespeare Our Contemporary permanently reshaped how directors, scholars, and audiences engage with the Shakespearean canon, stripping away centuries of comfortable academic tradition to uncover a playwright of visceral, almost violent immediacy. For anyone who has ever wondered why these four-hundred-year-old plays continue to feel so inescapably alive, Kott's answer is both thrilling and deeply unsettling.