The Cultural Role and Political Implications of Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare Festival

Journal Title: Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture - Year 2017, Vol 7, Issue 7

Abstract

Emerging from the atrocities of war, and still hoping to avert the results of the Yalta conference during which the countries of Central and South–Eastern Europe, including Poland, were “handed over” to Stalin, Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare theatre festival was a sign of courage and defiance. At the Festival 23 productions of 9 Shakespeare’s dramas were staged by theatres in 11 towns, with its finale in Warsaw. My paper will show that the Festival was an attempt to demonstrate both Polish cultural links with Europe, and to subvert Marxist ideology and Soviet culture.

Authors and Affiliations

Krystyna Kujawińska-Courtney

Keywords

Related Articles

The Monk by M. G. Lewis: Revolution, Religion and the Female Body

This paper reads The Monk by M. G. Lewis in the context of the literary and visual responses to the French Revolution, suggesting that its digestion of the horrors across the Channel is exhibited especially in its depict...

Intertextual Illuminations: “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Malcolm Lowry’s “Through the Panama”

The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henry...

Outside the Magic Circle of White Male Supremacy in the Jim Crow South: Virginia Foster Durr’s Memoirs

Virginia Foster Durr was born in 1903 in Birmingham, Alabama in a former planter class family, and in spite of the gradual decline in the family fortune, she was brought up as a traditional southern belle, utterly subjec...

Blindness in the Beckettland of Malfunctioning

Many of Beckett characters suffer from different kinds of disabilities and impairments, this being one of the ways of punishing them for “the eternal sin of having been born.” The article discusses blindness in Waiting f...

“Consider Yourself One of Us”: The Dickens Musical on Stage and Screen

Charles Dickens’s work has been taken and adapted for many different ends. Quite a lot of attention has been given to film and television versions of the novels, many of which are very distinguished. The stage and screen...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP332688
  • DOI 10.1515/texmat-2017-0010
  • Views 207
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Krystyna Kujawińska-Courtney (2017). The Cultural Role and Political Implications of Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare Festival. Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, 7(7), 183-193. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-332688