A Polish Hamlet: Zbigniew Herbert’s 'Elegy of Fortinbras'

Katarzyna Burzyńska

doi:10.18573/newreadings.84

Abstract

As Jan Kott observed in his seminal Shakespeare our Contemporary, Hamlet is one of but a few literary characters who lives not only beyond the text of the play but also beyond theatre. It seems that each nation possesses its own Hamlet, used for specific ends and equipped with distinctive features. Poles have their own Hamlet, imbued with specifically Polish qualities. Thinking about Polish history through the lens of Hamlet became a feature in several Polish poets' work. In 1961, Zbigniew Herbert published “Tren Fortynbrasa” [“Elegy of Fortinbras”]. As the staging of Hamlet in the Stary Theatre in Krakow in 1956 can be seen as a protest against the communist system, Herbert's poem also had political overtones. It seems to have been an expression of opposition to totalitarianism, written during “the Thaw”. Infused with a subtle irony characteristic of Herbert’s neoclassical poetry, the poem is interpreted here as manifesting a distinctly Polish Hamlet. This article offers a detailed analysis of it in the context of the contemporary political situation. References to the turbulent history of Poland explain Herbert’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s play as a political act.

Highlights

Hamlet’s universality and immense capacity for endless appropriations, adaptations and transformations, as pointed out by Jan Kott in his seminal work Szekspir współczesny [Shakespeare our Contemporary] in 1964, seems to be a well established fact nowadays
The construct of a Polish Hamlet relies heavily on the heritage of Polish Romanticism, which was created by such poets as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki or Cyprian Kamil Norwid
The archetypal Polish Hamlet seems to have met with a favourable response in the twentieth century and was widely taken up

Summary

Introduction

Hamlet’s universality and immense capacity for endless appropriations, adaptations and transformations, as pointed out by Jan Kott in his seminal work Szekspir współczesny [Shakespeare our Contemporary] in 1964, seems to be a well established fact nowadays. Bearing in mind the much cited universality of Herbert’s poetry, this article suggests that ignoring the very Polish context of “Tren Fortynbrasa” does violence to the poem and the vision of Hamlet encapsulated in it. Apart from seeing it as a metaphorical story of oppression, I want to look at it as a direct poetic portrayal of communist tyranny in Poland, in particular of the superficiality of changes brought about by the events of October 1956, as well as Herbert’s private expression of doubt that the so-called Polish October had any lasting value. To fully appreciate the erudition of Herbert’s vision and illuminate some of the distinctly Polish interpretative trails in his poem, it is important to see how Hamlet has functioned in Polish culture since Romanticism and how strongly the influence of Polish Romantics resonated right up until the Second World War

The Polish Hamlet

The Genre of the Poem

Hamlet versus Fortinbras

The Literary and Historical Context of the Poem

Conclusion

Works Cited