The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia. Jessica Munns Zdenĕk Stříbrný. The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia. Ed. Lois Potter. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 258. $52.00. Every culture gets the Shakespeare it deserves and needs, and from at least Pushkin onwards, Slavic cultures have displayed strong affinities with Shakespeare's plays. Jan Kott gave us Shakespeare Our Contemporaryin 1964 (English translation; Polish edition 1962), a work that strongly influenced dramatic productions for a Cold War decade, presenting a world where sudden midnight arrests and overnight changes of regime were not the stuff of poeticized history but of lived experience. In The Whirligig of Time, the distinguished Czech scholar Zdeněk Stříbrný brings us another interpretation of Shakespeare in tune, as his headnote indicates, with "the rough torrent of occasion" (2 Henry IV, 4.1.72) in European politics. However, unlike Kott, whose work Stříbrný felt was "as one-sided as the completely opposite interpretations of dogmatic Marxists," Stříbrný's approach is informed by a deep and compassionate humanism. He writes, almost apologetically, "I could not help seeing in King Learnot only cruelty but also Lear's self-discovery … and Cordelia's forgiveness" (29). The Whirligig of Timeis divided into three sections: an opening autobiographical essay, a series of essays previously published in journals such as the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, and a final section, "Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic," also drawn from public lectures and mostly published elsewhere. It is a great pleasure to see these works gathered together here in elegant translation. Time is a consistent theme in all these sections. Stříbrný has lived through "interesting" times: the brief life of the Czechoslovak Republic under Tomá√ Masaryk; Hitler's annexation of the "Sudetenland," the Communist takeover after World War II; the brief Prague Spring followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, and finally the "Velvet Revolution" in 1989. Amidst these upheavals and often with great difficulty, Stříbrný pursued his scholarly studies of Shakespeare, clearly warmed and inspired to continue by his sense of Shakespeare's "all-embracing humanism, serenely gentle yet stoutly defending [End Page 377]men's dignity and integrity" (77). Stříbrný's Shakespeare is a compassionate genius who understood how Time's whirligig tosses humanity from quiet courses, leads them to betray and forswear themselves, but may also bring them forgiveness and peace. The group of essays on Shakespeare's use of time traces an increasingly sophisticated manipulation of time; "double time" is Stříbrný's term. Indeed, it is almost treble time: actual play time, and then different rates of time taking place inside various plots, which allow for scenes of "feverish speed" to coexist alongside "events of heavy moment and long duration" (92). This perception is developed interestingly in relation to the history plays, countering E. M. W. Tillyard's classic view of a static world of order and immutable degree with a much more dynamic and dialectical model of contrasting modes of time. There is the fast time of the new men such as Bolingbroke and the slower, but constantly challenged, time of a Richard II. While many of these perceptions are not "new"—and are, indeed, found in essays dating from the 1970s—they remain valid, and one can wish that current theater directors would read these essays and think about them. Michael Boyd's recent production of the first tetralogy at Stratford-on-Avon, for instance, (a revival of his earlier prize-winning production) was an astonishing kinetic event with all-encompassing action on all possible theatrical levels and a great deal of noise, but no sense of any time other than that of fast and furious action. The poetic sequence in 1 Henry VI, 2.4 in which York and Somerset enact their future broils in a rose garden, which Stříbrný describes as a "haunting symbol of the whole English state" (100), turns in Boyd's production into a rapid sequence with paper flowers lowered on a rack. The final section of the book begins with "Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia," an essay that traces the long connections between...