Abstract
Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which has been translated into 48 languages and has gone through many re-editions, has indeed revolutionised Shakespearean studies all over the world. The title of his monograph, published in 1964, has become a keyword for the combination of often newly-discovered and constantly re-discovered theatrical, historical, aesthetic, philosophical, dramaturgical, linguistic, and modern concerns present in Shakespearean plays and poems. In the twenty-first century Shakespeare criticism and theatre studies are often divided into “before” and “after” the publication of Kott’s famous work. The aim of my work is to briefly outline in what way Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary has contributed to the liberation of Shakespeare from the Romantic imperative of universality and transcendence as well as from dusty pedantry and artistic irrelevance, engaging, rather, with current epistemological and ontological questions about humanity.
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