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Introduction
The cultural politics of Communist Yugoslavia
Shakespeare was introduced to the Yugoslavs through the contact with the Germans. In
Yugoslavia, as in many other Eastern European countries, the first knowledge of Shakespeare
was at second hand, via the German performances that people saw in German speaking theatres
and translations from German.1 From 1778 adaptations of Shakespeare in German were
performed in Zagreb. This situation remained until 1841, when for the first time a Shakespeare
play was performed in a native language, although the first translation directly from Shakespeare
had appeared in print earlier, in 1827. The first performance in the Croatian language was the
translation from the German adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. In the period of Austro-German
domination, which affected those Yugoslav peoples who were within the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Shakespeare’s plays, although mainly translated from the German and exceptionally
from the original, were very popular in theatres. During the First World War and after when the
dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy caused the unification of the Croats and the
Slovenes with the Serbs, Shakespeare’s plays were interpreted as outstanding art which belonged
to mankind as a whole and consequently remained extremely popular. In the period between the
two world wars many new translations of Shakespeare’s dramatic works from the original were
offered to all Yugoslav theatres and the popularity and production of his plays constantly rose.
The situation changed during the Second World War when the most important theatres in Zagreb,
Ljubljana and Belgrade were under the control of the pro-fascist government. At that time none
simple Shakespeare’s play was performed.
A new era in Yugoslavia began after the Second World War when with political and
social changes the new Communist regime introduced transformations in cultural politics. First of
all, the position of the theatre in general had changed, in the sense that now the theatre became
more of a folk institution visited by unsophisticated audiences. The cultural and artistic needs of
this new audience caused a change of attitude to Shakespeare, whose work had to be made
intelligible to these new theatregoers. Therefore, the Shakespeare’s work was appropriated for
Yugoslav interests, to give an impression of Yugoslavian cultural participation.
Considering political appropriations of Shakespeare, nowhere have his works been
appropriated for political examinations as in East European countries. The experience which
those countries share is the Communist period, especially the time of Stalin’s repressive and
aggressive regime, which caused many restrictions also in the individual arts. In Eastern Europe,
ideology was constantly foregrounded, and as for Shakespeare’s plays, only politically acceptable
adaptations were not condemned.
Unlike the other East European countries, Tito’s Yugoslavia had not become Stalin’s
satellite state. In Yugoslavia, the relation to Shakespeare’s work was different for at least two
reasons. First of all, there was the opening of the Yugoslav society towards the West, and
secondly the mask of Shakespeare was not very much used to reveal or comment on recent
political conditions. Not before Bre{an’s Hamlet was the East European tradition of using
Shakespeare’s text as an opportunity to put forward the truth about repressive Communist
regimes ever seriously approached in the Yugoslav cultural scene. Therefore, the controversies
that Bre{an’s Hamlet from Mrdu{a Donja provoked and the condemnation of this play in 1973
are interesting “incidents” in the cultural life of Tito’s Yugoslavia. At that moment, the usual
distance with which Shakespeare’s work had been treated for a long time temporarily
disappeared. The power of political criticism played an important role for the valorization of
Bre{an’s play and at the same time the idea of an open and tolerant Communist society became
very ambiguous. The political unsuitability of Bre{an’s play in Yugoslav socialistic society
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reflects the frustrations and vulnerability of this society. An understanding of Tito’s cultural
politics and Yugoslav Communism is crucial for understanding the position of Bre{an’s play at
the time and changes in interpretations which it underwent later on.
Tito’s Yugoslavia was regarded as the most liberal Communist country of Europe in the
period from 1948 onwards, until the recent war and destruction. For a very long time, the Tito era
was seen or rather interpreted, as a golden age. Due to Tito’s political turn in the years after
World War II, Yugoslavia became independent and, in comparison with the other countries of the
Eastern Block, free. The history of Communist Yugoslavia is not only different from the history
of other surrounding countries, but more importantly it is extremely complex and ambiguous. The
enormous difficulty of gaining a clear view of the complex social, political, ideological or
cultural past is one of the reasons why the interpretations differed so much. Therefore, the Tito
era has been seen from very different points of view; as a golden age, a free, peaceful and
comfortable time, but also as a dark period under a dictatorial regime. Anyhow, in order to at
least reasonably speculate about Tito’s Yugoslavia, a kind of basic knowledge concerning the
history of this very complex multinational country and Tito’s politics is indispensable.
The name Yugoslavia occurred for the first time after the First World War. In 1919, the
Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was established as the first Yugoslav state. The new
state was ruled by a Serb king, and also the government and army were mainly Serb. It was a
unitary state, with an unavoidable conflict between Serb centralists and Croat federalists. At that
time the achievements of the October Revolution in Russia came to be seen as shining examples
among the different social-democratic parties. The merging of those parties led to the formation
of the Socialist Workers Party of Yugoslavia (Communists). This party was the one to offer the
new, revolutionary program which united those diverse Slav nations of conflicting cultures. This
party was very soon, in 1922, banned and the number of party members declined. In the
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parliament, the conflict between centralists (Serbs) and federalists (Croats) continued until 1928,
when a member of a Montenegrin radical party killed two representatives of the Croatian Peasant
Party and their leader Stjepan Radi}. That was the beginning of the dictatorship of King
Aleksandar, who then prohibited all parties and set up a new parliament with the intention of
giving legitimacy to his absolute authority. 2 During the dictatorship of King Aleksandar many
members of the Communist party were killed and some of them emigrated to the Soviet Union.
But there, under Stalin’s purges, many of them were executed. Faced with enormous problems
such as persecutions and the inability to consolidate a multinational party, the Communist party
slowly became divided and almost fell apart. On the other side, the rise of fascist organizations in
Europe infected the separatists in the Kingdom, and as a result King Aleksandar was murdered in
Marseilles in 1934. The sympathy for the fascist ideology rose and both sides, Serbs and Croats,
following the example of the German government, made Yugoslavia into a kind of federation. In
fact, Croatia, including the territory that is now Bosnia, got autonomous status and the rest of the
country simply hoped to achieve the same status in the near future. In these historical
circumstances Yugoslavia faced the outbreak of World War II.
At the very beginning of the war the Kingdom of Yugoslavia made an effort at being
neutral and staying aside, but under German pressure the government signed a pact with the Axis
Powers. This “paper” agreement was not enough to protect Yugoslavia from German attack. In
1941 the country was completely conquered and divided between Italy, Germany, Hungary and
Bulgaria. In those years of political disintegration combined with the rise of the fascist ideology,
Josip Broz Tito, under instructions from Comintern, succeeded in uniting the Communist Party.3
In 1937 he became the leader of the party which organized one of the largest resistance
movement in Europe in their fight against fascism. The partisans were not the only armed forces
fighting against invaders, however. The Royal Army (^etniks), practically all Serbs led by
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general Dra`a Mihajlovi} was supported by the royal government in exile and until 1943 was
recognized by Britain and America as the royal army.4 On the other side, Croats gained what they
wished: the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Republika Hrvatska –NDH) which included
parts of Croatia and almost all of Bosnia. The Usta{a leader Ante Paveli} ruled this hybrid
country as a German protectorate, following the Nazi model known elsewhere in Europe.5
It seems that the lack of social, political, and cultural cohesion, too easily interpreted as
simple animosity, was in fact a very serious problem. The historical issue is to discover what kind
of political structure binds Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups together. At the beginning of the Second
World War all nations were trying to get rid of each other and found their own, ethnically “clean”
country. Tito’s partisans came on the scene when things were bad but might be worse. Their
propaganda consisted of the idea that only with the brotherhood and unity of all existing ethnic
groups, “death to fascism” and “freedom to people” would be possible. With support from the
British, Americans, and Russians Tito’s army liberated the country from the Nazis. By 1945, the
Partisans had control of the liberated territories, and under the leadership of J. B. Tito formed the
second Yugoslavia, but now as a socialist state. This state was arranged according to the Stalinist
model of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Stalin in 1948 made serious accusations against Tito,
such as being a nationalist and a right-wing leader. Tito’s nonconformity resulted in a break with
Stalin’s Soviet Union and opened up the new era in history usually named the Yugoslavian
experience.
Tito was the first Communist leader who disobeyed Stalin’s model of socialism and in the
Informbiroperiod (1948 and afterwards) he represented a model of socialism that was more open
to the West.6 Consequently, due to the independence the country gained, Yugoslavia became a
relatively open society and definitely the most liberalized one in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless,
Tito’s model of socialism has met with different interpretations over the course of time. When
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Zdenek Stribrny explains the post-war euphoria in Eastern Europe, which with great enthusiasm
celebrated Soviet support in its liberation from the German army, he did not mention Yugoslavia
at all. In his chapter “Shakespeare behind the Iron Curtain” he argues that every segment of life
in Eastern Europe was constructed to support Stalin’s ideas and named those “satellite states of
Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania” (Stribrny,
97), which accepted Stalin’s dictatorship. Although Yugoslavia belonged to the Communist bloc,
he simply did not mention it. On the other hand, many authors from Eastern Europe, including
Stribrny, confirm that “…all East European countries…were turned successively into totalitarian
states in which the Communist parties assumed all the decisive power” (Stribrny, 96). In fact,
without directly mentioning it, Stribrny sees “Titoism” as not very different from other
Communist dictatorships. This is partly true, especially in view of the period of Goli Otok
(Naked Island), which is Tito’s equivalent to Stalin’s Siberia. Tito’s purge of pro-Stalin members
of his party is a historical event never forgotten in Yugoslav history. Communists who were proSoviet were arrested and jailed at Goli Otok. In fact, Tito’s rule had the character of a
dictatorship, but somehow Tito’s Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian state, especially not like other
surrounding countries which were states of mass terror. Tito’s dictatorship was much “softer” and
more adaptable to the historical or cultural challenges.
Consequently, the other Eastern European states began experiencing greater pressure from
the Cominform after Tito’s break with Stalin. Anyhow, while other European Communist
countries strongly conformed to the Soviet model, Yugoslavia had found its own way. All
communist states have in common that political ideology and culture were linked together. In all
Eastern European countries the period after World War II is marked by a cultural reorientation
towards the Russian model of socialist realism. In the Soviet Union this artistic doctrine, with
very strict and clear ideological positions was established already in Resolution of Art (1930)
6
adopted at Kharkov and soon afterwards it became required as literary practice. Stalin’s maker
and executor of cultural politics was Zdhanov, who prescribed the goals and conventions of art.
The absolutely unavoidable task was strict adherence to party doctrine, including the optimistic
presentation of socialistic reality. Therefore, Arthur P. Mendel’s explanation of Stalin’s
(Zhdanov’s) repression in Russia applies to all of Eastern Europe, which adopted the Soviet
model without questioning it, except Yugoslavia. Mendel says:
Stalin liquidated Hamlet: there was no place in the close society for one who questioned
and vacillated… Hamlet, it was said, with his tragic doubts and indecisiveness, his
inability to see concrete ways of eradicating evil, was distant from contemporary Soviet
audience that were filled with active courage, optimism, and sense of clear purpose in life
and that looked to Shakespeare for ‘a real hero,’ not ‘Hamletism,’ for them synonymous
with vacillation and passive reflection. (734)
The Yugoslav situation concerning cultural politics differed from those of other Eastern
European countries. As Lydija Merenik rightly concludes: “Due to a change in political interests,
SFR Yugoslavia early got rid of socialist realism as the official art, and further forms of
repression in culture evade a precise detection” (1). This is historically correct and this is the
logical conclusion which simply and clearly explained the difference between the Yugoslavian
position and the position of other Eastern European countries. There are many interesting
opinions about “the form of repression” in Yugoslav political history. Yugoslavian cultural
politics can be explained as responses to the political changes. The observation such as “…a
liberation of the Yugoslavian culture should be seen as a social event strongly influenced not only
by direct Party orders, but also by various shifts in the foreign policy” (Merenik, 2) is perceptive
but it has to be seen as one of the possible explanations, not at all definite. It is very true that the
official policy influenced the cultural orientation. Although the political break with Stalin
7
officially also meant a break with the dogma of Socialist realism, in reality this literary practice
was publicly presented as the most desirable and convenient for a “proper” socialistic society.
The paradox is that on the one side political supporters of the Soviet model of Communism were
jailed, while on the other side high-ranking party members openly agitated for the Soviet cultural
model. A clear example of such contradictions is M.\ilas’ speech at the Fifth Congress of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1948. \ilas openly and freely agitated:
In the ideological political struggle after the war, the Party started – as it should in the
forthcoming period as well – from the premise that there are three sources of the hostile
ideological and political influence onto the working masses of our country. These are: the
influence of the ideological dark wave of the imperialists and their propaganda; the
influence of the deposed capitalist cliques […] and finally, the influence of the bourgeois
destructive power. (Merenik, 2)
It seems that there was a divergence between the political and the cultural orientation
towards the Soviet model, or that the political interest did not always directly affect cultural
politics. Therefore, it might be intriguing to investigate the controversies about culture and
ideology on the local level, which were less affected with the shifts in foreign politics.
In the period between the two world wars the idea of a united state of Yugoslavia became
very popular, mainly among left-wing writers. The traditional literary conception established in
the beginning of the 20th century showed gradual stagnation. The conventional themes explored
by the artistic and national-romantic writers became less interesting after the twenties. In their
search for new forms and expressions the new generation clashed with the artistic model adopted
by these “conservative” writers. The conflict between “the old” and “the new” conceptions of
literature started as early as 1917. Soon after, Krle`a published his progressive left-wing literary
magazines Plamen in 1919 (Flame) and Knji`evna republika in 1923-1927 (Literary Republic), in
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which he and other contributors radically opposed “the old” romantic and nationalistic
illusionism. Although on politically opposite sides, these two groups were more concerned with
their artistic than with their political orientations. The main characteristic of these writers in the
period from 1927-1933, except those openly and radically left orientated, was a kind of political
neutralism. The left orientated literary conception and their promotion of socialistic realism
dominated and became more radical in literary life from 1928 onwards. But the Marxist
indoctrination which infiltrated in literature following the Russian model of social realism, was
denounced by Krle`a as a vulgar attack on art as an aesthetic phenomenon. For Yugoslav cultural
politics after the Second World War the period between two wars is of extreme importance
because at that time the ideological and artistic position of left orientated artists, led by Krle`a,
was more or less formed.
Irina Suboti} in her article “Concerning Art and Politics in Yugoslavia during the 1930s”
discusses the cultural position of Yugoslavian intellectuals concerning their activities in different
periodicals of the time. She argues that cultural periodicals mainly followed the ideological
position established by Kharkov, but that “theoretical discussion” was tolerated until 1933. After
that time “the Yugoslav Communist Party and periodicals supporting it adopted a more rigid
adherence to the principle that art should be used as political weapon” (Suboti}, 1).
As an answer to this prohibition of freedom in art Miroslav Krle`a, an already established
writer, in 1933 published his essay The Preface to Podravian motifs of Krsto Hegedu{i}
(Predgovor Podravskim motivima Krste Hegedu{i}a). This essay provoked a debate which
essentially influenced the “form of repression” in Yugoslavian cultural life. Krle`a’s importance
grew between the two world wars and continued for a long time after. Being a communist and a
Marxist, Krle`a, at the point when Stalin’s influence already had a strong impact in the whole
Eastern European Communist world, “ criticized the Stalinist position as dogmatic, narrow
9
minded, and opposed to creativity” (Suboti}, 3). Throughout his very productive life, Krle`a was
in conflict with any kind of dogmatic, orthodox or “barbarian” thinking. Alone or with other
Marxist writers and artists Krle`a managed to publish literary magazines which were soon after
banned by the Communist authorities. In one of those, Pe~at (Stamp) he published in 1939 his
famous essay “Dijalekti~ki Antibarbarus” (“Dialectical Antibarbarus”). The conflict on the
literary left started in 1933 culminated after the publication of this essay. \ilas as well as Tito
accused Krle`a for his turn to the right and luckily enough he was only expelled from the
Communist Party. Suboti} points out Krle`a’s sins: “Krle`a questioned the moral basis of the
proletarian revolution, objected to the union of art and politics, and demonstrated that the
objectives of pro-Communist publications were solely political and not aesthetical”(3).
Beside all those directly political “sins,” Krle`a fearlessly wrote about cultural
backwardness, overwhelming stupidity and darkness, prophetically seeing that in such a society
any kind of “opening up” (Merenik, 5) will be misunderstood. Krle`a warned that stupidity is
always stupidity and it does not matter whether it comes from the Right or the Left, from the
West or from the East. In his novel On the Edge of Reason (Na rubu pameti) he wrote:
Centuries often elapse before one human folly gives place to another, but, like the light of
an extinguished star, folly has never failed to reach its destination. The mission of folly, to
all appearances, is universal. (Krle`a)
i
The Yugoslavian political and cultural position of always being somewhere in between is
actually in strong conflict with Krle`a’s position of being critical and skeptical towards reality
and literature. Under his influence, many Yugoslav intellectuals were orientated towards
progressive goals. Therefore, some Yugoslavian artists were absolutely aware of the real and
10
claustrophobic situation expressed also, years later by Merenik: “Activities devoid of ideology
and emancipated phenomena played a role of the ‘civilization’s outer shell’ in the policy of
‘sitting on the fence”.(5)
Later on, Tito rehabilitated Krle`a, who “was a dissident long before the term was
popularized, indeed, before the idea of dissident Communists was ever heard of in the broad
West” (Schwartz), and the reason is still disputed among critics. Even \ilas, Krle`a’s strong
opponent, later on explained his conflict with him, and recognized his “dangerous” authority:
“ since he enjoyed (with good reason) enormous prestige both in literary and in non-Communist
urban circles, his criticism had a devastating impact.”(\ilas)
The split with socialist realism did not happen at once, whereas on the political scene the
break with Stalin’s USSR actually had happened overnight. After Tito’s break with Stalin,
Socialist Realism was adopted by left-wing social writers of the 30’s and many political
ideologists. Therefore, for literature Krle`a’s break with Socialist Realism and his fight for artistic
freedom, started already in the early 30’s, is at least of the same importance for cultural politic in
Yugoslavia as Tito’s break with Stalin. In his article “Shaping the Grand Compromise,”
Branislav Dimitrijevi} comes up with the amusing idea that many politically “unsuitable” pieces
of art were not prohibited due to the illiteracy and low education of the Party’s cultural
policemen. Dimitrijevi} describes the situation where a socialist painter, a communist himself,
complained about the new artistic activities which made the Marxist aesthetic ridiculous and
demanded that “the Commission for International Cultural Relations has to include a figurative
painter in one of the exhibitions of Yugoslav art abroad. The reply he was given was that those
kind of paintings might be sent only to exhibitions in under-developed countries” (3).
The interesting thing, not only for Dimitrijevi}, is the fact that at that meeting where the
Marxist painter’s demand was so rudely ruled out, “none of the Party members reacted, afraid
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that they be qualified as primitives and conservatives” (3). When this did not happen, when the
Party’s policemen gave a comment without being ashamed or afraid of their own lack of
knowledge, then in Yugoslavia we have a case such as Bre{an’s with his prohibited-not
prohibited The Performance of Hamlet in Mrdu{a Donja.
After all, the chaos on the Yugoslavian cultural scene was something very different from
all other Eastern European countries. It seems that for a long period:
Titoism had become a setting, rather than an ideology, and had been usually treated by its
opponents with some kind of distance that created a sense of irony and ambivalence as the
main tools for critically dealing with it. (Dimitrijevi}, 5-6)
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II
Rise and Fall of Bre{an’s Hamlet
In several respects Bre{an’s play Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrdu{a Donja (The
Performance of Hamlet in Mrdu{a Donja) was the turning point in Yugoslavian as well as in
Croatian dramatic literature. Predstava Hamleta was published and performed for the first time in
1971. As W. E. Yuill has pointed out, this play was part of a project known as A Ring round
Shakespeare (Kolo uokolo Shakespearea). The Ring was in fact a triptych consisting of
Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Günter Grass’ Die Plebejer proben den
Aufstand and Bre{an’s unknown play. The reactions to Bre{an’s play from audience and critics
were euphoric. Yuill has noted that the audience was “spellbound for nearly four hours” and that
the applause that followed “was rarely accorded to indigenous authors,” while critics “were at a
loss to link the work with any native tradition and spoke enthusiastically of the sheer ingenuity
and originality of Bre{an’s concept” (529). The perceptiveness and prompt success of this work,
first staged by the great director Bo`idar Violi} in Zagreb’s ITD Theatre, inspired a number of
succeeding performances all over Yugoslavia. The play was translated not long afterwards, and
found its way to stages in Poland, Austria, the GDR, the USSR, Hungary, and Sweden. The play
was filmed in 1973 by the well known director Krsto Papi} and was a great success. Considering
the widespread public recognition of the play’s value, it was not surprising that the author was
awarded the highly regarded Gavella prize in 1973. However, the political dimension of the play,
which is by no means innocent, instigated serious accusations by the Party authorities. Bizarre as
it is, in the same year of admiration and success, Predstava Hamleta was taken off the repertoires
in Yugoslav theatres. And yet, in two theatres, Zagreb’s ITD Theatre and Sarajevo’s Kamerni
teatar, Bre{an’s Hamlet continued to be performed.
13
In his essay “Bre{an’s Grotesque Tragedies”, Yuill
has recorded details about the
political debate and called attention to the paradox of the Yugoslavian cultural and political
scene. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has never been forbidden in Yugoslavia, while Bre{an’s, after two
years of enormous success, was. There is, however, the new aspect of this so typically
Yugoslavian tolerance which makes it clear that the Party never ceased to control the cultural
activities. But the question why this particular play was suppressed in the seventies, when Bre{an
strictly followed the general rule of not addressing president Tito personally, still remains. In
Tito’s Yugoslavia, a lot of nonconformist art was tolerated by the authorities, especially after the
fifties. The only exceptions were Tito’s condemnations of abstract art and attacks on the “dark
wave” movies. Speculations and controversies around Bre{an’s play started when an anonymous
author commented on the ideological ground of the play. The comment of the anonymous author
was broadcast on Zagreb television and Yuill has noted down interesting parts of this debate:
All the negative characters in Bre{an’s work are Communists, the entire plot is built on
their moral and ethical defects. On the other hand the action is set in an era of which the
dominant characteristic was a revolutionary upsurge associated with a spirit of self-denial
on the part of whole nation, and particularly on the part of Communists. (Yuill, 536)
This limited kind of reception appeared to be of such importance that the use of “the mask
of Shakespeare to comment on current affairs without fear of censorship’” (Kennedy, 175), so
well known among Eastern European artists, was not a good enough tool against bitter political
agitation. The debate continued in daily magazines, showing the cynical political criteria which
resulted in undermining and distancing Bre{an’s artistic values. It goes on like this:
14
Everything associated with Hamlet in Mrdu{a is essentially a manifestation of the
provincial mentality of certain individuals who tried to use the notorious mousetrap from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet to ensnare progressive social forces and who have only succeeded
in catching their own petty provincial scheming which is far inferior to the artistic level of
the ITD Theatre and the individual actors who deploy their creative talents here. (Yuill,
537)
In a society like Communist Yugoslavia, this and similar assertions should be understood
rather as a profile of critical consciousness than as a serious threat against Bre{an personally. It is
a general attitude which shows the position of art in society. Artists were confronted with many
profound difficulties but the crucial problem became the questioning of the sense of art in such
difficult conditions. What really was expected is self-censorship, something that is absent from
Bre{an’s play and was a prevailing requirement of any artistic action. Therefore, the official
account of the Chairman of the Croat Central Committee, Dr. Stipe [uvar, cannot be taken
without reservations. His main point was that the Yugoslav authorities never banned anything
because of ideological unsuitability and the reason for the bad public reputation of Bre{an’s play
might be something else. He said:
I have the impression that certain individuals want things to be banned or criticized and
that they are deliberately trying to gain a reputation as martyrs and victims of the regime
at the same time as they are on the look-out for cushy jobs. (Yuill, 537)
The controversies around Bre{an’s Hamlet gave rise to a wider discussion of the position of
artistic activities in a society where ideology is in fact in control. The image of a liberal Marxist
15
society was seriously challenged mainly when writers like Predrag Matvejevi} “argued that a
stable society should be able to meet challenges and criticize its own image” (Yuill 538). Such
conclusive criticism as Matvejevi}’s was a thorn in the Party’s flesh and while avoiding directly
declaring who is the “boss,” [uvar responded:
I am in favor of things not being banned in this country, but I am also in favor of
maximum freedom for political criticism of political tendencies and messages conveyed
in artistic form. I am sure that Marxists will prevail over the petty bourgeoisie in any
conflict of opinion and that they do not need any outside help; they are stronger by virtue
of their ideas and their arguments. (Yuill, 538)
This statement expresses the strategy of political power where phrases like “I am in
favor” seemed to bear the mark of the Party’s ideology. The authorities actually demanded self censorship of artists and a peculiar balance between ideological and artistic values of artistic
critics. Therefore it is not strange to see that critics had been defending artistic freedom by hiding
their own arguments behind the authority of Karl Marx. How this balance worked out in reality
might be shown by Vjekoslav Mikecin’s justification of Bre{an’s Hamlet:
Paraphrasing the satirist Lucian, Marx pointed out that it is precisely through comedy and
satire that society rids itself of its failings. This is why I accepted these stings and
pinpricks in this sense. I did not observe in the structure of this work, in the composition
of its characters and so on, any deliberate political tendency on the part of the author to
ridicule or belittle the Communist movement or the idea of Communism. (Yuill, 539)
16
This is an example of common socialist criticism which shows a gradual decline into
mental disorder putting forward irrelevant facts considering art and completely dismissing
relevant features. Simply, Vjekoslav Mikecin did not say anything relevant about Bre{an’s
Hamlet. However, this demagogical circus about the Hamlet case brought about one good thing.
That is a public reproach of the incompleteness of socialist criticism. The participants of this
debate agreed with a general point made by Sr|an Vican that
it is necessary to reinforce Marxist critical thinking in the area of cultural life and
intellectual activities. But it is equally essential to prevent that critical thinking from
sinking to the level of everyday, prosaic, shallow, explicitly political commentary which
is content to stick labels right and left …not bothering to enter into an overall assessment
– not simply of a work’s aesthetic or formal characteristics, but also of its world vision
and the place that it assigns to man in that vision – factors inherent in one way or another
in every work of art. And bound to be inherent in it. (Yuill, 539)
After all, the fact that not only Bre{an’s Hamlet but also his other work in following years
was banned from Yugoslavian theatres, although not from all theatres, remains strange.
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III
Shakespeare in the World of Mrdu{a Donja
Bre{an’s play presents the world of the small village Mrdu{a Donja in the first years after
World War II. The villagers live in a new, communistic era which has introduced the so-called
cooperative society, the Yugoslavian counterpart of the Soviet kolkhoz. The new Communist
government seeks to change the rude and hard reality of this poor village of the Dalmatian region
of Zagora, not only by industrialization and electrification but also with a demand for cultural
activities. The organizer and the person in charge of the new, modern style of life is the local
Secretary of the local branch of the Communist Party, Mate Bukarica – nicknamed Bukara. When
a directive from “above” asks for the organization of cultural activities in the village, the Party
Committee organizes a meeting to discuss and decide about their future doings. The meeting is
held by Party members who are trying to convince the villagers that such an activity is something
they really need as participants of the modern communist society. This idea does not fly among
the villagers and they make an effort to subvert it by mockery. But an order is an order, and
Bukara is the voice of this order. The decision is that people from this community will act in a
play that has not yet been selected. Strangely enough, one of villagers, [imurina, proposes the
play he saw accidentally in the theatre in Zagreb. Excusing himself for not being an educated
man he tells the story about his fascination with “the miracle” called theatre with its brightness,
its comfortable chairs and the performance whose title, he thinks, is Omlet. His audience,
inhabitants of Mrdu{a, are left out of breath and they cannot wait to hear the story. But the local
teacher Andro [kunca, the only one who knows what [imurina has seen in the theatre, is terrified
with the idea that those people would like to perform a classical tragedy by Shakespeare. He
interrupts [imurina’s monologue and tries to make the audience aware that the tragedy of the
greatest British playwright with its complex language and complicated roles is not suitable. These
18
intellectual remarks are not interesting to them; they are eager to hear [imurina’s story. The
interpretation of Hamlet by an illiterate man, [imurina, spoken in his local dialect, introduces us
to a world that is far from the Elizabethan world of the Renaissance writer William Shakespeare.
In fact, the people of Mrdu{a are not confronted by any “original text,” but by [imurina’s
charming interpretation. They do not know any other Hamlet but [imurina’s. This one they
understand and like. [imurina’s interpretation is constantly interrupted with questions and
comments from his audience. The very tense “artistic” atmosphere is broken when Joco [koki} –
[koko, a young man whose father, an old communist, was jailed a short time ago, enters the stage.
In an attempt to convince the people that his father has been falsely accused, because he did not
steal community money, [koko blames Bukara for malpractices known to everyone. The other
Party leaders, Mile Puljiz – Puljo and Ma~ak, whose position is of less importance than Bukara’s
and whose political carriers directly depend on him, undermine [koko’s arguments in a very rude
and cynical way. When just one voice from the crowd has asked about the case of [koko’s father,
Bukara, taking advantage of his political power and using all available agitprop phrases, turns
everything to his own benefit. The people of Mrdu{a do not respond at all. They want [imurina to
continue his story, but the whole magic has disappeared after this incident with [koko and the
meeting ends. This is a very simplified account of the foundation on which the rest of Bre{an’s
play is built. Preparations for the performance begin immediately. As the only educated man in
the village, [kunca is chosen to be the director, although the idea of performing Shakespeare’s
Hamlet in the context of Mrdu{a Donja is against all his beliefs. But Bukara has blackmailed him
with a threatening remark that he might lose his job and be expelled from the society as an enemy
of the socialist people. Being too weak and very frightened, [kunca takes up his role as director.
He presents the future “actors” with a book which he labels “the original text” of the Bard and
sorts out the roles. His ”actors” are content with a script as long as they can understand it. The
19
problem is that the offered text is too complicated for them and they do not understand much of
it. [kunca has to adapt it and the transformation starts.
Seeing this as a perfect possibility to mock all the actors or rather this society, [kunca
fixes the roles as follows:
Mate Bukarica – Bukara plays Claudius
Mile Puljiz – Puljo plays Polonius
Andja – Puljo’s daughter plays Ophelia
Mara Mi{ –Majka~a plays Gertrude
Ma~ak –plays Laertes
Joco [koki} – [koko plays Hamlet
[imurina plays the commentator of the play
And the villagers are given the role of Horatio.
[kunca’s appropriation leaves out many characters and consequently the very important
relationships and actions so characteristic of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. These are obviously not
relevant for the mousetrap he is preparing. Therefore, for example Majka~a who plays Gertrude
is not [koko’s mother, nor Bukara’s wife. She is Bukara’s lover. Bukara did not kill [koko’s
father, but the man hanged himself in the jail, although Bukara and his party fellows are
indirectly responsible for his conviction, and so on. The family relationships such as son –
mother, brother – sister, stepfather – uncle – son, or the idea of friendship are deliberately
omitted. As we can see, [kunca’s Hamlet, which is deeply rooted in Mrdu{a’s reality, as well as
in [imurina’s innocent interpretation, has not much in common with the Elizabethan reality of the
famous writer. And yet, these two appropriations of Hamlet are the basic structure of Bre{an’s
Predstava Hamleta. The modus operandi of the whole play is the transformation of the borrowed
classical text which presupposes our knowledge of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But this is not a
20
tragedy, it is a grotesque tragedy and does not end up with the death of the main characters in the
royal residence of Elsinore. Instead, Bre{an’s small, poor and primitive village continues to live
in its own Stalinist communist era which, again, has not much in common with Shakespeare’s
historic time or Renaissance culture.
21
IV
Relations between Shakespeare and Bre{an
(Critical Approaches)
Yugoslavian, or more properly, Croatian critics have examined Bre{an’s work,
particularly his Hamlet, from many perspectives, always concentrating on the importance of
similarities, or general truths as the connecting lines between these two authors. Strangely
enough, the differences as possibly more integrated features considering inter-cultural
accessibility are simply omitted. The belief that general truths and the omnipresent meanings of
Shakespeare’s text are described as mimetic patterns transmitted in Bre{an’s text led them to
many illogical conclusions. Therefore, it might be interesting to challenge those preconceptions
in which Shakespeare’s text has the status of a holy, authoritative body and as such participates in
any cultural transition.
The first appearance of Bre{an’s play, as I have pointed out, greatly surprised both critics
and audience with its originality in the context of the Croatian theatrical tradition. The freshness
of The Performance of Hamlet in Mrdu{a Donja is to be found in its author’s disregard for the
established image of the Croatian national theatre, which was already exhausted from ever
repeated themes and contents. Yuill has provided translated excerpts of critics who made clear
this quality of the play. Yuill quotes from Vjeran Zuppa’s De Summa Thatrologica:
Faced with the Truth, Bre{an did not seek refuge in literary form and thus avoided the
typical spirit of Croatian dramatic literature, formalization. Faced with the language, he
did not attempt to shield himself by recourse to any norm […] Neither form nor norm
dictated his drama. (528)
22
Bre{an’s decision to adapt Shakespeare’s Hamlet for a broad audience was undoubtedly
an innovative feature. The Performance of Hamlet was commended for being “more than just a
pastiche of Shakespeare: it evokes in its own historical and social context those eternal values,
virtues and vices that inform Shakespeare’s play” (Yuill, 530). Yuill’s conclusion is a typical
example of the “existing dominant paradigm of literary studies” (Drakakis, 2) in which
Shakespeare’s texts are seen as the archives where the eternal wisdom, free from time and place,
is conserved. It appears that those everlasting and fixed values are applicable in any context. The
major limitation of the “classical” critical conception lies in its disregard of the fact that the text,
and particularly the play text, is itself subversive and as such cannot be a “straightforward
pathway” (Hawkes, Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches, 286) to the author’s mind.
However, regarding Shakespeare’s plays, the main critical approach in ex-Yugoslavia was and is
committed to a set of general images firmly established on the one hand in the work of Dr
Johnson, Coleridge, Bradley, more recently Harold Bloom, and on the other hand in the work of
Jan Kott, which was very influential in Eastern Europe. Kott’s well known claim that
Shakespeare is our contemporary comprises even more indeterminate and obstructive
interpretations of the Western critics based on the idea of self-evident truth which as such might
be transmitted from any time and place to another. These very common responses to Shakespeare
presuppose, as Hawkes has wittily noted, that:
That human nature is permanent, one and indivisible, regardless of place, race, creed and
culture. In the end, under the skin we are all the same and it is to this sameness that
Shakespeare speaks.
That the passage of time, history, makes no difference to this. (Alternative Shakespeares
2, 10)
23
Kott’s hypothesis of Shakespeare as a powerful medium for commenting on current political
events, our immortal contemporary, rests on such beliefs. Considering the use of Shakespeare in
Eastern Europe, Kott has added a political aspect as a connecting element between Shakespeare
and the authors who took advantage of his authority to speak openly. These standards form the
basis for the interpretations of Bre{an’s play as exclusively political which are not necessarily
bad, but rule out any other possible dimension of the playtext. In general, Bre{an’s Hamlet is
seen as an interesting imitation of a classical play, where the author intelligently uses the
omnipresent truth specified by certain characters applying the capacity of Shakespeare’s art to
cross the time borders and find a new life in the Stalinist period of Socialist Yugoslavia. This
perspective is hardly acceptable for many simple reasons. One of them is that it implies that
Shakespeare’s Hamlet imposes the meaning which, so well adapted into Bre{an’s Hamlet, has in
fact never altered.
The sense of meaning as a fixed and unchanging message inscribed in the text is crucially
challenged already by structuralism. The critical position of structuralism is in the nature of
language as a system of signs which is made up of relationships where the independent signs
cannot function as a transparent code to the meaning. Structuralist criticism was devoted to the
idea of the text as a structure which gets its meaning not as an entity but only when it is
assimilated into the wider composition as its part. In spite of the limitations of this criticism,
structuralism has opened up a new critical approach which combined with the further
development of criticism broadly inspired interpretations of Shakespeare. The traditional view of
meaning as a predetermined and settled category is transformed into the notion that literature
rejects any concept of incorporated meaning. Besides structuralism, the new critical approach
also includes poststructuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, Marxism, New Historicism or
24
feminism, which in an often highly complex literary and philosophical analysis, basically focus
on the indeterminacy of meaning itself. As a consequence of such a general perception, these new
apprehensions of the literary work and the world around us, although they grow in different
directions, are united in their attack on limitations such as a unique and definitive interpretation.
Remarkably combining the achievements of modern criticism with his own lucidity,
Terence Hawkes comes up with appealing interpretations of Shakespeare, continuously keeping
in mind that his perception is readjusted to a specific historical time and place. Therefore,
Hawkes’ interpretation of the history of Shakespearean criticism is based on understanding the
standards and patterns comprised in literary judgments from the Renaissance onwards. While
destroying the “Shakespeare” myths, Hawkes did not neglect critical studies from previous
critics, but explains that:
We can historicize Johnson. As a result, we can tell – we think – that he is unable to look
at Shakespeare except through the spectacles of his own time…
We might also, not unreasonably on the basis of our century’s studies of history and of
comparative anthropology, question the existence of a ‘general’ human nature. Once we
do that, the idea that representations of such an entity constitute the only proper object of
art begins to look more like a response to a series of specific historical moments than an
eternally valid perception. (Alternative Shakespeares 2, 3)
Hawkes’ Shakespearean criticism calls up the multi-dimensional role of literary criticism,
simply but effectively articulated in his famous conclusion that “Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we
mean by Shakespeare” (Meaning by Shakespeare, 3). As long as we is an uncertain and
disconcerting notion, the meaning cannot be accurate or limited. The multiplicity of signs
25
incorporated in a literary text endlessly participates in a wider system which includes the notion
of history and culture as “meaning-making discourses” (Alternative Shakespeares 2, 9).
New ideas of history and culture in literary criticism have originated in the projects of
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Both attempt to demonstrate that traditional
presumptions about the historical and cultural material seen as a scarcely important context from
which art arises, are serious obstacles in the search for new interpretations. Stephen Greenblatt in
his Shakespearean Negotiations clearly expresses how the renegotiation of history and cultural
practices changes interpretative modes, becoming the basis of a modern analysis:
If the textual traces in which we take interest and pleasure are not sources of numinous
authority, if they are the signs of contingent social practices, then the question we ask of
them cannot profitably center on a search for their untranslatable essence. Instead we can
ask how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to
another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption. (5)
Greenblatt has proposed an analysis where literature, language, history and culture have
to be treated as a collective construction involved in our re-reading and re-thinking of
Shakespeare’s dramatic work. The aim of such an analysis is to investigate the cultural
transactions including all of the signifying processes involved in a wider social context.
Therefore, such ideas might be of great interest for the interpretation of Shakespearian
adaptations. What Greenblatt has introduced as a “poetics of culture” and has explained as a
…general enterprise – study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and
inquiry into the relations among these practices. (5)
26
and Mullany has seen as “the symbolic dimension of the social actions in which humans engage
… a large cultural function” (Alternative Shakespeares 2, 9) is usually set aside in the
interpretations of Bre{an’s Hamlet.
Certainly under the influence of Jan Kott but also because of the real social conditions
which led to a number of “red” features so common and recognizable in the Eastern European
adaptations of Shakespeare, the interpretations of those appropriations usually focused on
political issues. Still, Kott’s book was popular in the West, too, and in combination with the
many radical theatre makers with Communist sympathies caused a politicization of Shakespeare
productions in Western Europe. One of Kott’s admirers, the British director Michael
Bogdanovwhile speaking about practical problems and dilemmas concerning Shakespeare, has
touched on the matter of political issues.7 As examples of the traditionally apolitical attitude
towards the arts and the theatre in Britain, Bogdanov names Sir Laurence Olivier’s adaptations of
Henry V, Richard III and Hamlet, where Olivier “managed to cut out some of the most essential
ingredients of the plays themselves” (Elsom, 19). The interesting thing is that he sees the political
dimension in Shakespeare’s plays as an “essential ingredient” as opposed to the “apolitical,”
rather subjective interpretation which is a kind of British classical heritage. It seems that a
general statement considering the political dimension is at stake, here as well as in a whole range
of comments on Bre{an’s adaptation. This typical polarization between the “individualistic” West
and “red-painted, political” East is a common and restrictive feature in literary criticism. The
transformation of the critical practice which began to emerge in the late 1970s has opened the
discussion of the conditions and impacts of ideological practices as forging properties for the
literary text. This new Marxist approach destabilized the inherited polarization of any
interpretation requiring a larger, broadening scope of our apprehension of the text and context.
For that reason, Shakespeare’s work, as well as Bre{an’s or Sir Laurence Olivier’s interpretations
27
have to be examined from different perspectives. The reception of Bre{an’s Hamlet as an
exclusively political play, as well as the interpretation of Olivier’s version only as an apolitical
play are not acceptable because they are restrictive. In both of them “Shakespeare’s plays have
become one of the central agencies through which our culture performs this operation” (Meaning
by Shakespeare, 3) where the clashes between different and opposed cultural practices are the
most interesting elements. The absence of a political dimension in Olivier’s film or the absence
of a psychological dimension in Bre{an’s adaptation, if they are absent, paradoxical or not, is
extremely significant. Ideology might no longer be compared with a narrowly political term but
rather seen “as a ‘given’, a sense of the ‘natural’ and the ‘real’ which we inherit, willy-nilly, and
without which it is impossible to conceive the world we inhabit” (Hawkes, “Shakespeare and
New Critical Approaches,” 298). As James H. Kavanagh points out, the term ideology was
redefined in Althusser’s philosophy to
…designate a system of representations that offer the subject an imaginary, compelling,
sense of reality in which crucial contradictions of self and social order appear resolved.
Ideology in this sense is less a set of explicit political ideas than what Althusser calls a
“lived”…relation to the real’ – a set of pre-conscious image-concepts in which men and
women see and experience, before they think about, their place within a given social
formation, with its specific structure of class and gender relations. (Kavanagh, 145)
For Olivier’s or Bre{an’s Hamlet to be seen as “a lived relation to the real” would require a more
complex social analysis where political or psychological dimensions are part of the context, and
have to be understood as such. In general, the text, and particularly the dramatic text, deserves
complete investigation because it is, as Alessandro Serpieri has concluded, the setting of
28
“virtually all the semiotic systems at work in a given culture” (Hawkes, Shakespeare and New
Critical Approches, 293). Therefore it might be interesting to examine the transmutation of the
world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the world of Bre{an’s The Performance of Hamlet.
29
V
Loyalty to Shakespeare Painted Red
In the early 70s, the interest of literary criticism had focused most intently on Bre{an’s
political inclinations but in the process of investigating the artistic qualities of his Hamlet also
other aspects were recognized. Later on the political dimension has been considered as a part of a
larger network within which moral and ethical values, religious beliefs and communist reality,
laws, and individual experiences are all present. In her study Bre{anov teatar (Bre{an’s Theatre),
published in 1989, Lada ^ale Feldmananalyses the drama text and the theatre performance.8 Her
main interest is in dramaturgical aspects of Ivo Bre{an’s opus, where she discusses , following
the principles of semiotic analysis, the phenomena of citation and intertextuality. The interesting
part of her writing is the anthropological study of political rituals as a theatralisation of reality.
But the fact that she wrote about the role of the theatre within the theatre as a structural procedure
largely turns her study away from the Shakespearean context. In her later research, her analysis
becomes more orientated to the relation Bre{an – Shakespeare and the structural sameness or
differences are interpreted as a part of the wider historical, social and cultural context, for
instance in her article “Hrvatski Hamleti” (Croatian Hamlets) from 1997.
Feldman’s first book focuses on techniques and attitudes of Bre{an’s Hamlet in the
context of the Croatian dramatic tradition and secondly as a part of his Grotesque Tragedies.
Therefore, it is not strange that ^ale-Feldman pays more attention to Bre{an’s borrowings in
general, which include also Molière and Goethe, than to the particular relation to Shakespeare’s
work. Bre{an’s model of the theatre within the theatre is analyzed as a common literary device,
popular and used from the very beginning of the theatre. This theatrical device reveals the idea
that the process of creating illusion in the theatre goes parallel with the action of destroying it. In
this sense, this breaking through illusion becomes the foundation on which another illusion has to
be built. In this very systematic study, Feldman investigates the nature and importance of the two
30
“universes” present in the dramatic text; the “universe of illusion” and the “universe of reality.”
She points out that the separation of these two universes, where the theatre openly declares itself
as a theatre and not as reality, does not completely take place in Bre{an’s play. The character
who takes a theatrical role cannot communicate with the characters from “reality” before turning
back to that reality. Therefore, she explains that firstly the special nature of Bre{an’s use of the
model of the theatre within the theatre lies in the masking and unmasking. This means that
Bukara, disguised, masked as Claudius, actually unmasks his real character. And secondly,
another way of presenting the theatre within the theatre appears when Shakespeare’s text is
directly mixed with Bre{an’s. The example she gives is [kunca’s monologue, which he half
loudly reads from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Although these statements are not completely
unacceptable, they lead this critic to the gloomy conclusion that Bre{an takes over Shakespeare’s
dramatic situation as a mythical vision of the world which is independent of socio-historical and
cultural processes, and exists for ever in a unified and unchanged form. Furthermore, Feldman
argues that Bre{an’s understanding of history as an endless repetition of archetypical situations
enables him to confront the mythical and actual in a form of grotesque. As a consequence, the
truth and the logic of the human fate is already inscribed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and as such
once again confirmed in the reality of Bre{an’s play. The general problem of these kind of critics
who adopt traditional approaches lies in their ignorance of the fact that making meaning is a
cultural process. These traditional statements and notions can no longer be taken for granted,
especially because Hamlet is a clear and comprehensible example of the text that has changed
with the times. The text of Hamlet today is not the same as it was in 1601; it has more than 400
years of history which intervene in our apprehensions of this text in this time. In any case, the
mythological creature Hamlet is no longer satisfactory, because Shakespeare’s text is full of
puzzling indeterminacy and accordingly it has initiated a vast range of interpretations.
31
In a relatively short period, Feldman’s interpretation of Bre{an’s Hamlet widened, and in
1997 in the article “Hrvatski Hamleti” (Croatian Hamlets), she tried to analyze more closely the
relation between Shakespeare’s and Bre{an’s Hamlet as a cultural phenomenon. She argues that
Bre{an’s understanding of culture might be explained in accordance with Lotman’s definition of
culture. In this “paradigmatic type” of culture, the text is described as a world or as an intelligent
message (soobscenje). The author of this world might be God, the laws of nature, the absolute
idea or a work of art by a genius. Our duty is to decipher these already inscribed meanings and
transcribe them in the system of signs comprehensible for us. The main misconceptions are
obvious; on the one side it is the authority of the author, and on the other the simplification of the
term ideology. Feldman notes more similarities than differences between Bre{an’s and
Shakespeare’s Hamlets and concludes that this aspect directly generates artistic values in
Bre{an’s adaptation. Bre{an’s use of “the Mousetrap” is thus the main dramaturgical pattern,
technically the same as The Murder of Gonzago in Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare’s Hamlet
functions as The Mousetrap in the world of Bre{an’s text. But Feldman concludes that the “real”
Hamlet functions as a poetically dominant, universal and authoritative archetype which at the end
unifies all meanings of Bre{an’s text, showing that truths are valid for all time.
Interpreting four performances included in The Performance of Hamlet in Mrdu{a Donja,
she falls into the common trap of not understanding that the appropriation as “an aesthetic
phenomenon demands a theory of textual relations” (Desmet, 4). In all four “performances” she
sees an attempt to devastate the original text which nevertheless, because of its universality and
Shakespeare’s brilliance, cannot be destroyed. This idolatry of Shakespeare prevails in
Yugoslavian criticism, where the death of the author is only partly accepted. The new critical
approach has to take seriously the concept that
32
…Shakespearean appropriation contests bardolatry by demystifying the concept of
authorship. Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”, a founding text for appropriation
studies, begins with that all “discourses are object of appropriation” (1984: 108). The
author, no longer regarded as the origin of writing, becomes simply a proper name by
which we describe a piece of discourse. (Desmet, 5)
Instead of trying to articulate “where we stand” in relation to the signifier ‘Shakespeare’”
(Desmet, 4), Feldman interprets Bre{an’s treatment of Hamlet as a show of his unmitigated
admiration for Shakespeare’s work.
33
VI
Four Performances within Bre{an’s Play
The first “performance” is [imurina’s interpretation of Hamlet. His interpretation of the
performance he accidentally saw in the theatre in Zagreb confirms the flexibility of
Shakespeare’s text, which enables him to identify with and comment on it. This vision is much
more than a simple subversion of the “original” text, as Feldman argues; it is rather an attack on
conceptual speculation, derided by Derrida as the mistaken idea that “there exists somewhere,
beyond all mediation, a pristine voice, an antecedent ‘presence’, a graspable origin towards
which that mediation impels us” (Hawkes, “Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches,” 291).
[imurina’s story shows “where he stands” and how his “lived relation to the real” suggests a
range of ways in which the play text might be interpreted. Feldman in her interpretation of The
Mousetrap presumes that [imurina’s story is Bre{an’s version of the dumb-show because it
indicates what will follow. The simple detail that the dumb-show is a pantomimic, wordless act
and [imurina’s story is a charming and dynamic presentation makes this statement at least
problematic. A more important misconception is again caused by carrying on the notion of the
authority and reliability of the “original” text. This kind of limitation in critical practices is
described by Hawkes:
The idea that a play can and inevitably does take a part in the affairs of a society requires
an abandonment of the notion of the primacy or, in practical terms, of the existence of any
transcendental meaning located within it, able finally to subsume, surpass or determine all
others. (Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, 6)
34
Hamlet is not a collection of universal and essential meanings reachable only for an educated
audience, it is “cultural capital” or in other words it:
Circulated through different ages and social strata, in turn accruing and conferring
symbolic value on cultural projects from both highbrow and lowbrow culture […] and
sometimes both together. (Desmet, 5)
[imurina’s understanding of the performance he saw demonstrates just one possible option of
“reading,” which in deconstructive analysis is unlimited, whereas a single and unified
interpretation is not tolerable. In her Introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, Christy
Desmet appealingly describes the essence of appropriation which might be connected with
[imurina’s way of adapting Hamlet. She suggests that:
Shakespearean appropriation begins precisely […] when experiencing Shakespeare
becomes “like living in a public park”. Private interests and public situations converge,
and back stage suddenly becomes front-stage, so that truth comes into focus with the force
of “grotesque”. Verisimilitude, that comforting illusion that drama holds the mirror up to
nature, but from a safe distance, becomes something more, either dream or nightmare.
Then Shakespearean appropriation becomes possible, perhaps even imperative. (2)
Seeing the “re-vision” of Hamlet from this perspective, we might argue that all “performances” in
The Performance of Hamlet are in this respect similar. Each of them is the result of “the
condition and grounds of consciousness itself” (Hawkes, 298).
35
The second “performance” within Bre{an’s play mentioned in Feldman’s article is the
comment on the work of the Croatian National Theatre, broadcast on the radio. The radio speaker
complains about the selection of Hamlet at a time when some other dramatic work would be
much more accurate and compatible to the socialist reality. The speaker concludes that, only two
years after the liberation, the Croatian National Theatre is an unlikely setting for the
performances of Hamlet and nevertheless, this play is performed in two versions; one version
directed by Karlo Benkovi} and another one directed by Tomislav Auer. The radio announcer
points out that the role of the theatre in society is that of a place where the political and social
problems have to come into prominence, but this statement does not cause negative criticism of
Auer’s recent “stage realization” of Hamlet. On the contrary, his comments on Auer’s directing
of Hamlet are positive. This anonymous radio critic argues that Auer, being aware of endless
interpretative possibilities has found his own, original approach in his treatment of “Hamlet’s
problem.”
Commenting on this “performance,” although Vidan’s proposal to call it Shakespeare’s
presence seems to be more appropriate, Feldman has compared it with two other parts in
Bre{an’s play. This structural device of having only the voice as a radio comment Bre{an has
repeated three times, after the first, the second and the fourth “picture.” Bre{an’s play consists of
two parts and five pictures which might be seen as acts. Thus, at the end of the first and second
act, the radio speaker informs the audience about socialistic reality and progress, exclusively
considering the conditions of life in villages. He concludes that the socialistic transformation of
life in small places shows important progress in many respects. With the new prospects of
industrialization, electrification and education, life for people like those of Mrdu{a will be much
better and easier, in spite of anti-communistic conspiracies and a wide range of obstacles,. The
last comment, as I have mentioned before, informs the audience about problems such as the
36
theatre repertoire and the validity of the last performance of Hamlet. Feldman reads these three
speeches as “professional and public statements which belong to the same politically directive
discourse” (Feldman, Teatar u Taetru u Hrvatskom Teatru, 324), extending the socialistic
ideology. An indisputable fact is that ideology is always politically significant, but at the same
time this political discourse offers the different positions from which the play may be read. One
suggestion is that the understanding of such an explicit distinction between city and village might
enable us to perceive the far more complex problem presented by Bre{an’s play.
The sharp contrast between city and village in Yugoslavian society does not originate
from the socialistic or communistic regime, but neither has it been changed or resolved during
this period. Underdevelopment, primitivism and backwardness are usually connected with life in
the village, while city life is advanced and cultivated. These images are traceable in common
language, where still the expression “a villager” has negative connotations of primitive, badmannered and even mean or malicious. From Krleza until the present, this contrast had often been
interpreted as a disguised antagonism. Quite recently, Bogdan Bogdanovi} took this hostility as a
reason for his comment on one dimension of the last war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he
named “urbicide.” 9Although Bre{an did not comment on this dualism, his Hamlet clearly
presents these two different social constructs which function separately until the moment when
they were forced to mingle. Therefore, we might conclude that in Bre{an’s play there exists an
opposition between these two perceptions of the world which despite of their political
commitment to socialistic convictions demonstrate opposed concepts of knowledge, identity,
history and culture. As a result, [imurina’s “reading” of Hamlet and the critic’s analyses we heard
on the radio, in spite of the same narrowly political background, are very different, yet may well
refer to the same performance in Zagreb directed by Auer.
37
Concerning Shakespeare, the main difference is with respect to the authority of the Bard.
The type of critical response which is deeply rooted in the image of Shakespeare as a supreme
authority reflects the cultural condition of the city, where the theatre, art, Shakespeare,
electrification or fashionable dresses already have a long history and are very well known. In
contrast, [imurina’s response is based on his own illiteracy. He does not know anything about
Shakespeare or any other writer, he does not understand the concept of the theatre and he has
never experienced any of the luxuries of life in the city. [imurina speaks dialect and only when he
wants to make his interpretation more fashionable does he use the new socialistic vocabulary.
The political dimension of his verbal expression is only to a certain degree relevant and the same
is notable in the radio-version of interpretation. It might belong to “political discourse”
recognizable in socialistic society but in fact the pure radio interpretation in this respect is rather
neutral. The cult of Shakespeare is a cultural heritage and for that reason his plays are always
accepted, even in the period when some other plays might be more relevant, but further, there is
no reference to political aspects of Hamlet as inappropriate for the Zagreb theatre. The sharp
distinction between [imurina’s version and that on the radio is in the use of language, and this
feature is by no means innocent in Bre{an’s play. Sophisticated language, not only political
phraseology, is opposed to the dialect in the same way as the reception of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
diverged throughout Bre{an’s play. [imurina’s interpretation, which changed the play to the
extent that it turned accepted meaning on its head, and another completely different reading in
Bre{an’s Hamlet, foreground what Martin Esslin explains as
…one of the strengths of Shakespeare. His plays provide a kind of multi-focal viewpoint.
You can look at the play as it was written. You can treat it as a historical document. You
38
can consider what it means to you as an expression of continuing human emotions and
you can look at it as a myth which lives through its ability to be modified. (Elsom, 26)
The world of Bre{an’s play is not a simple podium where different ideologies, the Marxist or
powerful one, and the Catholic one which has lost all political power, clash as Feldman proposes.
The large scale social processes, including an ensemble of relevant cultural practices and fine
understanding of history are set up in Bre{an’s Hamlet. Accordingly, the author’s vision is not a
black and white opposition between good and evil or between moral and immoral, but a complex
interaction between confusing social, economic, cultural and political signs.
The third “performance” consists of fragments of [kunca’s monologues read from the
book he uses for preparing the performance of Shakespeare’s play as a cultural project in Mrdu{a
Donja. The book [kunca uses is Milan Bogdanovi}’s translation of Hamlet, probably the only one
available although not the best one. These fragments, as critics agree, are the only explicit
intertextual components in Bre{an’s Hamlet.
At the end of the second act [kunca remains alone on stage. He is deeply troubled at his
agreement to take responsibility for the performance of Mrdu{a’s Hamlet as people from Mrdu{a
and Bukara proposed. In one of Hamlet’s monologue from the “original” text [kunca recognizes
his own weakness and incapacity to confront the crowd and Bukara. [kunca reads parts of
Hamlet’s long soliloquy with which he can identify. He finds himself “a dull and muddy-mettled
rascal” (Shakespeare, 2.2.544) unable to prove the rightness of his opinion in front of the crowd
whose judgments about Shakespeare to him are “zlo~in prema kulturi” (a crime against culture)
(Bre{an, 56).
The debate between [kunca and Bukara takes place at the first rehearsal, when Bukara as
Claudius finds out that for him Shakespeare’s text is extremely hard and incomprehensible. This
39
is [kunca’s last attempt to convince the villagers and Bukara that Shakespeare’s play is too
difficult for them. As a man of power, Bukara does not hesitate to expose all his illiteracy and
stupidity in explaining Shakespeare’s errors and orders [kunca:
Nema druge, nego ti }e{ ovo morati da popravi{. Ne mo`e to ovako ostati…
…popravi kako bog zapovida, da te vas svit tute u selu razumi (Bre{an,55).
In other words, Bukara says that there is no other solution but to correct this text “as God
demands,” which means that all people in the village will be able to understand it.
Bukara demands the “correction” of Hamlet, which will make the play intelligible for the
villagers. In fact, this new Hamlet has to be identifiable for the Mrdu{a’s audience. [kunca was
absolutely terrified by this proposal, firstly because to him Shakespeare is the supreme authority,
and secondly because this classical play is not suitable for lowbrow culture. All critics agree in
seeing a travesty and blasphemy of Shakespeare’s original Hamlet in [imurina’s interpretation
and in Bukara’s demand for correction, because these two “corrections” or adaptations are in
sharp contrast with the idea of high literature or culture and the Bard’s prominent place in it. One
problem is the question of what blasphemy might mean in Shakespeare’s “case,” but another
problem is how to establish the norm of something that should be called a “proper adaptation” of
the original text. In his very interesting essay, “Alas, poor Shakespeare! I knew him well” Ivo
Kamps warns that:
Every reading of a Shakespeare play, we need to keep reminding ourselves, is already an
appropriation, an interpretation that is limited only by constrains that our academic
40
institutions, journals, and university presses place on it. And the interpretive models we
use are so varied, so inconsistent, so incomplete, and so contradictory, that in and of
themselves they do not drive academic readers of Shakespeare into any compelling
direction when trying to determine the meaning of the play. (C. Desmet, R. Sawyer, 23)
Accepting such a meaning, it is possible to argue that also [kunca’s reading of Hamlet’s
monologue is exactly this kind of interpretative model limited by academic, cultural and personal
constraints. On the one hand, his cultural background has turned him into a kind of keeper of the
supreme value of art, which has to be kept away from the routine of ordinary life and preserved in
original texts, while on the other he himself unconsciously does the exact opposite. He adapts
Hamlet’s monologue and makes it applicable to his own personal situation. [kunca does not
“correct” what he believes is the original text, but he cuts the text when that text cannot explain
his own feelings or present situation.
…Sad sam sam.
O, rda sam I nitkov kukavan!
……………
…….budalast, gadan mlitavac,
Ja kunjam tu ko neki drijemalo
I ne hajem za svoju stvar I ne znam
Da kazem nista…………..
Ta zar sam ja kukavelj?
41
He starts with the first two lines of monologue from the second act, scene two (527-528) because
he identifies his loneliness with Hamlet’s (“Now I am alone./ Oh what a rogue and peasant slave
am I!”) and then skips twenty famous lines about the meaning of acting and transmutations of
actors. Then, he continues again with the monologue from line 544 (“A dull and muddy-mettled
rascal, peak…”) until 550, skipping the lines he is unable to put in the desired context (“- no, not
for a king, /Upon whose property and most dear life / A damn’d defeat was made.”).10 The way
[kunca modifies Shakespeare’s text might be seen as more proper than [imurina’s interpretation
or Bukara’s demand, but in essence the same process is at stake. The point is that all these
interpretations use Hamlet to express individual perspectives and attitudes towards the world
around them; in a word they are trying to find a coherent analogous life within the offered
material. What becomes explicit here is that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is used to mean something
else and what this play means or does not mean is not very important. The fact that Shakespeare’s
work always again undermines the values of established canons of literary work makes him so
exciting. Consequently, it is predictable that with all cultural, social and other changes, future
interpretations of Shakespeare will be extremely odd and set up in unimaginable contexts. In
Bre{an’s Hamlet, this unimaginable context is Mrdu{a Donja, where Shakespeare’s play might
be only deformed and misrepresented. But, the question is to whom Mrdu{a’s adaptation is
wrong. The deformation is seen from the perspective of [kunca who knows the play beforehand
and has his own different and already formed idea about it. Built up on prior knowledge, [kunca’s
inherited and obviously traditional view of Hamlet may also be a deformation. The intellectual
response to Shakespeare as an eclectic paradigm already shifts because the exclusion and
transcendence it implies is hardly acceptable and obsolete. The literary value might not be
interpreted as fixed and exclusively attributed to the literary work itself, but also to the unlimited
possibilities of its transmissions. It seems that in Bre{an’s comprehension of Shakespeare, pure
42
reproduction is not even possible, and the value of classical art lies in its openness to be
constantly involved in cultural, social or political relations and its abilities to participate in the
perpetual process of meaning making. Therefore, [kunca’s shortened version of Hamlet’s
monologue, seen from the purist’s perspective, is also a kind of distortion of the “original” text,
but as long as such a version is not blasphemy it is not seen as deformation and for that reason
accepted as a proper one. The versions of those who have never seen or known anything about
the play before, and have thus without prejudices assimilated it to their own historical, social,
political and cultural milieu, are scarcely discerned as refreshing ideas but consistently seen as a
travesty and blasphemy.
The fourth “performance” is [kunca’s adaptation of Hamlet to the level of the inhabitants
of Mrdu{a. He decides to play a game with the stupidity of the villagers, and by a way of revenge
makes a burlesque version of Shakespeare’s play. In the structure of Bre{an’s play this version
corresponds to The Mousetrap and in Feldman’s interpretation it is called a socialistic version.
But, before getting into the peculiarities of this performance of Hamlet, it is necessary to point
out that Bukara’s demand and [kunca’s realization are not the same thing. Bukara demands
communication between the play and its audience, while [kunca, who has been offended by him
in many ways, uses this demand as an opportunity to avenge himself. Bukara asks for a version
similar to [imurina’s, but his rudeness and stupidity, protected and covered by his powerful
position, and his naïve as well as ignorant arguments result in a conflict with [kunca, not in a
dialogue. That is why [kunca’s anger is turned on Bukara and not on [imurina. Bukara’s simple
demand to adapt Shakespeare’s play into something understandable to the audience of Mrdu{a
Donja, in the course of the conflict with [kunca gets a dirty political dimension. Ma~ak, who gets
involved in this conflict on Bukara’s side, presents a model of thinking in which political
correctness merges with a belief that taking up socialistic discourse is a sign of intelligence.
43
Ma~ak, who later on plays Laertes, points out that Hamlet as a prince or monarch such as the
former Yugoslav monarch king Petar does not fit in the context. Hamlet, as a positive character
has to belong to the working class. Undoubtedly, Bukara agrees with the idea of king Petar as the
enemy of the working class, but strangely enough his first comment on Hamlet is not about his
aristocratic heritage, but about his state of mind. Bukara thinks that “comrade Amlet” does not
see things well. Bre{an again uses the same concept in making Bukara’s character. Bukara’s
conclusion is a complement to his demand that [kunca has to correct Hamlet “as God demands,”
and it is to be understandable and therefore nicer to everybody around. These original suggestions
lack a political dimension. This innocence is lost when firstly he is confronted with the tasks of
his political position, and secondly, when as a party leader he does not admit anything from
highbrow culture to be unsuitable for him personally or for the working class of Mrdu{a Donja.
Bukara’s personal arrogance, the way he uses his political power, his disgusting moral and ethical
attitudes are dominant features in shaping his character, but for his first naïve reception of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, these aspects are not particularly important. In the situation of Mrdu{a
Donja, where the audience has to converge as participants of a mysterious game known as
theatre, Bukara’s voice is a pragmatic explanation of this arrangement. In any other sense he is a
human and political monster, but in refusing loyalty to Shakespeare, Bukara is an ordinary and
uneducated man, who unconsciously asks for a larger degree of cultural participation.
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VII
[kunca Discovers the Possibilities of Shakespeare
Giving up his role as Hamlet, [kunca takes up the unacceptable role into which he is
forced and becomes the director of the performance of Hamlet, which will be staged at the end of
The Performance of Hamlet in Mrdu{a Donja. [kunca’s adaptation of Hamlet functions as the
play within the play and it is the counterpart of The Mousetrap scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
In the selection of roles [kunca tries to find a parallel between the characters from Mrdu{a’s
“reality” and “fictional” characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The scenes from fiction, that is
[kunca’s adaptation, alternate with scenes from the frame actions, the reality of Mrdu{a Donja.
The real life of Mrdu{a and the scenes of the rehearsals mirror each other. The division between
the two worlds, the world of the theatre and the real world of Mrdu{a, is constantly subject to
change, because the final performance of Hamlet will take place only at the end of Bre{an’s play.
The dynamic exchange between scenes of illusion and reality, where the participants of [kunca’s
theatrical world are at the same time participants in the frame actions, gives an impression of
authentic reduplication considering the relationships and the characters. Therefore, Feldman
concludes that each character acts what in reality she or he is. As a result, she explains that
Bukara acts Claudius and in reality he is Claudius, Ma~ak acts Laertes and in reality he is
Laertes, An|a acts Ophelia and in reality she is Ophelia. In fact, according to Feldman, the
morality of the characters is unmasked in analogy to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the ideological
aspects are unveiled in analogy to [kunca’s mousetrap. Finally, it appears that Bre{an takes over
Shakespearean themes and dramaturgical devices as a mythological situation which is
independent of historical or political changes and as such is discernible in human actions. As an
argument, Feldman notes Bre{an’s vision of human history as a constant repetition of
archetypical situations where unchangeable truths and the destiny of human creatures are
45
inscribed for all time. Thus, the transformations of Shakespeare’s play serve to set up the conflict
between mythological and actual in a grotesque way, where the actual makes an effort to negate
the mythical. But, eternal values encapsulated in the mythological come out as morally superior
and unquestionable. As long as we assume that Bre{an tries to determine the real meaning of
Shakespeare’s play, Feldman’s statements might be interesting, but if Bre{an’s play is perceived
as
a kind of intersection or confluence which is continually traversed, a no-man land, an
arena, in which different and opposed readings, urged from different and opposed
political positions, compete in history for ideological power: the power, that is, to
determine cultural meaning, to say what the world is and should be like (Hawkes,
Meaning by Shakespeare, 8)
Feldman’s interpretation seems to miss the point.
The examination of the flexibility and adaptability of Shakespeare’s play is one obvious
aspect of Bre{an’s play which is personal as well as political. It seems that Bre{an’s play
becomes involved in a perpetual dialogue with unfamiliar and unknown possibilities in a search
to gain access to Shakespeare’s text from a new perspective. [kunca’s perspective is just one, but
that one has been most frequently interpreted.
Yuill asserts that “Bre{an’s greatest stroke of genius is his conversion of Shakespeare’s
tragedy into a combination of the traditional Yugoslav ballad with a crudely simplified Marxist
ideology” (541). Being aware of the difficulties which Bukara and others have with reading
Bogdanovi}’s translation of Hamlet, [kunca decides to turn long lines full of complicated
inversions into decasyllabic lines with familiar vocabulary. The melody of decasyllabic lines is
familiar to these people and it is reminiscent of the national folk poetry. Considering the context,
46
[kunca finds the most appropriate solution to be to combine the political and cultural misery of
Mrdu{a Donja in his interpretation of Hamlet’s story. For him, such a version is the great
opportunity to avenge himself by mocking, while for the villagers this adaptation is the
possibility to “read” Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Having already prepared Hamlet’s famous
monologue “To be or not to be” for rehearsal [kunca explains his version:
Sad nailazi Amlet I govori svoj ~uveni monolog: Biti il’ ne biti……. E, tu mi vidite,
morate ipak odati priznanje. Ja sam tu izbacio onu staru [ekspirovsku subjektivisti!ku
dilemu. To : Biti il’ ne biti, to je ovdje, znate, vi{e jedna onako tipi!no nasa, balkanska,
hajdu!ka alternativa, u duhu nase svijetle tradicije : Ili }u ga ja njemu ili }e ga on meni…..
Razumijete ? Ne ? Svejedno! (Bre{an, 69)
And now Hamlet comes on and speaks his famous monologue: To be or not to
be……Now, I reckon you’ve got to hand it to me. I’ve chucked out all that old
Shakespearean junk, typical bourgeois kind of subjective dilemma, you know. And what
I’ve done is, I’ve put in a kind of Balkan alternative, sort of cops and robbers version, if
you like, in keeping with our own great traditions. It begins, “Shall I screw him, or he
screw me…..” Get it? No? Well, never mind, forget it! (Yuill, 541)11
[kunca’s explanation is very interesting for two reasons. One reason is that he does not
mention any political aspect of his version, and another thing is that he gets to enjoy his job of
rewriting Shakespeare. He makes a Balkan version where subjective dilemmas are regarded as
minor problems, too soft and contemplative for the harsh reality. The socialistic reality is
excluded from the Balkan tradition in this particular comment by [kunca. The phrase “typical
47
bourgeois kind” considering “subjective dilemma” was added by Yuill in his free translation, and
does not appear in Bre{an’s text. On the other hand, although he constantly sarcastically makes a
mockery of the whole situation, [kunca gives the impression of someone who discovers the
endless possibilities of Shakespeare’s text and enjoys playing with them. Therefore, when he
claims the villagers’ respect for his version of Hamlet’s monologue, “Now, I reckon you’ve got
to hand it to me,” the sincere irony in his words also covers the fear arising from his inappropriate
way of dealing with the authoritative text, and it is mixed with the discovery of options which
fascinate him. If Desmet’s statement that:
Something happens when Shakespeare is appropriated, and both the subject (author) and
object (Shakespeare) are changed in the process(4)
is to be trusted, it might be illustrated with [kunca’s work on the adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. What his actors including the political masters do not understand is his intellectual
problem with destroying the classical text, but what he offers to them fits perfectly.
[kunca’s Balkan version of Hamlet’s famous monologue is played as a duet. It is read out in
rehearsal by [koko, who acts Hamlet but is not very enthusiastic, and by [kunca who himself is
very fond of doing it.
48
Their duet goes like this:
Yuill gives the following free translation of these lines:
Ili jesam ili ti ga nisam
To hell with this ‘To be or not to be’!
Niti znadem ko sam niti di sam,
The question is, will I screw him, or he screw me?
Il }u biti ili ti ga ne}u
‘Tis better to persist and yet to fail
Il }u pasti u nevolju ve}u.
Than let that bastard Claudius prevail.
Aoj, kralju, pljunem ti u lice, Za{to
I spit upon the king that dares to spite
gazi{ narodne pravice ?
And trample underfoot the people’s right!
Odi amo boga li ti tvoga,
Come on, my friend, and show what you can do:
Pa da vidi{, brajko, ko }e koga.
I’ve wiped my arse with better men than you!
Kad te moja kujica propara,
My blade will slit your throat from ear to ear
Ne}e tebi tribati likara.
And finish off your dastardly career!
Ne}e{ na{eg u`ivati truda,
No more you’ll suck our blood! Revenge is sweet:
Neg }es isti od labuda muda…
We’ll cast you down and give you dirt to eat! (Yuill,
(Bre{an, 69-70)
541)
Yuill’s translation is not at all precise and some lines are simply invented. Therefore, the comical
effect of Bre{an’s lines given in folk phrases and the simplified general idea of justice are
misrepresented. Bre{an’s lines are not so rude as in this translation. At this point it might be
interesting to compare two interpretations regarding the manner in which Shakespeare’s Hamlet
is adapted as in [kunca’s mousetrap. One is of the critic who reads it in her native language,
Feldman, the other one is by Yuill, a British critic to whom Bre{an’s language is certainly very
complicated. Yuill asserts that :
An English audience might regard this as blasphemous travesty of Shakespeare, but this
is not Bre{an’s intention. The ‘Balkan version’ is more than a joke, it is a profound and
bitter truth about a nation too concerned with survival to worry about existence. (541)
49
Although Yuill does not further explain this statement or give arguments, the fact that he does not
see this adaptation of Shakespeare’s text as blasphemy is significant. On the other hand, Feldman
points out that [kunca’s transformation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a socialistic parody mingled
with Balkan simple-mindedness is a disrespectful blasphemy. This critic argues that [kunca’s
adaptation indicates Bre{an’s attitude towards unsuitable uses of a classical work and that the
author presents his own attempt as impossible, in vain and unfitting. It appears that [kunca’s
adaptation and Shakespeare’s Hamlet constantly fight. Thus, lowbrow culture with its common
and obscure perception of the world is set over elevated values represented in Shakespeare as a
bearer of highbrow cultural standards. Feldman concludes that in spite of this “radical
(‘desacralization’) blasphemy,” which she sees as Bre{an’s conscious giving up of Shakespeare’s
text for the sake of realistic presentation of the Balkan spirit and socialistic context, the author
nevertheless gave priority to the original text over any possible appropriation. What is more, this
critic believes that “the source text emerges at the end of this orgy of destruction as universal”
(326), ready to proclaim its meanings and general truths to the future.
The main limitation of Feldman’s interpretation is her ignorance of the fact that what gets
represented in Bre{an’s Hamlet is not Shakespeare’s play, but the historical, cultural, ideological
and political reality of Mrdu{a Donja which enters the play. The “original” and universal Hamlet
is an illusion and Bre{an is very aware of the notion put forward by Baudrillard:
Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is the
impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no
longer possible. (Markus, 9)
50
In other words, as Hawkes argues “all texts have something in common with The Mousetrap.
That is, they always ‘take a part’ in a historical milieu, whenever and however they are realized,
either initially or subsequently. As a result, no final context-free meaning or ‘truth’ can, should,
or need to be assigned to them.” Bre{an definitely takes a part, but certainly does not choose
sides. In the interview from 1985, Bre{an said that people go to the theatre to recognize the
surrounding world and themselves in it and therefore the real theatre is the popular theater. That
is, the theatre where intellectuals as well as illiterate people might identify with something
(Bobinac,190).
Enthusiastically involved in his role, [kunca continues with his adaptation. An|a and
[koko’s relationship is a complement to Hamlet and Ophelia’s, and [kunca puts the expression of
their unfortunate love in verses which they sing in duet:
An|a: Oh, Amlet dear, my heart for you doth
pine,
Please tell me once again that you’ll be
mine!
[koko: Omelija, my tender, snow-white lamb,
Tis hard to say how fond of you I am!
An|a: Oh, Amlet mine, for ever staunch and
true,
No words can tell how fond I am of you!
[koko: Omelija, my fairy-tale princess,
I cannot live without you, I confess!
An|a: Oh, Amlet dear, my fairest scarlet rose,
Without you life is nothing, Heaven
knows!
[koko: Omelija, my darling, you must flee;
They mean to take my love away from
me!
An|a: Oh, Amlet dear, my primrose wet with
dew,
No power on earth can wrest my heart
from you! (Yuill, 542)
An|a: Oj Amlete, moja rano ljuta,
Ja te volim po tisu}u puta.
[koko: Omelija, janje moje bilo,
Ti si meni i drago i milo.
An|a: Oj Amlete, moja mu{ka snago,
Ti si meni I milo I drago.
[koko Omelijo ti si kao bajka,
Bez tebeka jadna li mi majka.
An|a: Oj Amlete, cvite moj rumeni,
Bez tebeka te{ko li je meni.
[koko: Omelijo, bi`i od tuteka,
Tebe o}e mrazit od meneka.
An|a: Oj Amlete, moje rosno cvije}e,
Sad
nas
nitko
rastaviti
ne}e.
(Bre{an,71)
51
VIII
A Balkan Version of the Dark Side of Life
In his own poetical and romantic version of the dialogue between two lovers [kunca deep
down enjoys himself. The interruptions of Bukara and his followers makes [kunca nervous and
ironic and he goes back to the prior conclusion that all this circus is so far from Shakespeare that
he as a director cannot take responsibility. The role of director is then taken over by Bukara and
Puljo, beginning with the scene before the romantic dialogue between An|a and [koko. They
dislike [kunca’s decision to have An|a sitting and reading a book before [koko enters the scene.
Puljo thinks that a book is something unnatural in An|a’s hands because she is a local, folk girl
and not “a noble goblin with glasses” (Bre{an, 69). [kunca ironically agrees saying that reading a
book definitely belongs to that backward, original version, but he could not find a good
alternative. Of course, Bukara’s option is regarded as the best one; An|a has to spin wool as is
normal for girls from Mrdu{a. [kunca agrees but immediately stops further conversation, asking
the actors to continue with his own verses. These verses are a combination of traditional phrases
from folk ballads and common daily speech. The description of An|a and [koko’s love is moving
and pure in comparison with the malicious and dirty world around them. But expressions of love
such as “my tender, snow-white lamb” or “my fairest scarlet rose” do not exist in An|a and
[koko’s world. Apart from being pleased by his romantic poem, [kunca seems to be completely
involved in his own adaptation and dislikes being interrupted with questions and suggestions.
Although all the time refusing the idea of seriously being involved in Mrdu{a’s Hamlet, [kunca
gradually does take a part in making meaning “by Shakespeare.” In the next scene, [kunca,
already very nervous and impatient to get to the point, takes over [koko’s role and continues :
52
Omelijo, golubice bila,
Omelija, my show-white dove, my dear,
Pamet mi se jadnom pomutila,
My reason’s gone, my mind’s unhinged, I fear,
Jerbo nema dobrog }a}e moga,
Since my dear dad, in law your future father too,
}a}e moga, a svekara tvoga,
Untimely bade this earthly life adieu!
The noble spirit, father, too soon fled,
Ti si, }a}o, pravi junak bija,
That oft people’s fight for freedom led!
Za slobodu narod pridvodija.
The workers now have cause to rue the day
Otkad tebe tute nema vi{e,
Their rightful king and leader passed away.
Narodu se crnja knjiga pi{e
[kunca becomes enraptured by the capacity of his popular and odd version of The Mousetrap to
reveal all injustice and corruption he is otherwise unable to speak of. It seems that in such
moments all powerful prejudices about the misuse and distortions of Shakespeare’s work are
forgotten. All [kunca wants is to continue with his adaptation and therefore he forces An|a to
pronounce her part :
Oj Amlete, svetoga ti duva,
My Heaven Amlet, make your reason sound!
Ko je njega pod zemlju otpuva?
Who was it put your father under ground?
53
An|a’s question anticipates further happenings and gives [kunca an opportunity to end the
following speech by Hamlet with insulting accusations. Ecstatically, he recites:
Kralj je njega ljuto privarija,
The King it was, with blackest, dire deceit,
U slipo ga oko udarija,
That struck him down and then usurped his seat,
Jerbo kralj je kurvinskoga roda,
Ignoble offspring of a whore to boot,
Neprijatelj radnoga naroda.
Who treads the working classes underfoot!
Aoj kralju, masna ti je brada,
Abandon, upstart rogue, thy vain pretence!
^upat }e je udarna brigada.
We’ll pluck thy greasy beard and send thee hence!
Ne}e{ dugo narodnoga isti,
Guzicom }e{ ti u dra~u sisti
The people’s grain is not for tyrant’s needs;
Let base exploiters root among the weeds! *
Then, leaning on the chair as an exhausted, tired man [kunca steps out of his role and quietly adds
already knowing that these last lines are inadequate for a Balkan version:
Omelijo, bi`i kod fratara
Omelija, a nunnery’s fate:
I ostani uvik cura stara!
For ever keep intact thy maiden state!
The nunnery is not an appropriate place for a socialist girl, and Bukara immediately reacts. He
explains that in Mrdusa’s Hamlet anything related to religion is not only inappropriate but also
outdated. Reading a book and going to the nunnery are images which belong to some other
world, not Anda’s and Mrdusa’s.
Listening to [kunca’s monologue, which is in fact [kunca’s rather than Hamlet’s, [koko
full of fear leaves the stage. Immediately afterwards, [kunca agrees with Bukara’s wish to change
the last two lines but not at the moment, excuses himself and goes off stage. Although
54
experiencing transformations of a different kind, both of them, [kunca and [koko, are again
pushed back into the reality of Mrdu{a Donja.
A couple of weeks later, rehearsals proceed and [kunca explains that the next passage they
have to act is a famous scene known as The Mousetrap. He informs the villagers that in
Shakespeare’s conservative version this scene is used to catch the king’s conscience, but because
that kind of conscience does not exist in a modern society like Mrdu{a he turns it into
demonstration of the working class against the dictatorial monarchist regime. In the mean time,
the City Theatre has sent Renaissance costumes to support Mrdu{a’s attempt to perform Hamlet,
which surprises but also confuses the already puzzled [kunca.
This play within the play immediately becomes a mousetrap for Bukara. Finding himself
very comfortable in the role of domineering king, Bukara takes over [kunca’s position as
supervisor and starts to coordinate the play. At such moments, when Bukara corrects [kunca’s
direction, [kunca is at a loss. On the one hand, he is satisfied with his achievement, in this case
with a mousetrap in which he does not “catch Bukara’s conscience, for he has none, but traps him
into revealing his true nature” (Yuill,543). On the other hand, [kunca, who is all the time
uncertain what he is doing with Shakespeare but can very much enjoy his own literary work,
becomes terrified, bitter and ironic, finding all that circus a ridiculous blasphemy. In the mean
time, Bukara really enjoys playing his role of an authoritarian monarch, and shouts:
See me, by Christ’s mercy, if by chance monarchy comes back one day, I’ll be king.
Bukara and his followers as exploiters of the working class use a lot of drink and food on the
stage to show the class difference between themselves and the poor working class whose
representative is Amlet. The performance gradually turns into a folk festivity, now in
55
Renaissance costumes but with Balkan habits of drinking, eating and dancing the traditional kolo.
The villagers-actors and [kunca also, are amused with their roles of destroyers of the monarchy,
and they enthusiastically shout paroles:
Down with the king and his followers! We don’t want monarchy in Denmark!
Long live the republic of the Danish workers led by Amlet!
This festivity of lasciviousness and debauchery is interrupted when news is brought in that
[koko’s father has commited suicide in jail. The news about the suicide of his father drives {koko
completely crazy. He threatens Ma~ak with a knife and forces him to admit that Bukara has
ordered him to burn that incriminating book which might serve as the evidence of [koko’s
father’s innocence. The silence among the people becomes morbid. For a moment, the silence
seems to be very dangerous for Bukara, but just like he without hesitation took over [kunca’s
position and became the organizer of the play, in the same way he has no shame to control
reality. Concluding that [koko is understandably mad and that he needs help, not condemnation,
Bukara orders the villagers to forget the whole incident. He becomes king of both reality and
fiction and he controls the festivity. The villagers are led by [imurina, who has finished with his
role as the commentator of the play and who takes up the role of the festivity leader. In a lovely
and amusing song which follows the rhythm of kolo, [imurina expresses his delight over the
lavishness of life in Mrdu{a Donja.
56
^a{e, pijati, `lice, botiljuni,
Glasses and platters and bottles and dishes,
pe~eno meso i dobri bokuni,
Roast beef and puddings and all kind of fishes,
pohano pile I but od janca,
Tasty fried chicken and mutton in slices,
tele}a noga I bubrig od prasca,
Succulent pork and fresh kidneys with spices:
papr{njak, kapula, frigana jetra,
Pepper and parsley and garlic to savour,
vino iz konobe svetoga Petra,
Washed down with wine of full-bodied flavour,
slanina, kobasa I srce na `aru,
Bacon and sausages, hearts on a skewer:
donesi kuma{ine, rakiju staru,
Old vintage brandy tastes better than newer!
pr{ut, kapula i pa{ki sir,
Smoked ham and garlic and cheeses galore!
neka se znade da nam je pir
Come out and join us, oh, come by the score!
The luxury of their life consists in having enough good food, drink and fun. Bukara, with a loud
“Op, op, op, op, o`e`I, opali, posko~i…..”speeds up the kolo rhythm even more, as well as
[imurina’s song enumerating the village’s material blessings. The dance gradually becomes very
loud because of the tramping round and round. The peasants only briefly interrupt [imurina and
Bukara’s song. This kolo, which Yuill wrongly interprets as mindless, is mainly silent; the most
important sound the peasants produce is the sound of their feet. If they sing, it is very short:
U`ivajmo, bra}o draga
Enjoy yourselves as best you can
Neka i|e sve do vraga…
And let the blasted world go hand!
This traditional dance, kolo, as Bre{an has presented it in his play, it is a kind of ritual with a
cathartic, purging effect. The song they sing while dancing the kolo is in sharp contrast with the
image of the dance and the terrifying sound it produces. The peasants are wordless, scared and
caught in Bukara’s net and this dance frees them from negative energy. The kolo is a mode of
communication which subverts words. Bre{an’s always praised gift to masterfully explore
57
language culminates at the end of the play when the author sets up a “dialogue” between the
words pronounced by [imurina or Bukara and the dark sound of the peasants’ steps.
The kolo goes dizzily on, following the rhythm of [imurina’s endless song in which the
full extent of his corruption is brazenly revealed:
Tre{eta, bri{kula, kupa I {pada,
Jokers are better than aces, remember !
~lanska knji`ica, divica mlada,
Buxom young maidens for each Party member,
upravni odbor, postelja meka,
Seats on the council on management beckon,
`ena nek u ku}I sidi I ~eka,
Wives are to stop in the kitchen, we reckon,
prkno udovice I visoka pla}a,
Widows with buttocks are savings invested.
zaprdi I nai se dobrih kola~a,
Let out a fart if your guts are congested,
uguli, operi, privrni, opali,
Disguise your embezzlement, dissemble and bully,
u mekano sidi, cigaru zapali,
Select a cigar and live your life fully.
masna brada i radni sta`,
Greasy chops and a pension deal:
ozbiljne stvari sve su la`!…..
Forget the rest, it’s not for real!
Bukara takes up the song and gives more force to this already mad dance:
Hop, hop, hop, hop! Quicker, quicker, quicker!
Op,op,op, op, br`e, br`e, br`e, katrige, referati,
Chairman’s reports and meetings and minutes
Sastanci, spisi, kobasice, ugovori,izvje{taj, di si,
Sausages, contracts, papers and fillets
Lokarde, traktori, {ljivovica, te~e, volovi, konji,
Mackerel, tractors and brandy from plums
Ovce, sme}e, zadruga, zadruga, zadruga, zadruga,
Oxen and horses, rubbish and slums
vrti se,
Unity, unity, unity, unity
Kri}i se, ~u~ni, digni se, op, op, op, op……….
Turn about, shout it out, squat on your haunches
Then leap to your feet
Hop, hop,hop, hop….
All this delirium ends when the lights are unexpectedly put out. The play ends with [kunca’s
desperate request which comes out of the darkness:
Light!…Put on the light!…..Light!
Svjetlo……..Upalite
svjetlo……..Svjetlo….
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IX
Conclusion
In conclusion, in Yugoslavian communist society of the 70s, Bre{an’s play Predstava
Hamleta was often seen and interpreted as a deliberate political attempt of the author to show his
disrespect for Communists and their achievements in the society. This view, however, rests on
the assumption that an ideological dimension is the center of a literary work. The political
discourse gained a dominant position in numerous critical approaches offering in fact a kind of
unified interpretative vision. The authority of the central realm of a literary text constantly shaped
the majority of critical works. The idea that focusing on one dimension of the text as dominant, in
Bre{an’s play the political dimension, might give insight into a complex text like Bre{an’s, is a
traditional interpretative illusion, which we encounter when a writer from an East-European
country appropriates Shakespeare’s play. Therefore, the more fragmentary interpretations,
without pretensions of discovering the whole essence and the definitive meaning of Bre{an’s
play, those which look at the “margins” of the text, promise at least a wide range of perspectives
and consequently might unveil more half-hidden levels of his Hamlet. Moreover, what is the
periphery and what is the center of a literary work has recently shifted and thus, the attempt to
locate a permanent value by considering one aspect of a literary work as dominant, ends in
misrepresentation. The political dimension is surely relevant in Bre{an’s play, but in the analysis
of the relation between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Bre{an’s Hamlet it seems to be more
interesting to examine cultural and social transactions through which other meanings are
incorporated in Mrdu{a’s Hamlet.
As I have argued, Bre{an’s dramatic idiom was an innovative feature mainly because it
shows a turn from the theatre obsessed with form and intellectual themes to the popular theatre.
In Predstava Hamleta, Bre{an questions the concept of the theatre as a social institution. Two
59
images have been clearly examined; the first one is to what extent theatre manifests collective
experiences, and the second is how much theatre depends upon the audience seen as a mass.
These notions logically introduced the concept of the author and the importance of his presence
in the drama text. Considering the authority of Shakespeare, or even authority in general, Bre{an
tests the viability of these preconceptions which belong to the solid core of the cultural heritage.
Among Yugoslav intellectuals, the cultural phenomenon of Shakespeare appears to be a bastion
against the traditional idea of the backwardness of the Balkan and against communist doctrine.
However, the idea of a context-free literary work where the author sublimates the stable and
unchangeable truths of the world has been seriously challenged and subverted. In fact, Bre{an
exposes the idea that the reading and adapting or appropriating of Shakespeare inevitably gets an
obviously ideological role. Mrdu{a’s teacher [kunca represents the ideological position of
intellectuals concerning art, where their political orientation is of limited importance. Presenting
to us four “performances” within his Mrdu{a’s Hamlet, Bre{an probes the flexibility of
Shakespeare’s text, offering different “readings,” understandings and interpretations of Hamlet.
Gradually, the view of Shakespeare’s theatre as offering the ultimate truth confronted with the
different forms of expression and cultural pressures, first leads to doubt, and finally ends up in
uncertainty. What in the beginning of the play for [kunca seems to be impossible and absolutely
inappropriate turns into Predstava Hamleta, which in spite of all negative attributes pleases its
audience so much.
Bre{an’s biggest achievement is his awareness that the major limitation of Shakespearean
criticism lies in its devotion to bardolatry, intellectual exclusiveness, and the concept of
everlasting truths and values. In his Hamlet, which is deeply indebted to Shakespeare’s classical
play and to Yugoslav reality of that time, Bre{an intentionally does not seek for sameness, but
suggests that a human being is not a permanent and unchangeable entity. Consequently, he
60
focuses his attention on the fact that the appropriation of Shakespeare involves a process of
making meaning as a cultural practice. The cultural changes have led to new critical approaches
to Shakespeare’s work, and Bre{an in his play explores these achievements to challenge the
stability of the unified text. No one “version” of Hamlet is the original one, but there is, for
traditional criticism, definitely one that is the most accepted one. And that version exists only in
[kunca’s head, it is the only one never performed. Bre{an has questioned the distance between
the adaptation which is treated as blasphemy and another one regarded as proper and close to the
true text. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so compelling and therefore so frequently interpreted and
adapted all over the world because of its indeterminacy. Being up to date with this, Bre{an does
not search for evenly matched meanings or images that characters bear, but he tries to distort
these preexisting notions projecting his Hamlet into the alien world of Stalinist Mrdu{a Donja. In
this way Predstava Hamleta within its own cultural and historical setting becomes a treasury of
signs, collective beliefs, and experiences inscribed in socialist culture. Therefore, in Bre{an’s
play An|a is only An|a, never as some critics point out Ophelia, not only because An|a cannot
read but only spin wool, but moreover because the culture to which Ophelia belongs has long
been dead. There are no general truths, they might be only Anda’s and Ophelia’s truth. In his
Hamlet, Bre{an presents the fact that different cultures, comprising ideological, political, and
historical dimensions, generate different meanings. Strangely enough, for many critics the set of
social relations subsumed in the play is marginal in comparison to the political dimension.
Finally, marginal or not, Bre{an’s ideas about the place of the theatre in society, its possibilities
and functions are an interesting and important part of his play.
After all, Bre{an’s “grotesque tragedy” The Performance of Hamlet in Mrdu{a Donja
continues to communicate with its audience and readers. The levels of communication the play
offers or the different receptions of this play are closely connected with its complexity.
61
Therefore, the political dimension which discredited Bre{an’s play in Communist Yugoslavia is
just one but not the most important one. Future approaches, as it seems now, will surely focus not
on the ontological status of human undertakings, as the plot of this play suggests, but on their
acquiring larger cultural and social significations which are still impenetrable for us. Bre{an’s
dialogue with Shakespeare’s play gives room to any number of signs, and Hamlet in Mrdu{a
Donja may never stop communicating in the meaning making discourses which circulate in art.
Therefore, the political dimension which discredited Bre{an’s play in Communist Yugoslavia is
just one but not the most important one. Future approaches, as it seems now, will surely focus not
on the ontological status of human undertakings, as the plot of this play suggests, but on their
acquiring larger cultural and social significations which are still impenetrable for us.
62
NOTES
1
My historical survey of Shakespeare in Yugoslavia is based on the following sources:
Miroslav [icel, Povijest novije hrvatske knji`evnosti. Ud`benici Sveu~ilista u Zagrebu, Zagreb:
1979.
Nikola Batu{i}, “Skriveno kazali{te”, Teatrologijska biblioteka, Zagreb: 1984.
Ivo Bre{an, “Osnovna na~ela moga kazali{nog sustava”, Republika, Godi{te LII, Zagreb: 1996
2
Aleksandar I Karadjordjevi}, king of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1921–29)
and of Yugoslavia (1929–34), who struggled to create a united state out of his politically and
ethnically divided collection of nations. See http://search.eb.com/
3
Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an independent international Communist
organization founded in March 1919 by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trozki and the Russian
Communist Party (Bolshewik). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/comintern/
4
A ~etnik is a member of a Serbian nationalist guerrilla force that formed during World War II
apparently to resist the German invaders but they collaborated with the Germans and fought
against the Partisans under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. They were under the command of
Colonel Dragoljub (Dra`a) Mihajlovi}. In March 1946 Mihajlovi} was captured and brought to
Belgrade, where he was tried and executed. See http://search.eb.com/
5
An ustaša is a member of the fascist movement that nominally ruled the Independent State of
Croatia during World War II. Dedicated to achieving Croatian independence from Yugoslavia,
the ustaše modeled themselves on the Italian Fascists and founded terrorist training centers in
Italy and Hungary. To make their state more purely Croatian, the ustaše set about exterminating
its Serb, Jewish, and Gypsy inhabitants with a brutality that shocked even the Germans and
occasionally obliged the Italians to intervene. See http://search.eb.com/
6
Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) agency of international communism founded
under Soviet auspices in 1947 and dissolved by Soviet initiative in 1956. The most vehement
supporters of the Cominform were the Yugoslav communists under the leadership of Tito;
therefore, Belgrade was selected as the seat of the organization. Mounting tension, however,
between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union led ultimately to the expulsion of Tito's party from the
Cominform in June 1948, and the seat of the bureau was moved to Bucharest, Romania. On April
17, 1956, as part of a Soviet program of reconciliation with Yugoslavia, the Soviets disbanded
the Cominform. See http://search.eb.com/
7
See John Elsom, Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? (London: Routledge, 1989),16-21.
8
See, Lada Feldman-^ale, Bre{anov teatar. Teatrologijska biblioteka, knjiga 29, Hrvatsko
dru{tvo kazali{nih kriti~ara i teatrologa, Zagreb: 1989. Although there are no direct citations
from Feldman’s book, her ideas about Bre{an’s play are paraphrased and discussed in my
article.
9
Bogdan Bogdanovi} is a famous architect from Belgrade, now in exile in Austria.
10
These lines are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed by S. Greenblatt et al, (New York:W.W.
Norton & Company, 1997), page 1703.
11
Yuill notes that this translation is designed for stage performance, not really an exact
translation, but he hopes that it still conveys the spirit of the original. All translations in my
article are from W.E Yuill, “The ‘Grotesque Tragedies’ of Ivo Bre{an,” Slavonic and East
European Review 61:4(Oct 1983), and have to be considered as very free poetical translations.
63