Szekspirowskie perwersje à la polonaise

Abstract

The motive of female-male disguise, perceived as an element of the theatrical convention, was attributed by some Shakespearian interpreters to hidden gay eroticism accents. This turns towards the persons of the same sex (recognized in general consciousness to be perverse) tended to be severely condemned as a refusal to play the procreative role, threatening the foundations of existence. Meanwhile, according to E. Roudinesco, the phenomenon of the perversion in history assumes features of an act of protest, revealing the symptoms of the crisis of various forms of collective life. Writing about alluring transvestism in Shakespeare’s comedies, J. Kott interpreted this phenomenon as a dream about love which is liberated from the limitations of sex, directed against the enforced social norms. The analysis of the examples of this inter-textual play with the motive of Shakespearian disguise, undertaken in this paper, portrays which type of contents was expressed by means of that literary “perversion” in Polish literature by chosen writers (Słowacki, Witkacy, Różewicz, Głowacki). In the unfinished drama Zawisza the Black by Słowacki (with the pattern of the intrigue parallel in some motives to Twelfth Night, or What You Will ) this motive was used for expressing the revelations of the evolving Spirit who in the end of times will eliminate corporeality (hence, sex) from mystical New Jerusalem - the state of angels. However Witkacy, introducing in Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix hermaphrodite heroine, showing her dual charm as the Shakespearean Rosalinda / Ganymede from As You Like It, bestowed this character with an ability to initiate in the essence of existence. Despite the ironic distance to the ‘knowledge’ acquired thanks to balancing between the male and female aspects of the heroine’s nature, her ‘perversion’, played on the stage, was the expression of the revolt of the perishing individual against the strengths of the history eliminating human subjectivity. In turn, in White Marriage by Różewicz the lack of identification with heroine’s own biological sex took the form of the gender demonstration. Bianka’s striving for liberating herself from the shackles of the cultural role enforced on the woman by man’s domination (similar the Shakespearean Catharine’s revolt in The Taming of the Shrew) also turned against the dictate of the blind and greedy nature (which was revealed with such power in Midsummer Night’s Dream). In the postmodern vision of the world - Roudinesco claims - the notion of perversion lost its value of a designate, and so its contestation power. However, the affirmation of fully ‘transparent’ conception of the social life seems to lead to its pathology and spiritual emptiness. Janusz Głowacki shows it in his derisive ‘postmodern farce’, Fourth Sister, mockingly warning of a progressive devaluation of culture which does not also even save Shakespearian works.