Content area
Full Text
The Gender of Rosalind Jan Kott Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. pp. x+88. $26.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.
The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theatre and Death Jan Kott Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. pp. x+153. $34.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Jan Kott's two recent collections of essays share some commonalities, but overall they represent two entirely different experiences. The Gender of Rosalind, a slender text, consists of three major essays that are not especially enhanced by being assembled in a single volume. The title essay offers a stimulating history of permutations on the representation of Rosalind and concludes that each era will manifest its own sense of the character's gender. An essay focusing on Measure for Measure is an engaging intellectual exercise that also aspires to shed light on staging the play. The exploration reinforces how profoundly static the play is; it would require a collaboration of unimaginable genius to theatricalize Measure for Measure and also reveal the insights put forth in Kott's essay. A final essay on Julius Caesar and Danton's Death ends with a personal coda, a touching lament on being in history in the late twentieth century.
The more transparent incorporation of autobiography in The Memory of the Body, makes it a far more compelling collection. Subtitled Essays on Theatre and Death, the best of 18 entries have a clarity, terseness, and resonance one associates with people writing reflectively on the range and meaning of their careers. Kott's notoriously dark view of the world is tempered by his discovering in his theatrical associations a...