Adapting Otherness and Togetherness / prof. Jacek Fabiszak

Kamilla Elliott, in her study Theorizing Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) treats adaptation as open, heterogenous and necessarily varied. It is highly liminal, inclusive and far from fixed. I have used this approach to talk about selected adaptations of Shakespeare’s works – stage and screen ones and address the issue of otherness and togetherness, of the openness of Shakespeare’s text(s) to a plethora of transmutations (or, adaptations), each an autonomous work on its own. Adaptation: a process and product, fluid and transcending, becomes a forum whereby Shakespeare’s works are deployed to account for novel phenomena, to give voice to the other and the marginalised, to be not only ‘for all time’ but also ‘for all’. In the workshop we first have analysed two productions which helped us delve deeper into the questions of otherness and togetherness, albeit approached very differently, yet deriving the differences from the same sourced (adapted) text. The participants were asked to think of similar contrasting pairs of adaptations of Shakespeare’s works and look at them from a similar Baroque aesthetics.