Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin

and LLL

est destinée au dépôt

never had such an extensive, global power than they have today, at a time when they circulate quicker and at a wider scale than they ever have. In the all virtual digital world, the power of words has never been so real, and words definitely act. When referring to abusive words that are exchanged on the web, commentators and politicians refer to these words as acts, giving J. L. Austin's famous theory on 'how to do things with words' [START_REF] Austin | How to Do Things with Words[END_REF] all its relevance. In Shakespeare's days, the world was smaller; words' wings did not carry them as fast and far as they do today, but Shakespeare's world was obsessed with the insulting impact of words too. It is from this LOL league scandal that the idea of this paper emerged as it appeared to me that it could be read in relation to Love's Labour's Lost and that the mechanisms that are at work in this LOL scandal could illuminate LLL. This paper will start by focusing on the performance of the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, which can be seen as an episode of collective mockery. Then it will argue that LLL is a kind of "Facebook", that is a book or a play that reveals a preoccupation with one's face. And finally, it will briefly suggest that the end of the play shows a way out of crisis, by refusing a bad use of laughter and promoting a good use of it.

The reign of "mockery merriment"

In Shakespeare's plays, crises are often triggered off and nourished by words, and especially by insults. By insults, we mean words that can be delivered and/or received as insults. When studying insults, one should always have in mind Évelyne Larguèche's illuminating concept of effet injure [START_REF] Larguèche | L'effet Injure[END_REF]. She shows that words are not insulting per se but become insults if they are received as such and have an insulting effect. The first aspect that is striking in the parallel of LOL and LLL is that the two worlds cultivate what the princess calls "mockery merriment" (5.2.139). 2 From the beginning of the play two characters are designated as the boy's club's butts: Armado and Costard. In the austere "Academe" that they imagine, "Costard the swain" and Armado "shall be [their] sport" which will make their three years of abstinence and study seem "short" (1.1.177-178). In the "mortif[ying]" (1.1.28) life that they are planning to have, some "quick recreation" will be granted (1.1.159). Using people as a source of collective sport: here is what the four men agree on at the beginning of the play. Armado will provide "interim" to the men's "studies" (1.1.169); he will be "used" for the king's "minstrelsy" (1.1.174). This is what the LOL league was based on: collective mockery that newspapers defined as moral harassment, to serve their personal plans and ambitions and disqualify the other as being out of place. The two characters, Armado and Costard, both coming from a lower social class, become "laughing stocks to other men's humours", to quote Sir Hugh Evans in

The Merry Wives of . 3 Longaville is identified from the start by the Princess as "some merry mocking lord" (2.1.52) in a sequence that relates wit to mocking and describes it as a blot to virtue:

The only soil of his fair virtue's gloss, […] Is a sharp wit matched with too blunt a will, Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills It should none spare that come within his power. (2. 1.47-51).

Dumaine is known for his wit (2.1.59), Berowne for his "mirth-moving jest[s]" (2.1.71). Wit is thus presented as both sharp and seductive. The princess then speculates on this link between mockery and wit through the aphorism "good wits will be jangling" (2. 1.221) and by referring to a "civil war of wits" (2. 1.222). If the battle of wits in LLL is balanced between the men and women, the characters rendering "mock for mock" (5.2.140), things are not balanced between the nobility and the lower status characters who ironically embody the Nine Worthies in the play within the play. As expressed by the princess, mocking is a matter of power. And this is what very strikingly appears in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies. What the lords do to and with the amateur actors at the end of the play can be compared to public bashing, collective humiliation, which Holofernes describes as such when he declares: "This is not generous, not gentle, not humble" (5.2.614) in a sequence that can be very moving on stage. Contrary to the exchanges that the princess defines as "a set of wit well played" (5.2.29), the exchanges between the audience and the actors show how what is supposed to be mere jesting may hurt. Boyet, called by Berowne "old mocker" (5.2.540), is part of the chorus of railing and mocking that the Pageant triggers off. The mocking effect is formulated by the unworthy Worthies. Costard leaves the stage by commenting on his performance: "'Tis not so much worth, but I hope I was perfect. I made a little fault in 'Great'" (5.2.549-550), a comment that reveals how the audience have destabilized the character-actor. The Princess notes that Nathaniel, playing the part of the conquering Alexander, is "dismayed" (5.2.557), while Costard becoming part of the audience describes him as "soon dashed" (5.2.569) and "a little o'erparted" (5.2.571). Nathaniel's dismay may come from the unsettling intervention of the audience who comment on his inappropriate nose. Dumaine uses the pun on Judas and ass to "shame" (5.2.588) Holofernes. The constant interruptions of the spectacle lead Armado to ask Longaville to "rein [his] tongue" (5.2.541) and the princess to "bestow on [him] the sense of hearing" (5.2.646-647) in a passage where Armado asks for the lord's indulgence: "beat not the bones of the buried. When he breathed, he was a man" (5.2.644-645). The "quick recreation" announced at the beginning of the play takes on all its meaning when Costard and Armado's strife about Jaquenetta emerges on stage, Costard "infamonis[ing]" Armado "among the potentates" by mentioning Jaquenetta "that is quick by him" (5.2.659-61). The transportation of elements of privacy onto the stage creates a moment of unease which only Marcadé's arrival will stop. Beyond Pompey and Hector, it is Costard and Armado who become the butts of collective scorn. The merriment that Marcadé is interrupting is a cruel, mockery "merriment" (5.2.692), a shaming moment when characters lose face.

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ LLL as a face book LLL is the play in which there are the most numerous occurrences (26) of the word "face". What happens on social networks when you are a target of collective public abuse is that you lose (your) face. In his book Impoliteness. Using Language to Cause Offence, Jonathan Culpeper draws a link between face and offense in a chapter that shows that "Notions such as reputation, prestige and self-esteem, all involve an element of face". He notes that "In English, the term is perhaps most commonly used in the idiom 'losing face', meaning that one's public image suffers from damage, often resulting in emotional reactions, such as embarrassment." (Culpeper: 24). For Culpeper, losing face means that one's public image suffers from damage and this creates an emotional reaction of embarrassment (Culpeper: 24). "The point is that how you feel about your 'self' is dependent on how others assume about you" (Culpeper: 25). Face meets fame, "fame" which is the second word of LLL in a passage that refers to their "brazen tombs" (1.1.2), which may mean "shameless" tombs. Yet, as Ewan Fernie has noted in his book Shame in Shakespeare, the lords feel shame in the play, especially when they are exposed to one another's eye in what Fernie calls the "shaming sequence" in 4.3. 4 Shakespeare dramatizes their "Sweet fellowship in shame" (4.3.41) in an eavesdropping scene that is based on "hiding and exposure" (Fernie: 228).

Fernie notes that the word "shame" may be deriving from pre-Teutonic "skem", a variant of "kem", which means "cover". Hence the insistence on the motif of the faceless face, the visors that the lords wear when they approach the ladies as Muscovites, which can be a "sign of shame" (Fernie: 90). After this episode, the princess predicts that the four "woodcocks" will "hang themselves tonight", "Or ever but in vizards show their faces" (5.2.270-271). It is in this context that the final Pageant must be read. It is as if the lords were compensating for the shame they have felt by inflicting shame to the actors on stage. Having themselves become "shame-proof" (5.2.507), having themselves lost face, they are happy to find external targets for their mockery. This clearly appears in the following exchange:

King: Berowne, they will shame us. Let them not approach.

Berowne: We are shame-proof, my lord; and 'tis some policy To have one show worse than the king's and his company. (5.2.506-508).

The text regularly insists on the motif of the face, from the very beginning of the play when Jaquenetta expresses her skepticism to Armado who claims he will tell her "wonders" by http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ exclaiming: "With that face?" (1.2.113-114), to Boyet's referring to Navarre's "face's own margin" (2.1.242) which is like a book that betrays his love, to the shaming sequence when the King notes how his fellowmen "did blush" (4.3.130). It is in the final sequences of act 5 that the face is most emphasized, precisely because the characters lose face, one after the other. First the Muscovites are unmasked, which leads to the women's mockery expressed in Berowne's words:

Can any face of brass hold longer out?

Here stand I, lady; dart thy skill at me. Bruise me with scorn, confound me with a flout, Thrust thy sharp wit quite through my ignorance, Cut me to pieces with thy keen conceit, (5.2.395-399).

The battle with the ladies leaves the men, especially Berowne, "out of countenance quite" (5.2.272). According to Boyet, the Lords will never "digest this harsh indignity" (5.2.289), they are "lame with blows" (5.2.292), an expression that clearly shows the effect of mockery and points to what Judith Butler calls "linguistic vulnerability" in Excitable Speech.

A Politics of the Performative (1997). As Boyet says:

The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen As is the razor's edge invisible,

[…] Their conceits have wings Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things. (5.2.256-261) The Lords are "dry-beaten with pure scoff" (5.2.263). Thus mockery leads to losing face and losing the fame Navarre was aiming at in the opening lines of the play. After these two shaming sequences, the eavesdropping scene and the Muscovites' scene, the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, with its defects, is an easy target for the lords to restore their self-image. The actors' distress is expressed in terms of faces too, especially in the following exchange between Holofernes and the Lords: Face and offense are here tightly connected and we attend Holofernes's ironic loss of face as he is given too many faces. Mocking has the power to outface, that is to destroy the face, the name, the fame of the character. And outfacing the character means silencing him, as he then disappears after having just delivered a few words, like Moth who declares a little earlier that the ladies "Do not mark [him], and that brings [him] out" (5.2.173). A lot of faces get lost in Love's Labour's Lost. Even Armado who is said to "make faces" (5.2.626) while playing Hector loses his during a moment of merriment that illustrates the dark side of laughter.

"Stabbed with laughter"

While attending the fiasco of the episode of the Muscovites, Boyet exclaims: "O, I am stabbed with laughter!" (5.2.80). Here he expresses the mocker's point of view who is dying of laughter.

But the mocker's words here may ironically point to the damaging power laughter can have on the other. The end of the story theorizes on the good and the bad side of laughter and delineates a kind of ethics of laughter.

In her book Shakespeare and Laughter. A Cultural History, Indira Ghose includes a section on laughter in LLL, in a chapter entitled "Courtliness and Laughter" (Ghose: 15-51).

She rightly notes that "the characters are not only mocked by exposing their linguistic extravagance. They are further deflated by means of the formalized, stylized structure of the plot. Every scene with the courtiers is mirrored by parallel scenes with the subplot characters." (Ghose: 37). She mentions the "harassing" of the Worthies and notes that in 5.2 "The hostility between members of the elite is now deflected to scapegoat figures from the lower ranks of http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ society" (Ghose: 41), a phenomenon that seems to perfectly reflect what can happen nowadays on social networks. In this play, she notes, it is the ladies who have "the upper hand" (Ghose: 41). The battle is not as balanced as the mathematical distribution of parts seems to suggest.

Thus it is not fortuitous that it should be the women who at the end write new rules for the men.

And these new rules are based on a good usage of laughter which should generate "pleasure and not aggression" (Ghose: 43).

The end of the play tells us that laughter should no longer be "an instrument to exclude outsiders through mockery" (Ghose: 47). The Princess gives the men and our contemporaries a lesson in laughter, formulating what Indira Ghose has termed, in another essay, an "ethics of laughter" [START_REF] Ghose | Shakespeare and Laughter. A Cultural History[END_REF]. Mocking is identified at the end of the play as a mortifying speech act while it should be restorative and re-creative. In her article on "Shakespeare and the Ethics of Laughter", Indira Ghose notes that there is a "darker side to laughter" (Ghose 2014: 56) and that "in the Renaissance, laughter continued to be equated with mockery" (Ghose 2014: 65).

She quotes a passage from the Traité du Ris (Treatise on Laughter) by Laurent [START_REF] Joubert | Traité du ris, contenant son essance, ses causes, et mervelheus effais[END_REF] which, she notes, "recycles Aristotle's definition of the ridiculous". Joubert writes that "What we see that is ugly, deformed, improper, indecent, unfitting and indecorous excites laughter in us, provided we are not moved to compassion" (Joubert 1980: 20 apud Ghose 2014: 65), 5 emphasizing the gap or tension between laughter and compassion. Ghose distinguishes benevolent from malevolent laughter, noting that Shak "repeatedly calls the practice of humiliation through laughter into question" (Ghose 2014: 65-66).

Rosaline at the end of Love's Labour's Lost puts into question the practice of jesting.

If the Nine Worthies, and especially Costard and Armado have been the Lords' sport, the Lords' love has also been a sport for the ladies, as appears when the Princess says they "met (their) loves/ In their own fashion, like a merriment" (5.2.758). Rosaline wants to come back to a benevolent use of jesting: The end of the play tells us that laughter or mirth making 6 should no longer be "an instrument to exclude outsiders through mockery" (Ghose: 47). Rosaline at the end of Love's Labour's Lost advocates a benevolent use of jesting, when she asks Berowne to put his sharp wit to the service of "the speechless sick" (5.2.819). In fact, by excluding what Ghose calls "derisive and punitive laughter" (Ghose 2014: 66), she reformulates what Holofernes expressed in simple words: be "generous", "gentle", "humble" (5.2.614).

Making faces, blushing, laughing: you can read crisis in the book of faces. We hope that this quick paper has shown how relevant LLL is to understand a culture of LOL. Collective abuse, jesting that turns into insults, the exposure of one's private life, the traumatic experience of offensive words, the malevolent effect of laughter, all these facets that are present in LLL speak to us nowadays. This comedy shows that behind a wonderful façade, behind Navarre, the "wonder of the world" (1.1.11), there is a mortifying use of the tongue which disfigures and

  Holofernes: I will not be put out of countenance.Berowne: Because thou hast no face.Holofernes: What is this? Boyet: A cittern-head. http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Dumaine: The head of a bodkin. Berowne: A death's face in a ring. Longaville: The face of an old Roman coin, scarce seen. Boyet: The pommel of Caesar's falchion. Dumaine: The carved-bone face on a flask. Berowne: Saint George's half-cheek in a brooch. Dumaine: Ay, and in a brooch of lead.Berowne: Ay, and worn in the cap of a tooth-drawer. And now forward, for we have put thee in countenance.Holofernes: You have put me out of countenance. Berowne: False. We have given thee faces.Holofernes: But you have outfaced them all.(5.2.592-608)

  Rosaline: Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Berowne, Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks, Full of comparisons and wounding flouts, Which you on all estates will execute That lie within the mercy of your wit. […] http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ to win me, if you please, […] You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick and still converse With groaning wretches; and your task shall be, With all the fierce endeavor of your wit To enforce the pained impotent to smile. Berowne: To move wild laughter in the throat of death?It cannot be, it is impossible:Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.Rosaline: Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit, Whose influence is begot of that loose grace Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools.A jest's prosperity lies in the earOf him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it. Then, if sickly ears, Deafed with the clamours of their own dear groans, Will hear your idle scorns, continue then, And I will have you and that fault withal; But if they will not, throw away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, Right joyful of your reformation.(5.2.809-837)

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ 2 All references are to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Love's Labour's Lost, ed. William C. Carroll, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2009. 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden, 2000. 4 On shame in Love's Labour's Lost, see also Jane Kingsley-Smith, "Aristotelian Shame and Christian Mortification in Love's Labour's Lost", in Patrick Gray and John D. Cox (ed.), Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 76-97. 5 Laurent Joubert, Traité du Ris, Paris, 1579, p. 16: "Ce que nous voyons de laid, difforme, des-honneste, indessant, mal-seant, & peu convenable, excite an nous le ris, pourveu que nous n'an soyons meus à compassion." 6 On the early modern culture of jesting, see Chris Holcomb, The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England, Columbia, SC, U of South Carolina P, 2001.


Paola Spinozzi

Mrs

teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

LEGAL DOCUMENTS, POEMS, AND PLAYS

It is widely acknowledged that in November 1582 William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway: he was eighteen, she was twenty-six and pregnant with their first child, born six months later. Age difference and pregnancy have been mentioned as evidence that the wedding was planned by her family and forced on him, yet evidence is missing. An entry dated 27 November 1582 in the bishop of Worcester's register records that a license was granted to William Shakespeare for his marriage to Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The key entry, on folio 43v, reads: "Item eodem die similis emanauit licencia inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple grafton" ("Also on the same day a similar licence was issued between William Shakespeare of Stratford and Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton") (Bearman, 2018a).

A marriage bond dated 28 November 1582 states that there was nothing to prevent William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway's marriage from taking place, and the bishop of Worcester, who issued the marriage license, would be safeguarded from any future possible objections.

The marriage bond is an original document and thus likely to be more accurate than the register entry, which is a later copy. Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, relatives of Hathaway from Stratford, signed a financial guarantee of £40 for the wedding (Bearman, 2018b).

In The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story (1909) the Irish writer, journalist and publisher Frank Harris declared that these documents testify to Shakespeare's involvement with two women. He intended to marry Anne Whatley, but when his preference for her became known, he was compelled to marry Anne Hathaway by her family. In the entry on "Whatley, Anne" in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2005) Stanley Wells observes that the name Whatley is regarded as "almost certainly the result of clerical error" (Wells, 2005: 185) by most scholars. The popular assumption that Shakespeare came to dislike his wife should also be considered as widely conjectural.

New Faces essay collection, Paola Spinozzi, August 2019 3 http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ It is well known that Anne Hathaway may be the subject of Sonnet 145. The couplet "'I hate' from hate away she threw, / And saved my life, saying 'not you'" seems to contain strong allusions to her: the pronunciation of the words 'hate away' in the Elizabethan age may point to a pun on 'Hathaway'. Likewise, the final line "And saved my life" would sound indistinguishable from "Anne saved my life".

Those lips that Love's own hand did make Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate'

To me that languish'd for her sake; But when she saw my woeful state Straight in her heart did mercy come, Chiding that tongue that ever sweet Was used in giving gentle doom, And taught it thus anew to greet: 'I hate' she alter'd with an end, That follow'd it as gentle day Doth follow night, who like a fiend From heaven to hell is flown away; 'I hate' from hate away she threw, And saved my life, saying 'not you.' (Shakespeare, 2007: 355) Whether the sonnet was composed by Shakespeare in 1582, when he was eighteen years old, and whether the pun is plausible, as Andrew Gurr has claimed (Gurr, 1971: 221-226), have been largely debated. His interpretation is significant from a metacritical perspective, being an attempt at regarding Anne Hathaway as a woman who was doted on by Shakespeare. Freud, drawing on myth and history. In the sonnet "Anne Hathaway" the passage from Shakespeare's will regarding his "second-best bed" triggers a lyrical narrative in which that bed is conjured up as a memento of their love and cherished as an enchanted place of delight.

Whether Mrs and Mrs

'Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…'

(from Shakespeare's will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas where he would dive for pearls. My lover's words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme to his, now echo, assonance; his touch a verb dancing in the centre of a noun. Some nights I dreamed he'd written me, the bed a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.

In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -I hold him in the casket of my widow's head as he held me upon that next best bed. (Duffy, 2015: 256) The bed is a synecdoche for passionate lovemaking, in which "romance and drama" are ignited by verbal ingenuity and nurtured by the senses, in contrast with the other bed, where http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ guests can entertain themselves with prose, the best one objectively, but not subjectively. The couplet is a hymn to romantic love, where possession circulates between a material and an immaterial object, a tangible piece of furniture, signifying their bond, and her mind, guarding fond memories: "I hold him in the casket of my widow's head / as he held me upon that next best bed".

The newly widowed Anne Hathaway meets her old rival, Mistress Anne Whatley, in Hubert Osborne's The Shakespeare Play: A Drama in Rhythmic Prose (c. 1911) and its sequel

The Good Men Do: An Indecorous Epilogue (1917). Osborne focuses on the lives of the women in Shakespeare's life, his wife Anne Hathaway, their daughters Judith and Susanna, and Mistress Anne Whatley, portrayed as the one he truly loved. The confrontation between Anne Hathaway and Mistress Whatley, two women significantly older than Shakespeare, intersects age and gender issues. In a climactic scene of The Good Men Do Osborne imagines a dialogue in which Whatley vents her frustration by openly accusing Hathaway:

You tricked him into marrying you knowing that he did not love you. You made no home for him who loved the little niceties of life, but made him live in squalor. You drove him from you by your nagging tongue to taverns and low company. Your jealous tantrums made banishment a happy liberty (Osborne, 1917, 52).

Emotional details boost the story and serve artistic purposes: Shakespeare's love life captures the attention of wide audiences and reinforces the idea that his genius shines through personal events which can be faithfully rendered by the adaptor. As Daniel Fischlin observes, "in so doing, the adaptor links his or her own production to the very 'genius' being promulgated in the adaptation, a way of building on the artistic capital guaranteed by association with the Shakespearean legacy" (Fischlin, 2004). http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Edward Bond's Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (1973), influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Epic theatre, explores politics and interpersonal relationships as it portrays Shakespeare, ageing, melancholic, worried about money in his Warwickshire home in 1615 and 1616.

Expanding on the idea of a problematic relationship between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, Bond represents Shakespeare's last days, suggesting that he and his wife had become estranged and showing that their daughter Judith resents his treatment of her mother. Mrs Shakespeare.

Will 's First and Last Love (1989) is a long solo show performed by American actress-writer Yvonne Hudson: separated by dramatic events, Anne and Will have become good friends and she is sympathetic towards his infatuations and possible adulteries. Like Duffy in her sonnet, Hudson attaches a positive symbolic meaning to the bed bequest, the only place where Anne felt she possessed William. Mrs Shakespeare. Will's First and Last Love explores what it means for a woman to look after a house without a husband and delves into the emotional sphere, expressing sympathy for her husband's world as she quotes sonnets and soliloquies. New narrative material in the twenty-first century explores Shakespeare and Hathaway in the very last stages of their existence: Shakespeare's Will (2005) by Canadian playwright Vern Thiessen is a one-woman piece about Anne Hathaway on the day of her husband's funeral. While combining details of her personal life with dramatic twists, the poetic monologue also claims a place as a historical document about women's lives in Elizabethan England.

LITERARY CRITICISM

Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife, 2007

Stereotypes about Anne Hathaway are the core concern of the lengthy Shakespeare's Wife, published by Germaine Greer in 2007. In deconstructing prejudices and received opinions, she constructs her own ideological discourse, one that targets canonical scholars of Shakespeare and exposes their gender bias. She rejects the uncritical plainness of the assumption that Mrs Shakespeare was not able to read, let alone appreciate her husband's work, based on the fact that illiteracy was shared by most women at the time:

Scholars desirous of separating Shakespeare from his pesky wife have taken for granted that all her life she could neither read nor write. They want her, need her to have had no inkling of the magnitude of her husband's achievement.

Of course most of the women in his world had little or no literacy, but the commonness of the condition does not change the fact: it is entirely possible that Shakespeare's wife never read a word that he wrote, that anything he sent her from London had to be read by a neighbour and that anything she wished to tell him -the local gossip, the health of his parents, the mortal illness of their only son -had to be consigned to a messenger.

Greenblatt can see no one to help Ann keep in touch with her husband beyond an Elizabethan version of a courier service. He imagines that any letter of Shakespeare's would have to have been read by a 'neighbour'.

If Shakespeare wrote at all, he would have written as Richard Quiney did, to a kinsman or a close friend, who had the duty of reading the letter to his wife and of penning her response. Abraham Sturley used to sign himself off to Quiney as writing 'at your own table in your own house', with Elizabeth Quiney beside him, virtually dictating what he was to write.

At least one of Shakespeare's brothers was fully literate and should have kept Shakespeare informed of the health of his parents. Ann's brother could read and write, as could her elder daughter Susanna.

Ann did not have to depend on the kindness of strangers or on professional messengers, who did not exist. Early modern letters were not private, but designed to be read aloud, in company. Truly intimate matters were deemed unsuitable for a letter.

Certainly it is possible, even entirely possible, that Ann could not read. It is also possible, given the absolute absence of evidence to the contrary, that she was blind. She may have been illiterate when Greer cannot accept that women's illiteracy should be taken for granted, disparaged, and exposed as a form of social disability. She detects a methodological flaw in Greenblatt's value judgement on the epistolary correspondence between Mr and Mrs Shakespeare.

Greenblatt wrongly assumes that they would be obliged to adopt a plain and neutral register, as she almost certainly could not read and should always require the intervention of someone specially summoned to fulfil that specific task. As a matter of fact, it was perfectly normal to write plain letters that would circulate among family and friends. Relatives would easily read and write for each other, and the social stigma would not be an issue. [START_REF] Wells | The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare[END_REF] As Greer targets and accuses male biographers, Wells targets and accuses her of criticising and even disparaging their biographical work by default, rather than on the basis of solid arguments. The patronising attitude she believes they display when tackling the topic of Shakespeare's wife becomes a fixation:

Shakespeare's Wife is an example of an emerging subspecies of Shakespearean biography. Other examples are James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599[START_REF] Thiessen | Shakespeare's Will[END_REF] and Charles Nicholl's The Lodger (2008). They approach Shakespeare's life story partially or obliquely, and they may be all the more illuminating than cradle-to-grave accounts for doing so. Greer's book opens up new perspectives in offering alternative hypotheses to many of the all-too-easy assumptions about Shakespeare's wife and his relationship to her. Greer is often unnecessarily, stridently, and selfdefensively combative. She ends with a gratuitous insult to those whom she derides as "the Shakespeare wallahs" who "have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women," as if she herself were not a Shakespeare wallah. But this is an important book in the challenges that it poses to received opinion. It will have a permanent and beneficial effect on attempts to tell the story of Shakespeare's life. (ibidem) Wells appreciates Greer's determination to interrogate common knowledge and truisms about Shakespeare and his wife, recognising that there is critical work to do. This battle of the critics reveals that Shakespeare's life and relationships incorporate methodological and ideological negotiations. In the twenty-first century the biography of Mrs Shakespeare becomes the catalyst of metacritical questions about canonical and feminist scholarship. All the reviews point to a bestselling book by a bestselling author whose strength lies in the ability to re/produce the Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, blending truth-likeness, intensity, and sentiment. The fact that the book appears on the list of the Best 10 Summer Beach Reads selected by Woman's Day Magazine, spelled twice without the Saxon genitive, invites two considerations: it is on a list produced by a magazine discussing food and recipes, health and fitness, life, sex and relationships, and it suited for summer holidays. Entertainment is the major feature, highlighted in all reviews, which praise the coexistence of (much) imagination and (some) objectivity: "fictionalized memoir of Shakespeare", "the complex heart of Elizabethan England", "lives into narratives that will entertain and delight", "great knowledge of the way that people acted and spoke back then". All these appreciations share the assumption that, because Harper thoroughly studied the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, she has developed a unique ability to reproduce the atmosphere of London, the language, the cultural habits and emotional turmoil of the people. Hyperbole permeates the last endorsement, in which the author of another historical fiction suggests that Harper has been endowed with the gift of authenticity and with other supernatural powers that allow her to penetrate the life of the woman who was the muse of Shakespeare. I tossed my hand over the water in a commanding arc. "Get thee to a nunnery!" I cried.

Arliss Ryan, The Secret Confessions of

"What?" I whirled around, and there stood Will Shakespeare, chuckling.

"What nunnery?" he demanded, coming closer, pleased at my discomfort.

"No nunnery. It's not important. I-"

"Is there a fish?"

"Where? In the nunnery?"

"No, in the water. You were staring at it as I approached."

"No, there's no fish in the water," I replied.

"But you were fishing, wishing, for something."

"I was only imagining faces." I shrugged, perturbed and hoping to end the conversation. Will's outfit, a blue satin doublet and breeches, seemed a little dandified for a country stroll.

"A strange river that has not fish but faces floating in it," he observed. Hathaway's "struggle to maintain her family; her attempt to keep the love for her selfish husband", the ways in which she "shares, and helps shape, his dream", the "absolutely plausible" story show that ultimately the novel works as a form of normalization and neutralization of femininity and female autonomy. However, within the normative parameters of the genre, Ryan's focus on confessions of authorship may be seen as bold, especially if compared to Harper's preference for pure romance. Indeed, Harper's endorsement of Ryan's novel highlights "controversial", "daring", and even shocking features:

Controversial and clever, daring and detailed, The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare out shocks any modern day tell-all. Anne, the feisty and dynamic narrator, gives us an in-depth view of her own life and of Queen Elizabeth's England. The novel is as sweeping and insightful, tragic and comic as some of the bard's own plays.

-Karen Harper, national bestselling author of Mistress Shakespeare and The Queen's Governess [START_REF] Ryan | The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare[END_REF] Five couples of adjectives -"controversial and clever, daring and detailed", "feisty and dynamic", "sweeping and insightful, tragic and comic" -form a paratactic sequence exhibiting Harper's perception of Ryan's inclination for extremity, mitigated by acceptance and praise. Fictional biographies of Shakespeare's wife must count on their authors' mutual endorsements to enhance public recognition.

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ It might be tempting to classify diverse renditions of Mrs Shakespeare according to the reliability of the sources: historical documentation would be placed on top of the list, scholarly biographies and literary criticism in the middle, fictional representations at the bottom. However, such hierarchical classification would be fragile, because different approaches to life writing, especially if the subject is a woman whose husband happens to be one of the most famous persons in the world, are adopted to pursue different aims. Filling gaps may be a shared aim, but other objectives are pursued, which may vary significantly. Historical truth, accuracy, objectivity, authenticity, conjecture, ambiguity, bias, preconception, projection, fictionalisation are components of a wide spectrum of methods and practices through which a predominantly unknown life comes to be known. How a biographer -scholar or creative writer -would like a life to be known is entwined with how s/he would like that life to be.

Works Cited

Bearman, Robert (2018a), "Entry in the Bishop's register concerning the marriage of William

  Shakespeare experienced romantic love for each other has been a http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ captivating topic. In the collection The World's Wife: Poems (1999) Carol Ann Duffy gives poetic voice to the wives of celebrated men. She evokes Mrs Shakespeare, Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Sisyphus, Queen Kong, Mrs Quasimodo, the Devil's Wife, Frau

  Greer's discourse on Mrs Shakespeare thrives on the deconstruction of what she defines as the biased view of other famous Shakespearean scholars. However, her critique of other critiques is so vehement that it comes across as her major goal, partly overshadowing her biographical study. The forcefulness which fuels her interrogation of other scholars' methods and intentions backfires, instilling the doubt that Mrs Shakespeare may be a pretext. In this sense Stanley Wells' polemical review of Mrs Shakespeare, published on The New York Review of Books in 2008, is hardly unexpected and his reasons for retaliating sound convincing: When I heard that Germaine Greer was embarking on a biography I was skeptical of what seemed likely to be a tenuous enterprise. There are serious gaps in our knowledge of Shakespeare himself, and facts about the woman he married are even harder to come by. Though Greer makes no use in Shakespeare's Wife of the fictions I have mentioned, she is nevertheless much concerned with what she sees as fictions masquerading as truth in what claim to be biographical writings about Shakespeare (or the Bard, as she is all too apt to call him). Ann, she considers, has had an unjustifiably bad press at the hands of (mainly male) biographers such as Anthony Burgess, Anthony Holden, and Stephen Greenblatt, and her book http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ offers characteristically pugnacious challenges to what she sees as received opinion. Drawing on her own research in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on the place of women in Elizabethan society, she makes use of the techniques and skills of a social historian and, to a lesser extent, a genealogist.

New

  Faces essay collection, Paola Spinozzi, 2019 10 http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ NOVELS Mrs Shakespeare attracts creative writers, especially those who draw upon sentimentality and sensationalism to fabricate fictional biographies in which historical facts are peripheral. Karen Harper's Mistress Shakespeare, published in 2009, and Arliss Ryan's The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare, published in 2010, deserve attention as contemporary expressions of popular literature investing in Shakespeare's love interests. Both titles play with mystery and expectations. Mistress Shakespeare alludes to a woman who may or may not be his wife, The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare points to unknown events that have been unveiled. Cover images and reviews offer clues to understanding the genesis and intended audience of both. Karen Harper, Mistress Shakespeare, 2009 For thirty-five years Karen Harper has lived in Columbus, Ohio, and periodically in Naples, Florida; after teaching English at the Ohio State University, in 1984 she started writing novels. Harper is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer of books published in foreign languages and the recipient of the Mary Higgins Clark Award for 2005. She has gained popularity as the author of historical and contemporary fiction blending suspense, mystery and romance. The Maplecreek series, the Home Valley series, the Cold Creek series are formed by 10 suspense novels published between 1996 and 2014, the Queen Elizabeth I series comprises 9 historical mystery novels published between 1999 and 2007, and many other novels are standalone. Her favourite settings are the Amish community in the contemporary age and England in the Tudor period. One of the main reasons for Harper's success as a writer of popular http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ literature is her focus on historical British women, which indicates her ability to satisfy an appetite for stories that are left untold in scholarly books. Cover image of the US edition Cover image of the UK edition The sentimental and sensational component of Mistress Shakespeare is announced in the cover images of both the US and UK edition, the former showing The Soul of the Rose (1910), a famously lavish painting by John William Waterhouse, the latter presenting a young lady in a Tudor costume and introducing the tantalizing question: "Is the dark lady of the sonnets William's secret wife?". Her face is only visible from the nose down; eyes and forehead are cut off from the picture, alluding to the mysterious identity of Shakespeare's beloved mistress. Karen Harper's rich website offers an enticing presentation of the plot, which revolves around the idea that Anne Whateley is real, and Shakespeare truly loved her. Harper indicates two main reasons why this lady must have existed. First, the discrepancy between Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton and Anne Hathaway from Stratford is too strong, which points to the existence of both. Second, the presence of Fulk Sandells and John Richardson is ambiguous: the role of sureties who should take responsibility for the outcome of the wedding sounds weak, instead they may have well exerted a function of control and enforcement: http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/

Mistress

  Shakespeare was selected by Womans [sic] Day Magazine in June 2009 as one of the Best 10 Summer Beach Reads "This intoxicating, fictionalized memoir of Shakespeare in love is a romantic roller coaster rich with vivid details reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet." --Womans [sic] Day magazine "Karen Harper has written a riveting tale of intrigue and passion that plunges the reader straight into the complex heart of Elizabethan England. Rich with details and drama, Mistress Shakespeare is a story Shakespearean fans will love." --Deanna Raybourn, author of SILENT ON THE MOOR "Told in first-person by Anne Whateley, this fictional memoir is a touching perspective of the life of William Shakespeare told by his soul mate and life-long love. Expertly researched and woven with the pageantry of Elizabeth and Jacobean history, this author has given us a rare glimpse of real persons from history, turning their lives into narratives that will entertain and delight the most discriminating readers."--Fresh Fiction, on-line review "[Harper] has a great knowledge of the way that people acted and spoke back then, and her characters never feel overly modern. Maybe Harper was an Elizabethan in a previous life?" --Historical Fiction, on-line review http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ "Everyone knows William Shakespeare -or thinks they do -yet few know the woman who inspired so many of his greatest works. A richly satisfying novel that recreates Elizabethan London at its riotous, unruly best." --Susan Holloway, author of The King's Favourite (ibidem)

  Anne Shakespeare, 2010 Arliss Ryan holds a Phi Beta Kappa B.A. degree in English from the University of Michigan and lives in St. Augustine, Florida. In January 2017 she and her husband moved aboard their http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ 35' sailboat Corroboree and began a circumnavigation of the globe, which she has documented in her blog "The Old Woman and the Sea". The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare is her third novel, published by New American Library and Penguin Books in 2010. The choice of historical fiction allows her to tackle the question of Shakespeare authorship from the perspective of romance. Compared to the US edition of Mistress Shakespeare, the cover image of The Secret Confessions of AnneShakespeare is even more allusive and tantalizing: the virginal beauty of a young lady in a generic Renaissance garb is captured while she is engrossed in writing, oblivious to the outside world. Sheltering and imprisoning her, the window grid also symbolizes her impossibility to come out as an author, while the roses make sure that the aesthetic titillation is felt by the reader.Living as a widow in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1623, Anne Hathaway is lying in bed, quickly deteriorating. While her granddaughter Lizbeth reads aloud from Shakespeare's plays, Anne reveals that he is not the only author. Ryan recounts how Anne Hathaway follows Will to London to support his decision to become an actor. His career as a professional writer develops mainly thanks to the support and active contribution offered by Anne, an author in her own right, whose talent must remain in the shadow. Far from being a country girl who beguils him, she is portrayed as a resourceful woman with extraordinary artistic creativity, sharp intellect, and acute practical sense. It is their secret collaboration that makes Will the most http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ celebrated playwright in Elizabethan England. The relationship between Mrs and Mrs Shakespeare is thus presented in a highly compensatory way: owing to the lack of equal opportunities, she did not become famous, but at least she was able to make the most of her talent by building up a highly successful partnership.While Mistress Shakespeare thrives on romantic speculations about Shakespeare's love life, The Confessions of Anne Shakespeare tests the limits of historical fiction as a genre by combining romance and the question of authorship. Its distinctive feature is the way in which Ryan uses the first-person narrative to envision how Anne Hathaway would deal with gender issues. The result is a post-modern stream of consciousness in which the predicaments of the protagonist sound all too similar to the problems with which contemporary women find themselves constantly confronted:From The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare I admit the thought of a lover, or rather a husband, was on my mind. I would soon be twenty-six, a prime age to wed, and Duck's push had a hint of impatience to it… Yet when my brain played over the likely candidates, my heart remained strangely empty. I did not fancy any of the local bachelors, though one or two had come calling. Even less did I incline toward the widowers and the taking on of their children as my stepmother had done. I knew I did not possess her gifts of patience or nurture. It frightened me to admit I might not make a good mother at all. But whomever I wed, he would expect me to bear him a brood, and the idea of childbirth sent a cold shudder along my spine. My mother had died of it and a dozen more wives I could name. You may call me lily-livered, but I would not have been unhappy to have proven barren.I had reached the secluded place where the brook pools into a large pond, surrounded by reeds and overhung by willows, dragonflies buzzing above the lily pads. Catching my reflection in the dappled water, I pictured beside it the faces of various eligible men and heaved a glum sigh. Too bad that our late fornicating monarch Henry VIII, in breaking with the church of Rome, had dissolved the monasteries and religious houses; if we were still Catholic, I would at least have had the option of http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ becoming a nun. It might have well suited me, for in a company of sisters I could have had a brisk and purposeful life, tending gardens or supervising the kitchen or managing the daily affairs. I could have muttered whatever prayers were required. The more I envisioned it, the greater pity it seemed to have missed out.

"

  That's not what I meant. There probably are fish in the brook, but I was imagining faces because, well, you can see how the play of sunlight and water and the lily pads might suggest…Here, you can see my reflection." He stepped up beside me, and we both gazed into the pond. While he took the opportunity to study my visage in the water, I found myself contemplating his. Not bad. His hair was close to mine in color but gingery where I was amber brown. His face was well shaped and the forehead prominent. His upper lip was somewhat thin, his mouth and chin fringed with the first appearance of down. Not bad, but far too young for me. Still, I kept looking. (Ryan 2019)Ryan's skill in combining macro and micro stories is evident in the fictionalization of the first encounter: Anne ponders on the first manifestations of erotic tension, elaborates on the http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ socio-economic advantages and dangers of marriage, mentions the religious controversies following Henri VIII's Act of Supremacy and explores the prospect, less feasible after the schism, of becoming a nun. Then she exclaims the very famous line from Hamlet, "Get thee to a nunnery!", which many readers will be pleased to recognise. Finally, they see each other and immediately start flirting. These self-reflexive moments of erotic arousal, religious critique and flirtatious banter are historically implausible, each of them sounding fictionally construed and narratively superimposed. Yet their tone is pleasant, and the effect is entertaining.

  What if the record of the marriage bond previous to and in the same 1582 registry (still in existence) between Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton and William Shakespeare indicates that Will loved and wed another woman before he married Anne Hathaway? A later entry links him to "Anne Hathway [sic] of Stratford in the Dioces [sic] of Worchester maiden." The earlier Whateley entry can hardly be a mere slip of the pen, for not only the last names but the women's villages are different. As Germaine Greer

	If you would like to hear the music to a song with the words by Will Shakespeare, one that fits the era
	and theme of MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE, try artist Emilie Autumn -O Mistress Mine -Listen free at
	www.last.fm/music/Emilie+Autumn/_/O+Mistress+Mine (Harper, 2006-2011)
	Harper skilfully arouses the readers' desire for empowerment. She invites them to
	enjoy the novel and develop their own conjectures. In order to do so, she suggests they become

MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE is the real story of Shakespeare in love.

All fiction-and real life-is about 'what if?' says in her recent nonfiction book, SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE (about Anne H.), if the Whateley/Shaxpere marriage bond is a scribal error, it's really an odd one.

Will's marriage to Anne H. was what we would call a "shotgun" wedding, not unusual for the time, but it may well not have been voluntary on his part, for it was enforced by two friends of the bride's family, who put up a goodly sum to produce Will for the ceremony. What if the famous "second best bed" in Shakespeare's will was given to Anne H. because he and Anne W. had the first best bed at their Blackfriars Gatehouse in London -a property he made certain did not go to his wife or daughters in his will.

So -what if Anne Whateley was really the love of his life, the dark lady of his sonnets, his inspiration and muse? What if you read their story, then decide for yourself? (For a look at the Shakespeare/Whateley marriage license (in Latin, with the usual loose Elizabethan spellings) go to http://home.att.net./~mleary/positive.htm. acquainted with authentic documents, providing links which must have worked initially, but have not been updated and are thus no longer available. She also publicizes contemporary fairy http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ pop singer Emilie Autumn, whose genres encompass classical, dark cabaret, electronica, industrial, new age, and folk.

  Codified notions of femininity and individual eccentricity generate a mismatch that resonates through the whole narrative. In spite of the great confession, which has the potential to change history, nothing changes, not only because times were not ripe for the genius of Anne Shakespeare, but because her attitude is traditional and conservative, expressing self-denial, support and subservience. Ryan's perspective is only apparently and superficially feminist. This story is a fantastic view of life in the theatre, and one woman's struggle to maintain her family; her attempt to keep the love for her selfish husband; and, understand the remarkable stories that are piling up inside her own head…. After reading this, you'll not only applaud Anne Shakespeare, but you'll also give Arliss Ryan a standing ovation for a job well done."

	Reviewers stress the boldness of Ryan's imagination, which allows her to access
	Hathaway's private thoughts and public aspirations, desires and predicaments.
	-Feathered Quill Book Reviews
	"An entertaining and admirable novel that offers a surprising reinterpretation of Will Shakespeare's
	wife, Anne Hathaway, who shares, and helps shape, his dream."
	-Sandra Worth, author of The King's Daughter: A Novel of the First Tudor Queen

"http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ "This is a book to savor! The cover screams 'young adult' but looks are deceiving in this case, as it is a very mature, well-written story and absolutely plausible…" -Historical-fiction.com

[START_REF] Ryan | The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare[END_REF]

  Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway", in Shakespeare Documented. An online exhibition documenting Shakespeare in his own time, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/entry-bishops-register-concerningmarriage-william-shakespeare-and-anne-hathaway, accessed 1 August 2019. _ _ (2018b), "The Shakespeare Marriage Bond", in Shakespeare Documented. An online exhibition documenting Shakespeare in his own time, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/shakespearemarriage-bond, accessed 1 August 2019. Bond, Edward (1973), Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death, London -New York, Methuen.Duffy, Ann Carol (1999), The World's Wife:Poems, London, Picador, 1999. _ _ (2015), Collected Poems, London, Picador, 2015. Fischlin, Daniel (2004), "Introduction to The Good Men Do: An Indecorous Epilogue", Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, University of Guelph, http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/a_goodmen.cfm, accessed 2 August 2019.

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Shakespeare met her, and he may have spent the long hours with her as she watched her cows grazing on the common, teaching her to read.(pp. 51-52)

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ West Schiel, Katherine (2018), Imagining Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, Cambridge UP.


Agnieszka Romanowska

Uniwersytet Jagielloński

Krakowie

Crises of Our Time in Song of the Goat Theatre's Island

Introduction

In the programme of Song of the Goat Theatre's Island we read that the performance has been inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest. Indeed, Island is not an adaptation of the play, but an independent theatrical project whose links with the Shakespearean romance are, at the same time, easily traceable and deliberately loose. Rather than offering a modern interpretation of the early modern play, Grzegorz Bral's ensemble uses references to The Tempest to establish a mental and emotional frame for their highly idiosyncratic contemplation on the condition of man in today's world. Their method is, aptly, similar to the trial Prospero devises for his wrongdoers -the tempest as a total experience. It consists in submerging the audience in a syncretic and synesthetic theatrical event which activates several channels of perception and enables a diagnosis and interpretation of our time's crises on many different levels. This immersive quality has been notices by many reviewers, one of them suggestively describing the production as a "sculpture of vibrating air," and a "tempest of breaths and gestures" which sets the whole theatrical space in motion:

Everything around the Island is swaying. We are observing inflows and outflows -after the introduction the dominating energy is that of the polyphonic singing, then our bodies are hit by the wave of the air moved by the dance. Again. And again. [START_REF] Pułka | Wyspa skarbów[END_REF] The visual and musical layer of the performance is irresistible, even hypnotic. What stays in the viewer's memory are the overwhelmingly impressive movements of the dancers, the once dynamic, once frozen images their bodies form with unbelievable acrobatic http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ skilfulness, and the powerful music of the songs. The verbal layer, on the other hand, does not get through easily in such density of non-verbal elements. This is mostly due to Bral's overall approach "characterised by a refusal to compromise with the idea that the text, or the story, is the most important element of performance" (Sakowska, 2014: 48). As a typical representative of what has been described as postdramatic theatre [START_REF] Lehmann | Postdramatic Theatre, trans[END_REF], he is not interested in developing characters or telling plots, but rather in creating for the viewers a sensory experience. Having this in mind, my purpose in this article is, nevertheless, to analyse the production's libretto in order to inspect the nature and function of the Shakespearean inspirations integrated in the performance. The nature of this integration is perhaps best illustrated with reference to Lehmann's definition of the performance text:

The linguistic material and the texture of the staging interact with the theatrical situation, understood comprehensively by the concept 'performance text'. (…) Consequently the significance of all individual elements ultimately depends on the way the whole is viewed, rather than constituting this overall effect as a sum of the individual parts. Hence, for postdramatic theatre it holds true that the written and/or verbal text transferred onto theatre, as well as the 'text' of the staging understood in the widest sense (including the performers, their 'paralinguistic' additions, reductions or deformations of the linguistic material; costumes, lighting, space, peculiar temporality, etc.) are all cast into a new light through a changed conception of the performance text. (…) it becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information. (idem, 85) Before "the linguistic material" of Bral's Island is presented, it is necessary to provide some insight into Song of the Goat Theatre's specificity. which results in performances based on rhythmicality and musicality. Bral's artistic manifesto flows from his conviction that tragedy has its roots in the spirit of music. It is also in line with the postdramatic concept of the auditory semiotics, i.e. the view that "the intrinsic musicality of the text is as important as its dramatic content, and in many cases even more important" (Bouko, 2009: 28). Bral's theatre aims at affecting the viewers' senses holistically which is fostered by the performances' multi-mediality, in Island exemplified by exploration of various forms of stage expression, including dance, opera, pantomime, ethno-performance and elements of shadow theatre [START_REF] Kowalski | Wyspa w Gdańskim Teatrze Szekspirowskim[END_REF]. While Bral repeatedly underlines his striving for connection and openness as the root of authentic theatrical experience, the effect of the synesthetic appeal is well illustrated by the following response to the group's 2012 "Songs of Lear": This is essence of Lear, desiccated and condensed; sensed rather than watched and absorbed until it hasn't just got under your skin, but right into your bone marrow. For the half hour that followed, I was static electricity, too knock-kneed to stand. It is a full-body detox; catharsis pure and simple and transcendent. [START_REF] Trueman | Review: Songs of Lear, Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe[END_REF] Song of the Goat Theatre's daily training goes beyond traditional acting techniques to include physical and musical exercises. They function as a laboratory theatre in the tradition of http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Grotowski, in which the training and the performances are treated integrally as an ongoing creative process, open to discoveries and ready to employ new techniques and means of stage expression. An important part of the actors' work includes anthropological and ethnomusicological research conducted through various multicultural projects, which include travelling and seeking contact with local practitioners and preservers of ancient indigenous traditions that are dying out, as was the case with the hugely successful Scottish project "Return to the Voice" of 2014. Bral explains that his techniques are rooted in an understanding that true acting is born from a particular way of being, with every culture having its own way of performing. His Theatre does not limit itself to including traditional Georgian, Albanian, Russian and Greek texts and tunes. The cultural openness is also visible in its cast, half of which consists of actors from various places of the world, as well as in its cooperation with international, often multicultural, groups and ensembles. In Island the director enriched his stage movement method by including the modern dance ensemble led by Ivan Perez, a Spanish choreographer working in the Netherlands.

Song of the Goat

Linked to the Theatre's methods and interests is their role, since 2005, as organisers of the Brave Festival, an international event which offers an overview of cultures, traditions and rites which are on the verge of extinction. Recognised by its meaningful subtitle, "Against Cultural Exile," this festival brings together people from all over the world who, through their art, save forgotten, abandoned or otherwise neglected cultures. Bral's idea, as initiator and artistic director, was to create a space to show authentic art, cultivated and maintained by participants of communities living in unfavourable social, religious and political conditions, or which are endangered with a loss of their own culture for the benefit of civilizational assimilation. Four years later, the festival developed a branch focused on children, Brave Kids, the special mission of which is to teach children respect for other cultures and inspire them by http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ means of artistic experiences to strive for a better future for themselves and the communities they represent. The festival's most recent extension is Brave Together, which fosters integration of people with and without disabilities, using different artistic tools to help the participants find a common language. The Brave Festival supports underprivileged children and orphans from the poorest regions of the worlds donating the proceeds from tickets to the ROKPA charity organization.

Yet another integral part of Song of the Goat Theatre is pedagogical work, in which they propagate their technique called "Acting Coordination Method". In the years 2004-2012 they created, together with Manchester Metropolitan University, an MA acting programme, which from 2013 has been offered in cooperation with Bral School of Acting in London. Acting Coordination Method is an original practice based on the integration of all the acting tools, including text, voice, energy, movement into one common and organic unity, which enables the actors to explore the flow between song and word, rhythm and gesture, sound and character. 1 For almost a decade now the group's repertoire has included productions in various ways related to Shakespeare's plays. These performances belong to some of their most successful projects, acclaimed and rewarded worldwide. The first was Macbeth, featuring a multinational cast and prepared in cooperation with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010.

Two years later Songs of Lear followed, which was awarded the Scotsman Fringe First, the Herald Archangel, as well as the Musical Theatre Matters Award during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2012. Crazy God inspired by Hamlet was first performed in July 2016, followed by Hamlet. A Commentary, which premiered in July 2017. In the meantime, Island was first performed in December 2016. In all these productions the Theatre typically interweaves text with choral singing, meticulously choreographed movement and live music. The effect is stunning and appreciated by audiences and reviewers. http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/

Everyone is an Island: Analysis of the Libretto

Island offers a multi-layered theatrical mediation on the human condition created from songs, music and tightly orchestrated stage movement. The whole performance consists of fifteen pieces, both with and without lyrics. Most of the texts were written by Alicja Bral, while four texts quote lines from Sophocles' Antigone and Aristophanes' Birds. Such "palimpsestuous intertextuality," frequent in postdramatic theatre (Jürs-Munby, 2006: 8), is a characteristic feature of Bral's other projects as well, but The Tempest -with its fragmentariness and sketchiness 2 -lends itself to such a treatment perhaps more readily than other plays by Shakespeare. The other feature of the play which may have inspired the creators of Island to rewrite it into a series of songs is the importance of music and, more generally, sound. This aspect is highlighted in the music of Ariel's songs -the "sweet air" (1.2.396), 33 the "ditty" that Ferdinand rightly assumes must be "no mortal business, nor no sound / That the earth owes"

(1.2.408-410) -and the "heavenly music" (5.1.52) of Prospero's magic. As Prospero's "isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight (3.2.133-4), so is Bral's "Island." The performance's music, mostly written by Jean-Claude Acquaviva and Maciej Rychły, contains inspirations from traditional Georgian and Greek tunes. As for the language of the songs, Island has been performed in English, with the opening poem, recited as the prologue, in some performances spoken in Polish. The printed version of the libretto, from which I am quoting, is bi-lingual.

The songs' titles mention several characters from The Tempest: Prospero, Ariel, Miranda, the Monster. In the "Introduction" printed in the programme the titular Island is described as the mind of Prospero, a lonely aging man, imprisoned by his own unfulfilled desires, obsessions and longings. He creates all the characters that surround him, and he is all http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ of them at the same time. While the tempest exists only in Prospero's head, his imagination is poetic and magnetic, his narrative illogical, yet suggestive, and his story not easy to follow and describe ("Island…," 10). 4 The "Introduction" suggests that the production focuses on Prospero, but an analysis of the songs reveals that Prospero is not the only, not even the main, persona in the libretto. In the prologue "the identity of the speaking voice is never revealed, so we ponder whether it can be that of Caliban (…), or of Ferdinand (…) or of any one of us, human wrecks who need an encounter with life-preserving magic" (Bottez, 2017). In most of the other texts the speakers are of equally blurred identity. The speaker of the prologue poem, entitled Prospero, seems to be outside the island-prison. I read it as Miranda's relation of her, apparently coincidental, meeting with the magician: "I met him in late autumn" (16). Formally, the text alternates between Miranda's report and Prospero's words as she remembers them, printed in bold type. Neither Prospero nor Miranda are identified until line thirteen, where Prospero introduces himself in direct speech: "I am Prospero, the King. I have Ariel and Caliban at my service. / I know man with his madness and love. Everything is in the Books /and it serves me, Miranda" (16). The opening lines highlight Miranda's wretched state at the moment of the meeting: "I was despaired. / Pain would stick to my soul, like leaves to the wet ground. / I had no idea who I'd become. The world had no reason" (16). While we have much access to Miranda's inner suffering, Prospero presented to us, as she sees him, is an old body without the spirit: "his soul was absent. / An aged man with a body like a cracked pine. / Only eyes -an island amid deep loneliness. / His heart pulsated. / He survived. (…) He would put a magic coat on and sob" (16). The focus is on the physical: the body, the intense look of the eyes, his pulsating heart, the sobbing. Prospero, an old survivor, meets Miranda, a person of yet unshaped, or lost, identity, a shipwreck of her own life, who initially does not see any hope for survival.

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Yet the second part of the song brings a change in Miranda's perception of Prospero.

She remembers his tantalising eyes gazing at her as he was providing his explanation, "Nothing bad happened. Nothing bad. I did it for you, for you. / You don't know who you are yet," uttering his promise, "You shall not die," and formulating his powerful command: "Go beyond.

Go to the other side of things, Miranda. (…) You will wake up there" (17). Once Prospero has revealed his identity and his plan towards Miranda, she describes him as a guardian of hope, "an old druid. /Wizard of the wind tied to his cell" (17), the one who has shown her how to endure. His words sound like a mission when he is commanding her to tear the pine and free Ariel as "[e]veryone must survive" (17). This part of the poem, as I see it, is the core of the prologue because it poses the production's most important question -Is there a hope for survival in the world of global violence and wars? It also explains the islands in "Island." "Each time he met me he revealed a piece of this reality," relates Miranda, "He called them islands" (17). Each of us may be a lonely island on the sea of desperation, but the main instinct is to survive, and the survival may only be spiritual, effectuated by tearing apart the "cracked pine" of the body and letting out Ariel. Such hopeful interpretation of the exposition seems to be strengthened by the ending of the prologue. We learn that Miranda's retrospective report is delivered after Prospero's "good death", that he "died in his cell -happy" (17). May we take this as a foreshadowing of a happy, or at least cathartic, ending of Island?

In the songs that follow we get some insight into the reasons for, and nature of Miranda's initial unhappiness and desperation, although in them Miranda is not the speaker anymore. The songs entitled "Last Breath," "My hands," "Night" and "Silence" differ from the opening poem in their much looser connections with The Tempest. In the prologue the links are explicit: names of the characters, references to the play's plot and to several famous lines. Alicja Bral clearly alludes in it to Shakespeare's text, but never uses it verbatim. Her method is to http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ paraphrase, but echoes of phrases like "There's no harm done" (1.2.15), "a cloven pine"

(1.2.277) or "master of a full poor cell" (1.2.20) are easily recognisable. Thanks to the dialogic form of the first poem and its narrative character we are transported to a quasi-fantastical world governed by the magician-ruler: the "old druid," the "wizard." The other songs' common denominator is that they all bring us back to a reality easily recognised as today's world and that their speakers seem to be modern alter egos of Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban.

In the "Last Breath" there is a first-person description of a body infected with violence and killing that are brought daily by the news: "The shell of my heart crushed / By the breaking news / drowned in the aggression / Which I drink every morning" (21). The "venom of unclear games" poisons the speaker's heart, while he breathes "the air polluted by cruelty" and chokes with the images brought by the media. Such permanent contact with atrocities, from which there is no escape, erases compassion, "My hands don't shake / When I watch killing" ( 21), and has a degrading effect on the senses: "I see nothing / Deaf is my ear" (21). The song closes with an image of the persona standing numb under the sky covered with clouds of the victims' dried eyes, while his last thought is a fearful question about the circumstances of his own death. The horrors of the surrounding reality contaminate life, cause emotional emptiness and make death the more frightening. In "My hands" the diagnosis of the bleak situation is completed by further elements. The speaker finds himself in a vicious circle of commercialised existence, in which the main force is the demand to live faster and faster in pursuit of prosperity. As conscience is constantly "invigilated by commercials," greed is "the most cruel prison / In which the prisoner and the guard are one" (26). In a world thus controlled by the rules of market, in which one is ready to sell "body, speech and heart," the speaker realises that his hands are, paradoxically, empty. This part of the song concludes with the speaker's bitter observation that estimating the price of his life is "the very essence of this blind solitude" ( 26). Yet the rest of the song brings http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ an unexpectedly hopeful turn. As the miserable state of "humanity deprived of tenderness" (26) resembles a bad dream, there is a chance of waking up and opening oneself to a change. The last two stanzas suggest that a way out of the hopeless emptiness might be possible through noticing the other: "I see you there," "We are the same /We breathe together (…) with the same love" (26). So perhaps compassion and tenderness can be recovered and the slavery of the profit-pursuing life can be overcome? This feeble hope is crushed in the song entitled "Silence," which continues the plural form introduced by the final lines of "My hands." The progression from the single persona of "Last Breath" and "My hands" to the collective speaker in "Silence" reflects the fact that the process of degradation and dehumanisation is not limited to individuals, but corrodes whole societies. Of all the songs commented on so far, "Silence" reveals the most frustrated and desperate speaker, while the text contains some of the most graphic images. This is well illustrated by the opening lines, "Gagged with collective madness / False needs / We vomit with anger /And we eat it again" (36), and in the closing sections of the song: "Covered in furs of annihilation / We stuff our empty stomachs with slaughter (…) We are drowning in the swamp of artificial needs" (37). Some of the themes mentioned in the previous texts, like the pursuit of false needs, dependence on advertisement, or readiness to destroy others for the sake of profit, return with a double force. The main social concern, the most disconcerting result of the "collective madness" introduced here, is the corruption of law reflected in the image of criminals "changing paragraphs in order to hide their hands," so that "in the light of the wellconstructed law / Profits [could be] weighted with the life of the victims" (36). The final, most damaging, result is spiritual. The song finishes with a grim conclusion: "Our hearts embedded with pride / Crushed the Spirit into silence" (37). http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Apart from the opening poem, there are two more texts whose titles allude directly to The Tempest. "Monster" and "Ariel's Song" can be interpreted in the immediate context of the songs analysed above, as they extend and complement the themes of imprisonment, dependence, rejection, loneliness, longing and hopelessness which result from violence and/or spiritual estrangement. "They called me a monster / And my heart went silent (…) My rage is turned to whisper / My hopes are ruined" (50), complains the speaker. The addressee of the song "Monster" is a beloved with whom the speaker has been separated, or whom the speaker has lost, and longing for whom worsens the suffering caused by his captivity: "Your absence / Envelops me with the shadow of this prison" (51). The link between the branding inflicted on him by the unidentified enemies, "I can't bear this change they made" (50), and the state of imprisonment is not clear, but the song can be described as a pleading for reunification (with its repetitive requests and imperatives "Would you come back?", "Please take me there," "Hear me love"), which seems to be conditioned on the addressee seeing beyond the speaker's alleged monstrous identity, forced on him and, thus, false. The conflict suggested in this song has as its roots prejudice and/or hatred and as its effect -rejection, separation and loss of freedom. There are certain key words of the libretto that keep repeating in the songs, "Monster" included: ruins, corroded reality, solitude, prison. This song presents a figure of someone silenced by humiliation and suffering, whose "rage is turned to whisper" (50). "Ariel's song" is a complaint which begins with the song's refrain -"I cannot choose to die. / I was given birth and I remain" (41). Ariel seems to be suffering from a different kind of imprisonment, one that consists in being suspended between life and death, perhaps forever.

The endlessness of this state is highlighted with the repetition of the opening phrase in the closing line, as well as once in the middle of the text. Ariel's attitude to his/her creator is ambiguous, as is his/her condition of a creature unfinished, and therefore utterly dependent, http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ with an unripe identity, unable to decide about its fate: "I have not had enough time to create myself outside your / body-I tremble with bliss and fear," "I am a hostage of my unfulfilled dreams of grandeur," "I am falling," "I will not fall" (41). The creature is at the same time frightened, awe-stricken and grateful, while the full dependence on the creator seems to be the only imaginable way to go on living: "There is so much light within you-/ It flows from your skin. / I want to cling to it and survive" (41). There is no way out of the state of being alive: "I remain / To live and breathe, to smell and remember" (41). This Ariel is not longing to hear the releasing command "to the elements / Be free (5.1.317-318) because it would mean annihilation.

The song "Night" stands out as perhaps the most topical and, at the same time, the most explicit, of all the texts written by Alicja Bral. It is also, in many ways, the most central to the director's idea of speaking about the problems of today's world with references to The Tempest. The opening stanza brings an image of a war survivor who has been deprived of everything he cherished and is left clenching a bullet in his fist. War has "shattered all [his] life's bonds" and "chained [his] will to revenge" as he "lost love in a sudden gust of hate" (31).

He sees himself as a figure "collapsed into ashes, unable to rise" (31), left with nothing, but the readiness to kill and/or die. The second stanza extends this catalogue of the war's grim consequences to include exile, loneliness and loss of memory: "The winds of exile scatter my beliefs around this / cage of loneliness. / I try to reach memory, which is dispersed in tears" (31). As a result of the forced displacement, the speaker's integrity has been shattered, with the values and rules that governed his life before having lost their meaning and significance. Being separated from the formative core of his previous existence, i.e. from his past, has a destructive impact. In the subsequent stanza the negative effects of this violent separation and forceful transfer to a place which is a "cage of loneliness" manifest themselves in the speaker's impaired http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ physicality: his heart, "raped, beats without rhythm," and his eyes cannot see as he is crawling "blindly, in search for light" (31). But, most importantly, the disintegrating effect of war and exile is visible in the speaker's mind and psyche. He is disoriented, perceives the surrounding reality as chaotic and irrational, and feels deceived and abandoned by whatever guarding powers he used to believe in: "I beg for logic in this chaos. / You have deceived me, exiled god.

/ We have drowned on the way to the promised land -/ My island does not exist" (31). Thus the song "Night" presents the darkest existential night of a person uprooted and displaced as a result of a military conflict, left at a loss and helpless, desperate and revengeful. The topicality of this song is highlighted in the penultimate line with the shift from the first person singular to the plural form "we," which changes the speaker into a representative of a group that has not been lucky enough to reach the refuge land. This is a Prospero without his island.

Theatre of the Capacious Metaphor

Apart from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Grzegorz Bral mentions another important source that had an inspiring influence on his Island. It is the drama of the shipwrecks presented on Theodore Gericault's 1819 The Raft of the Medusa, the gruesome story of the worst imaginable human behaviour in the situation of desperate fight for survival. The extreme emotions of the survivors maddened by mortal fear and the dead bodies scattered around the raft as depicted by the painter are easily associated both with the uproar on the board of Alonso's sinking vessel and with the desperate situation of today's refugees transported in overloaded boats and dying in coastal waters of the unwelcoming "promised lands." Bral wants his Prospero to be one of such survivors.

And yet the strength of his performance lies in the fact that it is much more than a comment on topical events. 5 Although it is inspired by the migration crisis -the acutest political http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ and social problem of the modern world -its appeal is more universal. This is achieved in two ways. One is that Bral's reading of The Tempest is existential rather than political. Island is not about the desire for power and about revenge, but about loneliness and death and, as such, it has been viewed by reviewers as "a contemporary treatise on man" [START_REF] Szatkowska | Kto zabił Hamleta?[END_REF]. As it "entangles the viewers in a dream about loneliness so desperate that no cleansing storm can be of any help" [START_REF] Matuszewska | Teatr Pieśń Kozła: piękna 'Wyspa[END_REF], its message is rather grim: "as humanity we are still alive, breathing, and until it is so, there is some hope for the world plunged into loneliness, violence, maddening race and consumerism (…) but Island is, more than anything else, a lament" [START_REF] Chojnowski | Wyspa[END_REF]. Maciej Rychły, the co-author of the music, commenting on the use of the old Greek and Georgian tunes, emphasizes the communal aspect of traditional music, its ability to interconnect people in mourning and loss, which is especially valuable in today's culture, when there is a tendency to eliminate sadness and lament from the public space [START_REF] Szatkowska | Kto zabił Hamleta?[END_REF].

The other aspect that enhances the production's universality is Bral's method to reach the spectators' emotional sphere directly through metaphor. Island is contemporary in the very literal sense of the world, "not because of modern setting or costumes, but thanks to the directness of theatrical experience" [START_REF] Pułka | Wyspa skarbów[END_REF], the viewers being physically drawn into the swirl of movement and sound. One of the characteristic features of Brals' aesthetically refined theatre is simplicity of the means of expression. The actors, who wear "unflattering black jeans and turtlenecks, as if in a world of despair no body can be beautiful" (Bottez, 2017), are located in an empty space. Aurally, all is created by their voices. Visually, there are the actors' bodies on the dark floor, their shadows against the white walls, actors animating chairs and mirrors 6 which, activated with the use of lights, create overwhelmingly suggestive images -all of this is based on sparsity of tools. This minimalistic approach is also visible in Bral's libretto, "being http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ not a foundation, but rather a distant background for the dozen or so loosely linked musickinaesthetic impressions" [START_REF] Karow | Pod kreską 1[END_REF], in which the characters are but sketched and their situations hardly signalled by a few phrases. The characters are not engaged in a linear plotline but become frozen in a series of metaphors. "'Island' operates on the abstract plane and impacts directly on the emotional sphere. It is a total experience" (Werpachowska, 2017).

Conclusions

"I see Shakespeare as creator of the basic European myths. We have nothing stronger than this, his plays are the foundation of the most important European universals," says Grzegorz Bral [START_REF] Olasz | Grzegorz Bral: Istotą teatru jest prosty zachwyt dziecka w widzu[END_REF]. Asked whether he wants his theatre to comment on current events, Bral observes that this happens automatically because each theatre operates within a specific context which generates references and associations. But he never forgets that the specific power of theatrical comment is metaphor. Alicja Bral's songs depict a drama of a person trapped in chaos, violence and loss of identity which cause loneliness in the world of wars, migration and consumerism, but the key feature of her libretto is flexibility and openness to a variety of readings. Inspiration is a broad notion, but I consider the vagueness in the title "inspired by The Tempest" to be a very conscious decision that signals the production's decidedly inclusive character. Bral sees his Prospero as an Everyman, while at the same time each of the characters is a Prospero -a refugee on an island of loneliness.

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. ( 2002), Lectures on Shakespeare, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton UP. Bouko, Catherine (2009), "The musicality of postdramatic theatre: Hans-Thies Lehmann's theory of independent auditory semiotics", Gramma 17, pp. 25-35. Bottez, Alina (2017), "Island (Wyspa)", https://playstosee.com/island-wyspa/, accessed 15 February 2019.

  Theatre and their Method http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Established in 1996 by Grzegorz Bral and Anna Zubrzycka, Teatr Pieśń Kozła [Song of the Goat Theatre] is nowadays recognized as one of Europe's most significant training-based theatre ensembles. Its name -alluding to the etymology of the Greek tragōidia, and commemorating the group's first production based on Euripides' The Bacchantes -Pieśń Kozła. Dytyramb of 1997 -indicates their fascination with ancient theatre. A distinctive feature of their practice and training is the integration of movement, voice, song, live music and text,

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ contemporary crises, that of 1940s and of 2010s, respectively. In Auden, Prospero admitting his responsibility for Antonio's treason might be seen as "a suggestion of the failure of liberal humanism to avert Hitler"(Fuller, 1970: 159). There is, however, a formal similarity between Alicja Bral's series of songs and the shape of Auden's poem which is divided into "voices" of particular characters.

http://www.new-faces-erasmusplus.fr/ Werpachowska, Edyta (2017), "Bolesna synestezja", http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/239710.html, accessed 4 February 2019.

1 More about Song of the Goat Theatre methods, workshops, projects and initiatives can be found on their official 3 The Tempest is quoted from The Arden Shakespeare edition by Frank Kermode, reprinted 1992. 4 The numbers is brackets refer to the pages of the Island theatre programme available at http://piesnkozla.pl/en/spektakle#178-island. 5 Which can be related to The Tempest's own capacity for the universal. As Kermode argues, "there is nothing in

The Tempest fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered, and the Bermuda voyage never taken place. The New World stimulated interest in the great and perennial problem of the nature of Nature; but the fact that Shakespeare is at pains to establish his island in the Old World may be taken to indicate his rejection of the merely topical" (idem, xxvi).

6 There is nothing in Bral's performance to suggest any link to Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror." The poem is not referred to by the creators of Island as a source of inspiration or plane of reference. Although the mirrors are central to the stage design, they are never mentioned in the libretto. If one looks for any thematic closeness of these two works, it may perhaps be admitted in the very broad sense of both responding in certain extent to