Jan Kott - Later Career

Later Career

Kott travelled to the United States in 1965 on a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, and lectured at Yale and Berkeley. The Polish authorities refused to extend his passport after three years, at which point he decided to defect. He was stripped of his professorship at Warsaw University as a result. A poet, translator, and literary critic, he became one of the more prolific essayists of the Polish school in America. He died in Santa Monica, California after a heart attack in 2001.

As theatrical reviewer, Kott received praise for his readings of the classics, and above all of Shakespeare. In his book, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964), he interpreted Shakespeare in the light of philosophical and existential experiences of the 20th century, augmented with his own life's story. This autobiographical accent became a hallmark of his criticism. Kott sought to juxtapose Shakespeare with Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, but his greatest insight came from the juxtaposition of Shakespeare with his own personal life. He took a similar approach to his reading of Greek tragedy in The Eating of the Gods. Reportedly, Peter Brook's film King Lear and Roman Polanski's Macbeth (both made in 1971) are influenced by Kott's view of Shakespearean high tragedy in relation to the 20th-century "nightmare of history".

Kott wrote many books and articles published in American journals such as The New Republic, Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books. Aside from Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, he also wrote about Japanese theatre, Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski. He translated into Polish and English, works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Denis Diderot, Eugène Ionesco and Molière.