Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance Volume 9 Article 3 December 2012 Polish "Macbeth" and the Middle East Crisis Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams British and Commonwealth Studies Department, University of Lodz, Poland Follow this and additional works at: https://digijournals.uni.lodz.pl/multishake Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kwapisz Williams, Katarzyna (2012) "Polish "Macbeth" and the Middle East Crisis," Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance: Vol. 9 , Article 3. DOI: 10.2478/v10224-011-0013-6 Available at: https://digijournals.uni.lodz.pl/multishake/vol9/iss24/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Humanities Journals at University of Lodz Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance by an authorized editor of University of Lodz Research Online. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 26 Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 9 (24), 2012 DOI: 10.2478/v10224-011-0013-6 Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams ∗ Polish Macbeth and the Middle East Crisis Shakespeare was staged for the first time in Polish by Wojciech Bogusławski in 1798. It was Hamlet which Bogusławski decided to introduce to the Polish audience, and which became an indispensable element of war for independence, while its hero became a “Polish Prince”, a representative of the Polish nation.1 In the Polish context, shaped by wars, over two centuries of captivity and struggle for independence, Hamlet was usually followed by Macbeth as they both proved to be very potent vehicles for social and political commentary.