Horrible Imaginings: Jan Kott, the Grotesque, and “Macbeth, Macbeth”

Throughout Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a keyword for the combination of philosophical, aesthetic and modern qualities in Shakespearean drama is “grotesque.” This term is also relevant to other influential studies of early-modern drama, notably Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, as well as Wolfgang Kayser’s psychoanalytic criticism. Yet if this tradition of the Shakespearean grotesque has problematized an idea of the human and of humanist values in literature, can this also be understood in posthuman terms? This paper proposes a reading of Kott’s criticism of the grotesque to suggest where it indicates a potential interrogation of the human and posthuman in Shakespeare, especially at points where the ideas of the grotesque or absurdity indicate other ideas of causation, agency or affect, such as the “grand mechanism” It will then argue for the continuing relevance of Kott’s work by examining a recent work of Shakespearean adaptation as appropriation, the 2016 novel Macbeth, Macbeth by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey which attempts a provocative and transgressive retelling of Macbeth that imagines a ‘sequel’ to the play that emphasises ideas of violence and ethics. The paper argues that this creative intervention should be best understood as a continuation of Kott’s idea of the grotesque in Shakespeare, but from the vantage point of the twenty-first century in which the grotesque can be understood as the modification or even disappearance of the human. Overall, it is intended to show how the reconsideration of the grotesque may elaborate questions of being and subjectivity in our contemporary moment just as Kott’s study reflected his position in the Cold War.