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Aleksander Fredro: Three Plays
The extraordinary career and impressive literary output of the ‘Father’ of Polish comedy, Aleksander Fredro, was the subject of much celebration in Poland in 1993, the bicentenary of his birth. These new translations by Noel Clark of three of Fredro’s best known plays should do much to repair the relative ignorance of his works in this country. Virgins’ Vows – generally regarded as Fredro’s most accomplished comedy – and The Annuity, both reflect the author’s awareness of the disadvantages suffered by young women in a male-dominated society. Revenge is a seemingly innocent social comedy about a property dispute, but the Russian censors of his day were not slow to spot the subversive potential of the play. Noel Clark’s translations of Revenge and Virgins’ Vow’s have been broadcast, to much acclaim, by the BBC World Service
334 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Aleksander Fredro
110 books25 followersAleksander Fredro was a Polish poet, playwright and author active during Polish Romanticism in the period of partitions by neighboring empires. His works, including plays written in octosyllabic verse (Zemsta) and in prose (Damy i Huzary) as well as fables, belong to the canon of Polish literature. Fredro was harshly criticized by some of his contemporaries for light-hearted humor or even alleged immorality (Seweryn Goszczyński, 1835) which led to years of his literary silence. Many of Fredro's dozens of plays were published and popularized only after his death. His best-known works have been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian and Slovak.
Source: wikipedia.com
Source: wikipedia.com
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May 27, 2020Canonical Polish comic plays from the mid-1830s, often taught in schools. Romanticism was still a big deal in Polish literary culture at this time, as seen in these and in national epic Pan Tadeusz (1834). In both cases, it was a knowing, ironic Romanticism that affectionately mocked many of its own tropes, and especially male characters who went over the top with it, as Pushkin had done in Eugene Onegin (1825-33). Writing Pan Tadeusz in exile in Paris, Adam Mickiewicz could be more open about his theme of Polish independence. Fredro lived at this time in Austrian-controlled Galicia, which was more liberal than the Russian and Prussian partitions, but still had to be careful. These plays are largely traditional marriage-plot comedies and don't say much overtly about politics.
I'm not familiar with many plays of this age and, as is probably the case for a lot of Anglophone readers, my knowledge of drama between the Restoration and Oscar Wilde is patchy and vague - and owes more than it should to Blackadder III. Thanks to Czarny Pies, the only other reviewer of this collection so far, for mentioning Beaumarchais, whom I did for French A-level and don't often think about now. Whether because of studying The Marriage of Figaro as if under a microscope, rather than reading it straight through once in translation as I did with this collection - or if they are *actually* different -Fredro's plays, compared with Beaumarchais, feel faster-paced, slighter, and more actually comical. Comical, at least, if you like a certain sort of old-fashioned farcical caper that probably hasn't been in fashion since the 1970s. (I do.)
Unfortunately, this translation (apparently the only one published in English) has no notes. There is plenty of context Fredro doesn't explain to his audience, because it wasn't necessary at the time. It helped that I'd read a little Polish literature already, but there's probably plenty here I missed, or interpreted according to works from other European countries.
Revenge (Zemsta) 4 stars (1833-34) is Fredro's most famous play, and the best of the three in this collection: funniest, easier to understand than The Annuity, and with the most sparkling verse in translation. The Polish original was adapted into into a film by Andrzej Wajda in 2002. If you are in the US you can see it cheaply on Amazon streaming, but not in the UK. There are also a few versions on YouTube, but without English subtitles, so I've only watched the first 5 minutes.
An ageing country squire and his nouveau riche neighbour, a notary, occupy two semi-detached halves of a castle, and have an ongoing feud over a party wall. It is, on a grander and decaying scale, the sort of thing of which later 20th century English sitcoms were made, and gives good set-piece comedy (even while these things do, on another level, trivialise neighbour disputes, which can be a source of overwhelming stress to some people). The squire seems to be a relic of the old Polish baroque culture of Sarmatianism, as was his counterpart in Pan Tadeusz (which was set over twenty years earlier); fond of feasting, drinking and hunting, and being obeyed, these are guys who would get on well with the likes of Squire Western in Tom Jones and Sir Talbot Buxomley from the aforementioned Blackadder III, although the Poles' costumes were more exotic. One of the few political references appears when the Squire mentions that he fought for Polish independence:
Mylady of Bar, I call this blade …
She served me there and, in those days,
At Slonim and Podhajce slew –
Lomazy and Berdyczow, too!
(The Confederacy of Bar was a group of Polish nobles who fought the partition. Some of the others seem to be battles that happened long before the squire could have been born. Like I said, this thing needs notes.)
As you might have already guessed, these two feuding men have young relatives, one boy and one girl, who are inevitably in love, and various schemes ensue with supporting characters. Like heroines in Onegin and Pan Tadeusz, the squire's niece Clara is more assertive than early Romantic ideals of passively beautiful female objects:
An hour past, she was fit to faint –
Now she’s a paragon of force:
Fearless, a creature of resource
Romanticism is represented here most obviously by the buffoon and intermediary Papkin, a fan of French culture and keen to talk of duels and wooing, but apparently something of a pathetic individual himself. I assumed from the text that he was probably in his twenties and meant to be comically weedy-looking - but in the film he was played by Roman Polanski, then nearly 70, an age suggesting a man still fixated on his youth in which he had never been as dashing as he liked to make out, instead scraping by in the service of minor nobles.
The verse, at its best, has a sprightly, playful back and forth that reminded me at times of Gilbert and Sullivan. I have never been a fan of the more flowery type of 19th-century verse, so am glad this takes itself less seriously; here two characters realise they have met before, when one of them was pretending to be someone else:
WACLAW: No real cause –
A student jape – a prank I played–
A pointless, wanton escapade–
Tomfoolery – but not a crime!
WIDOW: You said you loved me, at the time!
WACLAW: (Aside.)
Now I’m in a pretty pickle!
WIDOW: Why ever blush, if you’re that fickle?
I waited! Then, a prey to mania -
I scoured the whole of Lithuania!
Of Prince Rodoslav – not a trace!
It is also rather dirtier than the most famous English literature of the time, more like that of the 18th century in Britain. Says Papkin imagining a young woman making excuses for the noises made by him in her bedroom,
What’s that whispering I hear?
It’s my kitten lapping cream –
Go to sleep now, Mother dear!
Mother mine, it’s the kitty-cat-cat –
The noise in my room – it’s only that
(What *was* Wajda doing with that casting...?)
All ends well for nearly all of the characters after much back and forth and plotting. For everyone except Widow Anna (probably only in her 30s), an interesting and intelligent woman damned as a gold-digger, apparently falling foul of the era's lack of sympathy for the financial bind upper-class women were in, unable to work and with no way of getting more money except to marry well. The problem of these widows' lack of skills, and the trap of destitution it created for those who were without other income, would be addressed 40 years later in Eliza Orzeszkowa's novel Marta.
Virgins' Vows (Sluby Panienskie) 3 stars (1833) A frustrating play for a modern reader who's even a little bit feminist. Also tedious for much of its length, though a series of madcap schemes near the end liven up the action - whilst stressing and manipulating most of the characters. Two young rural gentry women, the headstrong Clara (yes, another Clara - was it a very fashionable name then, or a favourite of Fredro for some other reason?) and her quieter, sweeter friend Aniela (a case of nominative determinism, it's Polish for Angela) have vowed never to marry. A wise decision in those days, many of us would say now, given the lack of rights in marriage and the considerable health risks of sex and childbirth for women. However, Aniela is not quite as sure about her friend's teaching. Perhaps not so surprisingly, because Clara - although her liberal parents have apparently let her read unsuitable books - is uninformed about these real problems, and bases her loathing of men primarily on the notion that all their declarations of love are fake. Though she has also realised that men of her time don't respect women:
"How could we match their standards for a start?
Our feelings and our views, despised from birth –
Since what men thought was all that really mattered
Have always been dismissed as flawed or fettered!"
Such ideas, with negligible life experience to back them up, are liable to be overturned by some young man either pretending effectively and for long enough to be an exception, or who's an exception for a while but becomes less respectful after marriage. A marriage they can't escape from.
Apparently part of what's needed is to change the courting style to suit the girl. Party boy Gustave (always telling his aunt and uncle with apparent sincerity that he will change and sort himself out, and then going on the same as he always did) seems to be genuinely lovelorn about Aniela. He decides that the way to break through her mistrust of men's propensity to really love is … to lie to her - in Hollywood teen romcom style, asking her advice about another girl he says he is in love with… who's really her. The cad manipulates them so much that Clara eventually advises Aniela to break their vow. As mutual relatives are keen for them to marry, nothing stands in Gustave's way once Aniela's convinced. They don't care that he once exclaimed to them, "In town, virgins I shun!" with all the pox that implies.
Meanwhile, Gustave advises ageing Wertherian Romantic-slash-stalker pest Albin, who's been declaiming his love to the exasperated Clara for years, to pretend he's found someone else, so Clara will start to miss him. Unfortunately she does a bit, no doubt because of the slight to her ego and the absence of anyone really worth crushing on in the vicinity. And when Gustave concocts a rumour that Clara is to be married to an old widower, Albin starts to look to her like a palatable alternative. Weddings happen quickly here - as they did in 18th century English novels like Pamela and Tom Jones, written before church reforms later that century - no long engagements to mull over the wisdom of any of this.
Rather than the happy ending on the page, it's too easy to imagine a future in which Aniela declines slowly and horribly from syphilis, missing Clara who died earlier in childbirth after a few years dissatisfied and crowded at home by Albin - and who had realised she was right when she was younger, but for the wrong reasons. (It's an entirely unnecessary sadness that Albin is old - why not at least make him young(ish) and good-looking so Clara gets that? The characters of Albin and Papkin seem to imply there was a type of laughable Romantic older man around in the Polish gentry at this time, who continued to be inspired by West European culture of his youth.)
The Annuity (Dozywocie) [3.5 stars] (1835) is rather abstruse in its plot (doubtless why it was the one of these plays never broadcast on BBC radio), but it's historically interesting. Knowing only kindergarten levels of Polish, and not especially wanting to spend hours plugging pages of search results into Google Translate, I contented myself with making sense of the financial aspect of the play via The Merchant of Venice and a vague understanding of that Victorian scam of taking life insurance out on other people, this being kind of their opposite. What has happened here is that a miser, Watka has obtained the annuity income of a Romantic young rake, Leon Birbanski. It seems it was sold by said rake to pay his debts, and that he now regrets this, accusing the miser of deception - though earlier on in the play it's a little confusing, hard to tell if a crime was committed or not. The lack of explanation perhaps suggests sale of an annuity by a debtor wasn't terribly unusual in 1830s Poland. By the time the play begins, the young man is ill with consumption, and the miser is comically eager for him to survive as long as possible so he, the miser, can keep collecting the cash. It is also not quite clear whether miser is actually on the brink of penury if he loses the annuity, due to other bad investments, or if his talk about this is simply an illustration of the anxiety about money that makes him a miser. Of course, there is also a marriage plot in among all this.
Among the things one finds out is how excited people got about balloon rides - apparently a rare travelling foreign attraction that appeared in cities from time to time. To more conservative members of the older generation, they could seem morally dubious as well as dangerous.
To complete the bingo card of tropes about Romantic about young men, after the miser, behind his back, averts threats to kill him in a duel, from angry wronged friends, Leon decides to shoot himself. He's dying anyway, he's broke, and the girl he likes is betrothed to Watka, as her father wants to clear a debt to the miser.
The most interesting element is what could, at the time, constitute a happy ending. There was no cure for consumption in the 1830s, and the play doesn't invent one. Leon will live perhaps a few months or years longer, and Rose gets to marry a broke, dying man and will be a widow sooner rather than later, yet all is attended by a sense of lightness and celebration.
WATKA: Before you die, why not consent –
I’d gladly raise a cross for you –
Your death a little to postpone?
‘Twould give you time to start a cure
With doctors, thermal springs and then,
Who knows, but the improvement shown
Might give you courage to endure?
With roses in your cheeks again,
A buyer might well feel inspired
(He is hoping to sell the annuity on to someone gullible and recoup his loss.)
LEON: Let’s not forget to thank our friend
Who snatched the pistols from my hand!
I hadn’t loaded them, it’s true –
But how on earth was he to tell?
For making sure all ended well –
And for enabling me to wed
Rose, who will care for me instead;
For Watka’s change of heart, praise be –
And long live my annuity!
While LEON declaims “Life would be sweet beyond compare” etc., WATKA has been
creeping towards a chair where he stands in a daze until, with the last line, he slumps
helplessly into the seat.
Readers of these plays in English most likely have some connection to Poland and are reading them voluntarily, so are already more interested than the average bored Polish high school kid. Zemsta is certainly worthwhile (unless you find this kind of old comedy too silly for words), The Annuity is culturally quite interesting. But Virgins' Vows drags on and on - even going through the notes for it I nearly gave up. It would be forgiveable to skip parts of it. Overall though, the collection is a pretty quick read - plays always have a lot of white space, those in verse more so - and it's interesting to get an overview of Fredro - even if it isn't always clear in English why these plays are so very revered in their homeland (perhaps we compare everything unfavourably to Shakespeare?) they are at least sometimes fun.
(Read April, reviewed May 2020)
I'm not familiar with many plays of this age and, as is probably the case for a lot of Anglophone readers, my knowledge of drama between the Restoration and Oscar Wilde is patchy and vague - and owes more than it should to Blackadder III. Thanks to Czarny Pies, the only other reviewer of this collection so far, for mentioning Beaumarchais, whom I did for French A-level and don't often think about now. Whether because of studying The Marriage of Figaro as if under a microscope, rather than reading it straight through once in translation as I did with this collection - or if they are *actually* different -Fredro's plays, compared with Beaumarchais, feel faster-paced, slighter, and more actually comical. Comical, at least, if you like a certain sort of old-fashioned farcical caper that probably hasn't been in fashion since the 1970s. (I do.)
Unfortunately, this translation (apparently the only one published in English) has no notes. There is plenty of context Fredro doesn't explain to his audience, because it wasn't necessary at the time. It helped that I'd read a little Polish literature already, but there's probably plenty here I missed, or interpreted according to works from other European countries.
Revenge (Zemsta) 4 stars (1833-34) is Fredro's most famous play, and the best of the three in this collection: funniest, easier to understand than The Annuity, and with the most sparkling verse in translation. The Polish original was adapted into into a film by Andrzej Wajda in 2002. If you are in the US you can see it cheaply on Amazon streaming, but not in the UK. There are also a few versions on YouTube, but without English subtitles, so I've only watched the first 5 minutes.
An ageing country squire and his nouveau riche neighbour, a notary, occupy two semi-detached halves of a castle, and have an ongoing feud over a party wall. It is, on a grander and decaying scale, the sort of thing of which later 20th century English sitcoms were made, and gives good set-piece comedy (even while these things do, on another level, trivialise neighbour disputes, which can be a source of overwhelming stress to some people). The squire seems to be a relic of the old Polish baroque culture of Sarmatianism, as was his counterpart in Pan Tadeusz (which was set over twenty years earlier); fond of feasting, drinking and hunting, and being obeyed, these are guys who would get on well with the likes of Squire Western in Tom Jones and Sir Talbot Buxomley from the aforementioned Blackadder III, although the Poles' costumes were more exotic. One of the few political references appears when the Squire mentions that he fought for Polish independence:
Mylady of Bar, I call this blade …
She served me there and, in those days,
At Slonim and Podhajce slew –
Lomazy and Berdyczow, too!
(The Confederacy of Bar was a group of Polish nobles who fought the partition. Some of the others seem to be battles that happened long before the squire could have been born. Like I said, this thing needs notes.)
As you might have already guessed, these two feuding men have young relatives, one boy and one girl, who are inevitably in love, and various schemes ensue with supporting characters. Like heroines in Onegin and Pan Tadeusz, the squire's niece Clara is more assertive than early Romantic ideals of passively beautiful female objects:
An hour past, she was fit to faint –
Now she’s a paragon of force:
Fearless, a creature of resource
Romanticism is represented here most obviously by the buffoon and intermediary Papkin, a fan of French culture and keen to talk of duels and wooing, but apparently something of a pathetic individual himself. I assumed from the text that he was probably in his twenties and meant to be comically weedy-looking - but in the film he was played by Roman Polanski, then nearly 70, an age suggesting a man still fixated on his youth in which he had never been as dashing as he liked to make out, instead scraping by in the service of minor nobles.
The verse, at its best, has a sprightly, playful back and forth that reminded me at times of Gilbert and Sullivan. I have never been a fan of the more flowery type of 19th-century verse, so am glad this takes itself less seriously; here two characters realise they have met before, when one of them was pretending to be someone else:
WACLAW: No real cause –
A student jape – a prank I played–
A pointless, wanton escapade–
Tomfoolery – but not a crime!
WIDOW: You said you loved me, at the time!
WACLAW: (Aside.)
Now I’m in a pretty pickle!
WIDOW: Why ever blush, if you’re that fickle?
I waited! Then, a prey to mania -
I scoured the whole of Lithuania!
Of Prince Rodoslav – not a trace!
It is also rather dirtier than the most famous English literature of the time, more like that of the 18th century in Britain. Says Papkin imagining a young woman making excuses for the noises made by him in her bedroom,
What’s that whispering I hear?
It’s my kitten lapping cream –
Go to sleep now, Mother dear!
Mother mine, it’s the kitty-cat-cat –
The noise in my room – it’s only that
(What *was* Wajda doing with that casting...?)
All ends well for nearly all of the characters after much back and forth and plotting. For everyone except Widow Anna (probably only in her 30s), an interesting and intelligent woman damned as a gold-digger, apparently falling foul of the era's lack of sympathy for the financial bind upper-class women were in, unable to work and with no way of getting more money except to marry well. The problem of these widows' lack of skills, and the trap of destitution it created for those who were without other income, would be addressed 40 years later in Eliza Orzeszkowa's novel Marta.
Virgins' Vows (Sluby Panienskie) 3 stars (1833) A frustrating play for a modern reader who's even a little bit feminist. Also tedious for much of its length, though a series of madcap schemes near the end liven up the action - whilst stressing and manipulating most of the characters. Two young rural gentry women, the headstrong Clara (yes, another Clara - was it a very fashionable name then, or a favourite of Fredro for some other reason?) and her quieter, sweeter friend Aniela (a case of nominative determinism, it's Polish for Angela) have vowed never to marry. A wise decision in those days, many of us would say now, given the lack of rights in marriage and the considerable health risks of sex and childbirth for women. However, Aniela is not quite as sure about her friend's teaching. Perhaps not so surprisingly, because Clara - although her liberal parents have apparently let her read unsuitable books - is uninformed about these real problems, and bases her loathing of men primarily on the notion that all their declarations of love are fake. Though she has also realised that men of her time don't respect women:
"How could we match their standards for a start?
Our feelings and our views, despised from birth –
Since what men thought was all that really mattered
Have always been dismissed as flawed or fettered!"
Such ideas, with negligible life experience to back them up, are liable to be overturned by some young man either pretending effectively and for long enough to be an exception, or who's an exception for a while but becomes less respectful after marriage. A marriage they can't escape from.
Apparently part of what's needed is to change the courting style to suit the girl. Party boy Gustave (always telling his aunt and uncle with apparent sincerity that he will change and sort himself out, and then going on the same as he always did) seems to be genuinely lovelorn about Aniela. He decides that the way to break through her mistrust of men's propensity to really love is … to lie to her - in Hollywood teen romcom style, asking her advice about another girl he says he is in love with… who's really her. The cad manipulates them so much that Clara eventually advises Aniela to break their vow. As mutual relatives are keen for them to marry, nothing stands in Gustave's way once Aniela's convinced. They don't care that he once exclaimed to them, "In town, virgins I shun!" with all the pox that implies.
Meanwhile, Gustave advises ageing Wertherian Romantic-slash-stalker pest Albin, who's been declaiming his love to the exasperated Clara for years, to pretend he's found someone else, so Clara will start to miss him. Unfortunately she does a bit, no doubt because of the slight to her ego and the absence of anyone really worth crushing on in the vicinity. And when Gustave concocts a rumour that Clara is to be married to an old widower, Albin starts to look to her like a palatable alternative. Weddings happen quickly here - as they did in 18th century English novels like Pamela and Tom Jones, written before church reforms later that century - no long engagements to mull over the wisdom of any of this.
Rather than the happy ending on the page, it's too easy to imagine a future in which Aniela declines slowly and horribly from syphilis, missing Clara who died earlier in childbirth after a few years dissatisfied and crowded at home by Albin - and who had realised she was right when she was younger, but for the wrong reasons. (It's an entirely unnecessary sadness that Albin is old - why not at least make him young(ish) and good-looking so Clara gets that? The characters of Albin and Papkin seem to imply there was a type of laughable Romantic older man around in the Polish gentry at this time, who continued to be inspired by West European culture of his youth.)
The Annuity (Dozywocie) [3.5 stars] (1835) is rather abstruse in its plot (doubtless why it was the one of these plays never broadcast on BBC radio), but it's historically interesting. Knowing only kindergarten levels of Polish, and not especially wanting to spend hours plugging pages of search results into Google Translate, I contented myself with making sense of the financial aspect of the play via The Merchant of Venice and a vague understanding of that Victorian scam of taking life insurance out on other people, this being kind of their opposite. What has happened here is that a miser, Watka has obtained the annuity income of a Romantic young rake, Leon Birbanski. It seems it was sold by said rake to pay his debts, and that he now regrets this, accusing the miser of deception - though earlier on in the play it's a little confusing, hard to tell if a crime was committed or not. The lack of explanation perhaps suggests sale of an annuity by a debtor wasn't terribly unusual in 1830s Poland. By the time the play begins, the young man is ill with consumption, and the miser is comically eager for him to survive as long as possible so he, the miser, can keep collecting the cash. It is also not quite clear whether miser is actually on the brink of penury if he loses the annuity, due to other bad investments, or if his talk about this is simply an illustration of the anxiety about money that makes him a miser. Of course, there is also a marriage plot in among all this.
Among the things one finds out is how excited people got about balloon rides - apparently a rare travelling foreign attraction that appeared in cities from time to time. To more conservative members of the older generation, they could seem morally dubious as well as dangerous.
To complete the bingo card of tropes about Romantic about young men, after the miser, behind his back, averts threats to kill him in a duel, from angry wronged friends, Leon decides to shoot himself. He's dying anyway, he's broke, and the girl he likes is betrothed to Watka, as her father wants to clear a debt to the miser.
The most interesting element is what could, at the time, constitute a happy ending. There was no cure for consumption in the 1830s, and the play doesn't invent one. Leon will live perhaps a few months or years longer, and Rose gets to marry a broke, dying man and will be a widow sooner rather than later, yet all is attended by a sense of lightness and celebration.
WATKA: Before you die, why not consent –
I’d gladly raise a cross for you –
Your death a little to postpone?
‘Twould give you time to start a cure
With doctors, thermal springs and then,
Who knows, but the improvement shown
Might give you courage to endure?
With roses in your cheeks again,
A buyer might well feel inspired
(He is hoping to sell the annuity on to someone gullible and recoup his loss.)
LEON: Let’s not forget to thank our friend
Who snatched the pistols from my hand!
I hadn’t loaded them, it’s true –
But how on earth was he to tell?
For making sure all ended well –
And for enabling me to wed
Rose, who will care for me instead;
For Watka’s change of heart, praise be –
And long live my annuity!
While LEON declaims “Life would be sweet beyond compare” etc., WATKA has been
creeping towards a chair where he stands in a daze until, with the last line, he slumps
helplessly into the seat.
Readers of these plays in English most likely have some connection to Poland and are reading them voluntarily, so are already more interested than the average bored Polish high school kid. Zemsta is certainly worthwhile (unless you find this kind of old comedy too silly for words), The Annuity is culturally quite interesting. But Virgins' Vows drags on and on - even going through the notes for it I nearly gave up. It would be forgiveable to skip parts of it. Overall though, the collection is a pretty quick read - plays always have a lot of white space, those in verse more so - and it's interesting to get an overview of Fredro - even if it isn't always clear in English why these plays are so very revered in their homeland (perhaps we compare everything unfavourably to Shakespeare?) they are at least sometimes fun.
(Read April, reviewed May 2020)
August 30, 2014
This is an excellent choice for anyone with Polish relatives or friends wishing to become acquainted with Polish Literature.
Polish Literature prior to WWII poses great problems for North Americans and other English speakers because the Polish writers followed the examples of French writers (e.g. Balzac, Zola) or German speaking Romantics (e.g. Schiller and Goethe). Sienkiewicz who belonged in school of Walter Scott remains the most easily accessible Polish novelist to this day.
Fredro followed the excellent model of Beaumarchais another great writer whose style and conventions are unfamiliar to most English readers.
My suggestion is to read the Revenge and then download the Wajda movie which you will find under the title of Zemsta if not the Revenge on Netflix. Watching this movie will allow you to see how Fredro can absolutely sparkle on the stage. The cast is stellar. Roman Polanski plays the buffoon Papin who like Bottom in the Midsummer Night's Dream dominates the proceedings.
Polish Literature prior to WWII poses great problems for North Americans and other English speakers because the Polish writers followed the examples of French writers (e.g. Balzac, Zola) or German speaking Romantics (e.g. Schiller and Goethe). Sienkiewicz who belonged in school of Walter Scott remains the most easily accessible Polish novelist to this day.
Fredro followed the excellent model of Beaumarchais another great writer whose style and conventions are unfamiliar to most English readers.
My suggestion is to read the Revenge and then download the Wajda movie which you will find under the title of Zemsta if not the Revenge on Netflix. Watching this movie will allow you to see how Fredro can absolutely sparkle on the stage. The cast is stellar. Roman Polanski plays the buffoon Papin who like Bottom in the Midsummer Night's Dream dominates the proceedings.
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