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Szerző/Author: Gabriella Reuss (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest)
E-mail: reuss.gabriella@btk.ppke.hu
Rövid életrajz/Bio: Gabriellea Reuss is Assistant Professor at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and Associate Professor at Rózsahegyi Catholic University, researches the reception of Shakespeare in the 19th–21st centuries. She is particularly interested in W. C. Macready's so-called Shakespeare restorations, Sándor Hevesi's Shakespeare cycles, and Hungarian puppet Shakespeare productions. Recently, she has also been working with inclusive drama groups.
How to cite:

Theatron , Vol. 19. No. 4. (2025): 62–68.

Cím/Title (ENG): “A gauntlet thrown at the reader’s feet” (Otakar Zich: Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art)
Abstract:

This review assesses the long-awaited English edition of Otakar Zich’s Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy (1931), published in 2024 (General editor David Drozd, translated by Pavel Drábek and Tomáš P. Kačer). It highlights the decade-long Czech initiative to make Zich’s seminal but complex writings accessible to an international readership through the Theatre Theory Reader (2016) and related projects. The review situates Zich’s inductive, spectator-centred theory within the intellectual tradition of the Prague Linguistic Circle and early twentieth-century European performance thought. It commends the translators’ methodological clarity and the volume’s dual structure—Introduction and Afterword—for enabling critical engagement with Zich’s intricate aesthetic system, now restored as a foundational text of modern theatre theory.

Keywords: Otakar Zich; Prague Linguistic Circle; theatre theory; performance studies, Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art