Selected Drama and Verse

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2016 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2015

This edition presents, for the first time in English, a selection from the repertoire of the first Polish woman dramatist, Princess Franciszka Urszula Radziwillowa (1705–1753), with a historical-biographical Introduction incorporating interpretations of her works. Radziwillowa’s plays treated complex issues concerning intimate relationships. In her poetry she explored new, very personal, means of expression for intimate declarations, in a form of language capable of conveying the emotional distress that could not find expression under existing conventions.

"This collection of works by Franciszka Urszula Radziwillowa opens a window onto the world of a remarkable eighteenth-century Polish noblewoman. Fluent in French, Radziwillowa produced some of the first translations of Molière into Polish - but also wrote dramas of her own and composed lyric poems which evade the Baroque conventions of the day in order to strike notes of confessional intimacy well in advance of their time. Barbara Judkowiak’s selection of her works, here presented in Patrick John Corness’s fluidly idiomatic translations, provides an excellent portrait of Princess Radziwillowa’s keen and restless mind."

-Thomas Seifrid, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California

PATRICK JOHN CORNESS is Visiting Professor of Translation at Coventry University, England, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds.

BARBARA JUDKOWIAK is Professor of Polish Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. Her area of research is early modern literature, theatre and culture.

ALDONA ZWIERZYNKA-COLDICOTT is a Polish Translator/Interpreter with an MA in English Philology (UMCS, Poland) and MPhil in Linguistics (Coventry University, England).

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women 12.1 (2017): 227–230. Reviewed by Ursula Phillips.
Renaissance & Reformation 40.2 (2017): 224–226. Reviewed by Rosalind Kerr.
Renaissance Quarterly 70.1 (2017): 393–395. Reviewed by Halina Filipowicz.
The Sarmatian Review 36.3 (2016): 2040–2041. Reviewed by Barry Keane.