Interview with translator Filip Krenus on his translation of Marin Držić's 1551 comedy "Old Stan or A Fool Fooled", published by the House of Marin Držić.

In this interview from July 2026, the Croatian translator Filip Krenus explains why Marin Držić is the greatest Croatian and Slavic playwright, and what it meant to be a 'fool' in Držić's sixteenth-century Ragusan dramas.

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Interview with translator Filip Krenus, transcript below

TRANSCRIPT

Laura Seymour: We are really so happy and excited to have with us Filip Krenus who is a theatre maker, translator and also produces an English theatre festival in Croatia. So welcome Filip, and thank you so much for talking to me today.

Filip Krenus: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure.

Laura Seymour: Great. I have so many questions to ask you, kind of specific questions about early modern fools and your process of translating. But first I wondered if you could, in your own words, give an overview of Držić and who he was and what your role is as a translator.

Filip Krenus: Well, hello to everyone. I'll approach this as a theatre maker, as a translator, not as a scholar. There is little is known of Držić, in a sense who he truly was. He's a quite enigmatic figure. He started as a clergyman and then as a student in Siena, he was apprehended for taking part in a lewd performance. It was described probably featuring an actress, which was an extra scandal, but because I think he was well placed in society, he was not punished. He was also probably a spy because he was in the service at the Ragusan court going all the way to Constantinople. I'm deliberately omitting all the years - I'm just trying to figure him out as a as a man.

So he, his theatre production, or rather his playwriting, only takes about a decade of his life, because after that he goes elsewhere. He dies in Venice, and before he dies, as far as we know, he also plotted to overthrow the government of the Republic because he considered the government to be obsolete, foolish, unyielding, unbending. And although it was quite strange, he sought a foreign power, the Medicis, to help overthrow the government, meaning that they would take over.

The topic of youth versus old age, the praise of fortune or Fortuna, seizing your opportunity and, being your own person, the maker of your own fortune, and also the dialogue between folly, or rather confrontation between folly and wisdom is constant in his works.

So, you know we may discover something else that might surprise us again, like Shakespeare and I think like most Renaissance authors, he would consider works in verse his greatest achievement rather than prose. And his works in verse have been published, his poems and also his plays, and therefore they are preserved in a much better state than his prose works. He suffers from, his works suffer from, various stages of cannibalism in a way. Some of them are entirely gone; some of them are missing a head, like a title or few introduction scenes. Others like Skup, which I translated as Pinch Hoard, and then Uncle Maroye and even the one that I've done recently: the original is Grižula, but I translate it as Plakir, Son of Cupid, because the title is also missing and a tiny fragment of ending is missing as well. Only written versions, manuscripts, survive of his works.

So he's an interesting, very strange, very, very lively, incredibly fascinating character and father of Croatian drama and one of the founding fathers of Croatian literature.

Laura Seymour: Thank you so much. Skup was the first of your translations that I read, as you know, and I've been kind of immersing myself in them for the last few weeks. You mentioned folly, and I think for our project, the play that is perhaps most pertinent and exciting to talk about is the one that you've titled Old Stan or A Fool Fooled. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that. You know, in what sense is Stan a fool in the early modern sense/in the modern sense?

Filip Krenus: So first of all, the the original title is Novela Od Stanca, and novela is a contemporary Ragusan Renaissance term. And we also just have to quickly have an overview of Croatian dialects. Croatian is a very small language, one of the oldest in Europe, and although it's small, it has great works. But because it's small, those great works are not as known as maybe languages that that have bigger literatures. So in Croatian you have three major dialects, Shtokavian, Kajkavian and Chakavian depending on how we say word "what". So "cha" is Dalmatian word for "what", "kai" is northern Croatian, central Croatian word for "what", and "shto" is used as "what" in Slavonia, where I'm from, and also in Dubrovnik or Dubrovnik, as we'd call. We'll go back to how to accentuate Croatian words. But the Ragusan dialect is a mix of Italian influences and Dalmatian, Slavic, Croatian language.

So the the modern version of that title would have been A Prank Played on Stan, or rather Stanac. First of all, I use the name Stan because both Stanac and Stanley have the similar root, and it also worked better when it comes to immersing it in the iambic hexameter, which I used overall in translating that play. So Slankamen would have been an expression of like a very, very ancient rock. Stanac could also be interpreted almost like an old man yearning for for summer and Stanley would have had the root in "stone", so that was quite a happy coincidence.

Now, when it comes to translating the actual title, I wanted to play on words that there are a lot of things that you may think you lose when translating from from one language to another. One of them are diminutives, then plays on words and the meanings of names and nicknames, which are very prominent both in Ben Jonson and in Držić. So I had to preserve the name Stan, but Prank Played on Stan sounded really clumsy and if you wanted to turn it into Renaissance English again, it would be a long title. So I wanted something playful, A Fool Fooled, which would also open up the discussion of what kind of fool that character really is.

Now it opens also a question of what "fool" really means in Renaissance terms, and I would avoid approaching Stan simply as a stupid peasant. He is not. He is naive. And, there's a difference when it comes to Dubrovnik. The Republic guarded its borders, and particularly its its walled city fiercely. Everything outside the city walls was considered chaos, everything inside had to have its proper order. Even prostitutes, when they reached the age of 40 would be commissioned, or rather given a bachelor, a husband, and if he chose to refuse to marry the lady in question, he would be banished. There was one of the first sewage systems in the world; they praised cleanliness. They had the biggest spy network, one of the biggest spy networks, in Europe. And also they trusted diplomacy because there was nothing else that could preserve such a small community. So anything outside the city, including peasants, were considered wild, were slightly looked down upon. And the difference between city life and life in a village is that when you arrive in a city, nobody's going to immediately offer you their home and you know, a place to stay. Whereas if you do that in village, it'll be considered improper and immoral; you know, if you see someone on the street, you will offer them a place to stay.

And that's something that Stanac or Stan first encounters, and that's why we see him next to a fountain where he is with his little goat and some cheese that he wanted to sell in the city. So I would say that he's not born a fool, but he becomes one, and I think that's the strongest argument. I mean, Stan does possess experience. I mean, he possesses practical knowledge - he's very old. He possesses honesty, hard work, and he survives perfectly in his own world. But then he comes to Dubrovnik where we have this carnival time and you have this urban irony and you have this theatrical performance that he's presented and this sophisticated deception and this really noble humour in a sense that these boys that play prank on him are all of noble birth. And so this fish out of water thing makes him vulnerable,

so that would make him foolish in a sense.

And another thing is that when we are so vulnerable, you'll become more open to a suggestion of "what if I gave you eternal youth?", you know, and for a second you will have that, "Oh, that's not possible". But for a fraction or a second, if I offered you and said, you know, if you do this, you will become eternally beautiful, eternally young, I would have more than a fraction of a second of like amazement, and then I would try to come to my senses. So I think that as far as I can say about the Renaissance use of the word "fool" is never just an idiot, you know. You can lack judgement, you can be morally blind, or as is the case of Stan or Stanac, he's unable to distinguish appearance from reality and and then in this case, appearance is everything you know. He also comes in the time of carnival and as we know, carnival reverses society all to become young and and there is the painting and motif that I mention also in the introduction of the fountain of youth. The old people immerse themselves in this water and then come out beautiful and naked and just go about and continue in their folly. So he is not used to pretence like all the city dwellers are and therefore he is more suscept to that.

That would be the initial introduction into the fool and the way Držić balances it out. I mean, I can maybe say a few words about the the structure of the play before I go into the language of each character if you want me to?

Laura Seymour: Yes, that'd be really interesting.

Filip Krenus: So the Croatian poetry, the earliest Croatian poetry, and particularly the Renaissance poetry uses dodecasyllabic verse, which means it has 12 syllables and you have rhyme in caesurae and at the very end. So it's like a double rhyme and the tempo or the meter is more akin to Alexandrine verse in original Croatian, so you have this dum, dum, dum. That's why Molière was very popular in Dubrovnik, even more popular than poor Držić - for four centuries he was barely performed, if at all, whereas the French plays, or rather Ragusan versions of those French plays were performed on a regular basis. So the entire play, which is very short, it's about half an hour long, 40 minutes if we perform it, is entirely written in verse. I wanted to preserve that uniqueness.

English is like the wild tree that does not suffer constrains and corsets for too long, but I wanted to restrain the language as much as I could without losing the natural mobility of this really lively language that Držić gives us. So I decided to use iambic hexameter, which is basically pentameter with an extra extra beat the de-dum, de-dum, de-dum of Shakespeare and of Renaissance poetry, and therefore it, it gave me more of a leeway of, you know, giving English version of this lively exchange and making that language work in Renaissance-English-approximate, I would call it. I almost had a rule of not using words if they were, you know, 18th century or 19th century. It was very difficult. Sometimes I think I have one or two cases where I just deliberately did not yield to that rule, but mostly I tried keeping up with it.

So even even the language of Dživo, who presents himself as this tradesman who is a merchant who is well known in his part of the world and he's very focused, he's very, very reasonable and impresses Stanac. Stanac has lots of these enjambed lines and he has this almost wailing sound and he uses lots of diminutives. So you can see that his mind is very childlike and, and very naive. But on the other hand, he will respond to things like, "oh, well, my wife saw me young when I woke up and she said, 'where's my husband?', and then I beat her up, and then she came to her senses" which is a case of, you know, violence against women that was very common in Renaissance times. And it's something that Stanac will also respond to. So he's not just going to be a naive child/childlike creature that gets really exploited and almost unnecessarily experiences almost unnecessary cruelty like, I don't know, a Malvolio. Once you have the background of of that character, you'll understand why. So forgive me if I go on different tangents, but you can always use your time to restrain me.

Does that answer your question? And do you want to, you know, lead me wherever you want to lead me?

Laura Seymour: Oh, it does, yeah. That was so fascinating. And it's so great to hear you give a nuanced description of what a fool was. There's something about being a traveller and being gullible because you don't have those kind of coordinates that you're used to having, around how people behave. You know, where are you going to sleep? Oh, I'll sleep by this fountain because I don't know where else to sleep. It was really interesting how you were sort of drawing out the social elements of what it means to be a fool.

Filip Krenus: Yeah, because you have the natural fool and you have artificial fool, and I think artificial fool would be someone who either uses the guise of not having their wits about you to speak the truth or, you know, being appointed in court because madness is often associated with prescience and with having having been touched by by God or just being touched because you can also be a force. Or like Lear's fool will tell the truth to the old king in the way that nobody else is allowed to. In fact, you know, anyone who tells him truth, like his daughter, Cordelia, is going to be banished. And you can see how same words spoken by two different characters played usually by the same actor (who plays Cordelia, they also play the fool) will have different effect because Lear will take truth, real truth, from his youngest daughter as an insult and banish her, whereas he will take the beating, or rather he will take the truth from the fool himself.

So it is also the question of what roles we assume. And yeah, Dubrovnik was very much as any society, I think: immersed in roles and you had to play the part of not modesty, but public displays of wealth were scorned. You were not allowed to wear gold chains in public, particularly youths. It was because the Republic paid tribute to empires around it, so anything was worth less than your freedom, you know. There is even a motto on one of their fortresses: "Freedom is not to be sold for all the treasures in the world". Dubrovnik was the only country because it was a a city state that actually had direct economic relations with the Ottoman Empire. They had an embassy in Constantinople and you'd have two prominent intelligent Dubrovnik officials and they will be sent to Constantinople with a huge tribute, and they would relieve two other representatives of Republic and stay in Constantinople for a year or two until they're relieved of duty. So the parts that we play were also important when it comes to government. Dubrovnik was a city state that abhorred anyone having too much power. No one was allowed to have their statues or their likenesses being moulded or built in the city. So the the ruler of the city, it was an aristocratic Republic, the ruler of the city would be appointed for only a month and then he'll be chucked out, and you'd have a calendar of who becomes the ruler for each month of the year. So, yeah, the appearances are very important. If you look at Oscar Wilde, "show me the mask you choose and I'll show you a true self."

You can also see Cervantes and this quest of choosing illusion over reality and where this fool is up against windmills in a way. And if you look at another Renaissance element, the question of tarot cards, you have this innocent, naive fool wandering, carrying possessions and then going into the world, It's not evil, he just simply lacks discernment, and therefore, I think that's also the archetype that fits surprisingly well. Now, if you then look at In Praise of Folly from Erasmus, he does not mock the fools or not merely mock the fools, but he says that everyone is foolish like kings, priests, lawyers, everyone. Everyone's a fool. And old men chasing youth is one of the categories that he describes, and that particular category praises or rather describes Stan and and Držić would have almost certainly known of that humanist tradition because Stan's wife is 20 and he is close to 60, so he says, "oh, if I could only be young again to please my wife" - to please him first of all, and then his wife.

And you know, finally, I think you also have Ben Jonson. I think Ben Jonson is very close to to Držić in a sense of deployment of names as weapons and as character-defining vehicles. Jonson's victims, or rather fools, are often actually intelligent, but they are simply ruled by vanity, you know, greed. You could reach, finally, Italian comedy, which is an element that's very prominent in Držić because he went to Siena, he saw what theatre could do. You have this southern tradition of Commedia Dell'arte where you'd have old men like Pantalone and you would find that character replicated in Pinch Hoard or Skup and also in any other any other Držić play. Fools in Držić are also masters, noblemen who are directed by servants, and it's very prominent in Uncle Maroye, his greatest play, where you have two servants manipulating their masters. They tend to be, you know, a different type of archetype, usually the lover, foolish and vain, you know.

Laura Seymour: There are so many threads that I want to pick up on - this is so interesting.

Filip Krenus: Choose your thread!

Laura Seymour: I guess the thing at the forefront of my mind at the moment is about genre, because I mainly work on British and Spanish literature, and when I hear something is a comedy, I expect it to end with a marriage. Not necessarily a happy marriage - but a marriage, right?, that's the ending. But at the end of Old Stan, he realizes that his possessions, his foolish possessions, have been stolen: his goat has gone, his cheese has gone, he's been pranked. Is that a typical ending? Is this comedy? Is this the typical Ragusan comedy ending? What would you say about that?

Filip Krenus: There is a type of comedy that still exists, it's called bura and it's a type of joshing, and in the way that they joke with you quite seriously until finally you think that you've lost your mind. So they will really prank you, prank you, prank you until are you losing your mind. It's not necessarily mean. I think Držić just does not just limit himself to this Renaissance ideal of, you know, everything has to happen within 24 hours in the same place, although he's aware of that, and he would have been aware of marriages. But you also have to realise that there are two different theatrical traditions.

What is also unknown is a fascinating historical fact that English travelling players every time you had plague in London or you just wanted to, you know, earn more money, they would go into the Northern Europe, to the Baltic States, particularly to Poland, to Germany and travel all the way to Graz. Now, English players were misunderstood, or rather nobody understood what they were saying, so everybody would laugh at them. They would be called Englische Comedianten. In fact they were, they became, quite a fashionable item to have; many noblemen would have a wonderfully equipped, rich company of English players that they wanted to access. But what what it really shows is that England influenced the northern European tradition, whereas you have Southern European tradition, Italy, the area influenced by the Republic of Venice, which almost had a direct border with the rival Republic of Dubrovnik, and you have a Spanish tradition. So all those traditions are unknown, or rather lesser known traditions, because, you know, we always concentrate on this area that's influenced by England.

The ending in Uncle Maroye - it ends in marriages in a way, so does Skup or rather Pinch Hoard in a way. When it comes to his play Grižula or Plakir, which is one of his four fairy plays (there's Tirena named after a fairy), you have Plakir, Son of Cupid (or Grižula), which is very close to A Midsummer Night's Dream. And you have Venus and Adonis which has this play within a play: you have shepherds and and rustics and wild men or wild people watching Venus and Adonis in their pivotal scenes. So there's another fairy play. And, you have the Old Stan. So these are four pastorals where they have fairies involved in the various degrees. For example, Plakir or Grižula is actually a marriage play and it's framed around marriage of a real person who is almost invited to take part there. Držić was also known to say that no marriage takes place without his knowing or about it, so most of his plays were commissioned for public occasions or wedding feasts. So you do have a comedy performed at the wedding that not necessarily have has to end with a marriage, if that answers your question.

Laura Seymour: It does, yes, thank you! I think it's touching on something that's been in the back of my mind for a while, which is about how Western-focused a lot of Renaissance studies here is, in the Anglo world. I'm coming at this from a place of sort of ignorance: all I know of these plays comes from your translations and your introductions, and I'm very grateful to be reading them. As we were talking before this interview as well, my mind was just fizzing because when I was reading Old Stan, I was thinking of all the different similarities and connections with other literatures, right, doing kind of comparative literature in my mind. This is such a specific question, but as you know, I've worked on the character of Grim the Collier, and there's a scene in Edwards' play Damon and Pythias where the Collier is pranked by having his face blackened. He thinks he's going to the barbers, and they say they're shaving him, but they're shaving him with piss, and then they rob him. And when I read the kind of parallel or analogous scene in Old Stan, I was like, "What! Wow, this is so interesting as a connection!" If this isn't too specific a question, what is it with fools and fake barbers and being pranked and robbed by a barber? Is this just a coincidence or is there something deeper going on?

Filip Krenus: I think we all share the cauldron of stories. I always go to that image of Tolkien, we all dig up from it. I'm going to go back to - I'm not trying to avoid the question, but I'm going to go back to, because I've just finished translating, or rather, it's just been published and presented, Plakir, which has incredible similarities with with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In fact, you have Cupid and and Diana fighting as two separate kingdoms, you have Plakir almost like a form of Puck, who's the son of Cupid who lays traps fairies and then in turn he is trapped by fairies themselves. He is also blackened, but for the reasons of white being the colour of chastity and black being the colour of lust and desire. In the allegory, in Renaissance allegory, those two have to come together like in the marriage of heaven and hell for the marriage to truly work, so he's blackened because of that. Old Stan is blackened because I think that's one of the favourite Renaissance horrible, cruel entertainments. I think that's the sense of it.

I think we should reach for common themes of humanity in a specific time period rather than thinking who copied whom. You know, Držić would not have read Shakespeare, of course, because Shakespeare was not born at that time. But in Shakespeare, if we take out conspiracy theories of Shakespeare not being actual Shakespeare or actual author, but rather a name that hides one or several authors just like Homer, I don't think that he read about or rather read Držić - definitely not in original. He may have heard of Držić maybe from Dubrovnik merchants who were prominent at the time of Shakespeare in Dubrovnik. But I think they have the shared sensibilities of of liking antithesis and antithesis is usually black and white, so I think this blackening comes from that source, apart from obviously being cruel to someone who is different. It's not something that's just shared in Renaissance, I think it's shared here. So your connection is wonderful and I think maybe it it warrants a further investigation: how many further characters you could actually link up in this, in the way of punishment, the Renaissance punishments in comedies and why they're so particularly harsh.

You know, why are we so harsh to Malvolio, again, that I mentioned before? Because he's a Puritan and he needs to be ridiculed, and he ends up in dungeon. I played him once and there's such a temptation to make him a tragic hero at the end, you have to resist it and you have to make him a petulant child. You know: "why have you wronged me?" But truly, he is, he's tortured at the end, and it is awful what they do to him. Truly awful. But yeah, it's a type of Renaissance cruelty. You don't need to justify it when you stage it, but you have to find ways of presenting it to the modern audience without indulging in this unnecessary cruelty. You know, like The Taming of the Shrew; I have so many problems with because it has misogyny at it's heart. A woman has to be trained, she has to be subdued. Or even A Midsummer Night's Dream, a gorgeous, glorious play where you still have a husband that you can technically say that he drugs his wife and lets a monster rape her. So you can maybe turn that upside down and then change the lines between Titania and and Oberon, and so have Oberon fall in love with an ass which was done in in in the Bridge Theatre version, which was so much fun. You can maybe, you know, have The Taming of the Shrew being entirely played by women. And maybe you can kind of, not justify the cruelty, but let's say, understand it better.

I'm not saying that all the Renaissance plays should be performed today because some of them have probably problematic attitudes. However Othello may have glorious, glorious speeches and truly wonderful, but the core of it is hatred to yourself because you are black and that's, you know, that's something that I can't find justification for. So yeah, I think it is a coincidence, but it kind of reflects, to answer your question, the way I can see it, it shows common themes of particular - and I wouldn't say that they're coincidences, but they just show shared inclinations of authors. We all have that. Some version of bear baiting would exist in every country. Jews were, you know, persecuted in every country in Renaissance and medieval Europe, more or less, there was this archetype of women as well: the attitudes to gender were again more or less shared by majority of Europe. So, you can find similar themes.

Laura Seymour: And that's something that in your translations and introductions, especially, even in the epigraphs you use from A Midsummer Night's Dream and so on, you make those connections in a really interesting way. I don't want to keep you too long!

Filip Krenus: No, you're not keeping me long at all, of course.

Laura Seymour: My final question was going to be about what you're doing next in your career and what we can look forward to. But first I wanted to ask, is there anything that you really wanted to say that we've missed because it's been so interesting to talk to you, and I have a million questions in my mind, but we don't have a million years.

Filip Krenus: No, no, of course, of course. So, I just want to say to, to whoever is going to listen to this, both students and maybe experts, that it's a incredibly strange problem that we would deal with here is that the author hasn't been performed in Croatia for 400 years until the early 20th century, and there was a first translation, I think it was in German, and it's the end of the 19th century. So he was neglected by his own people and then therefore could not be known to wider audiences and even in these 100 years of being rediscovered and made into a prominent figure that he deserves so much, he still hasn't been translated. So it's almost like trying to insert him back to where he belongs by using this super-language of English and then try not to annihilate Držić by imposing Englishness in a way that would completely erase the authenticity of his language and of his imagination.

He takes people from everyday life and transforms them. His monologues, I mean from Grižula or Plakir, a serving wench who comes, she escapes Dubrovnik and then she is caught up in these mountains where fairies chase other fairies and mortals chase fairies as well because they're in love with them. And she just says, "this is what happens to me when I have to serve my lady". It's like a long, long, long speech, which is so lively because she gives gives us so many characters.

I translated all the street names and all the names as far as I could to almost give like an English version of Dubrovnik because all of these names have their history. But I did not offer them as a replacement, but rather as as an alternative, the way to immerse even more into that world. The three fairies that you have, Peahen, Posy, and Perfuma, they have these beautiful diminutive names, in original Propumanica, like they are these -itza -itza beautiful, beautiful like tiny little delicate, delicate names, but they might have been also based on Dubrovnik courtesans. So, you know, he was drawing from everyday life.

Držić is not my life's work, but I want to complete his works within my lifetime. Some translations you choose, you choose to do, and other translations choose you, and this was the case. So you could just like: push down the stairs and that's how it is, you know. If you want to know what it's like to translate Držić I still don't know. I usually take an opportunity and then make what I can with it. I love poetry and as an actor I've dealt with, as a translator I've dealt with, classical texts. So this gave me an opportunity to engage with all that beauty and liveness in the best possible way. It's also strange to reconstruct his endings, or rather write your versions of endings only in English without translating them to Croatian. So it's also got a strange dichotomy. I am Croatian actor who has performed in Croatia exclusively in English, so that's also this strange misplacement that I have.

The map of Europe, as my friend who is head of English in Rijeka University, English department, Antonija, pretty much she said that European literature is like a map. And then when you come to my neck of the woods, you just have a sign: "Here be Dragons". You don't know. So you can reach such conclusions and see how surprising a culture is if you just dig into it. You know, the early Croatian churches - I'm just jumping from one - are very small. Romanesque would be considered like a national style of Croatia like this stern, simple, but the same time, you know, weighty and magnificent. We didn't have much money or material and Slavs lived outdoors. So as you approach that church, you go through that almost like cleansing and you come to that small space. The Croatian mythology is again very elusive. What do you know of Croatian mythology? Like the beauty and the magic of it. It can actually exist. But yeah, open up more to smaller literatures, smaller only in size, but not in depth and breadth. Yeah, we're not even known amongst the Slavs. We've taken Držić to Gdańsk in Poland, to their Shakespeare festival -

Laura Seymour: That's a brilliant festival.

Filip Krenus: Yeah. And they even didn't know. They didn't know him either. He is the greatest Slavic author, probably the only one of his kind, and he deserves to be known. I'm not saying that my versions are definitive. I poured my heart into it and I would not do them differently. But it can open up a modern version or a version that can be done in just blank verse or in iambic pentameter, but only with rhyme at the end rather than at caesura as well. So yeah, it just opens up the dialogue and the more we make him present. And we've been trying, or rather I've been trying together with the publisher at the House of Marin Držić, which is the smallest museum in in Dubrovnik, and their director Nikša Matić has been very stubborn in a positive way, trying to push a really strange project of translating Držić. It's not so strange now because it's taken root and and it presents Držić in such a lively way.

He works on stage every time we have the full reading read throughs. We have been doing that in at York Shakespeare Festival at either York St. John's University or University of York.

Both universities hosted events based or dedicated to Držić. It just shows how how well he works on on stage, and that's joy to see.

Laura Seymour: Yeah. We'll put a link to the publisher with this video. I really hear you, it's like you're offering your hand, with this invitation to be open, to be more open.

Filip Krenus: Yes, and also when it comes to publishing this particular play, Museum of Marin Držić, the House of Marin Držić, the only way they could publish these works - and these are really beautiful editions illustrated as well, which is uncommon for plays, because we wanted to make sure that all attention and was given to to the text and presented it in the most beautiful format possible. When the books cannot be sold outside the museum, when you don't even have the Internet shop, and of course you know, Renaissance classics of European literature are very niche topic. So I think the only thing that I have in mind hopefully it would be his poems published in England. But we have been very interested in publishing these works, perhaps collaborating one of the universities in Britain. It would be a great honour and also a great event for his works to be published entirely. I still have Tirena, which is next to translate, then the fragments of and reconstructions of three of his plays called Pjerin, Džuho Krpeta, and Arkulin, which can exist in fragments - I think it will be also useful addition. And finally, his only tragedy, Hecuba, a very long play written entirely in verse - so that will be the last thing to do. So all of those plays deserve to be seen and read and published.

UCL is hosting an event this autumn dedicated to Držić. It's going to be called Držić Days: two or possibly three if we introduce translators' workshops. It's going to be dedicated to symposium and also to readings of his works. So yeah, there'll be a lot of Držić, but I think once University Press or a publisher decides to just take a chance and and publish a work by him, I think will be very, very big step, because what I've noticed from working both as a translator, as a writer, is that you just have to create something and make it real, exist in reality, and then it gives you a chance to root it. And this is what we're doing with translations of Držić.

Laura Seymour: Yeah, thank you! We'll share the link to the UCL event as well, that sounds fantastic. I think it was actually - yeah - I think UCL is where I got Pinch Hoard from.

Filip Krenus: Oh, good. I mean, if you need all books being sent to you or to your university, I can of course ask the director of the museum and and connect you in an e-mail and he'll be very happy to post the the translations. They can have physical copies of it and see how pretty they're all and yeah, because it's always wonderful to have a book.

And I don't know if you want me to say anything about the future work? This season was quite interesting for me because I had two plays performed in this summer season. One of them was adaptation of Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I reworked it into a play called One for All and we also explored the life of another Dubrovnik great and that's Marin Getaldić, another Marin. He was a mathematician who was considered a magician because he was conducting experiments in his cave. And in the future, Držić-related, I have a book coming out hopefully the beginning of next year called Necromancer Speaks, which is collection of stories like collection of stories from Shakespeare but using one of the characters as a vehicle and employing mythological creatures from Adriatic region, namely Necromancer who is a magician. He is kidnapped by little evil Orcos and they force him through their magical mirror to tell the tales from that region. So that's going to be a collection of stories coming up.

Laura Seymour: I'm already hooked on that! So that's like the framing device, is it? He's forced to tell this and each chapter is a story, or -

Filip Krenus: Yeah, it's a frame. Framing device is already done, so after this weekend, I just have to talk with the illustrator and because it's going to be a bilingual edition, and well, when I have more of this, I mean, I already have written about 30 odd pages, and once that is published or in process of being published, you know, I'm very much looking forward to it because it's a novel as well as 12 tales from Držić. One of them I wanted to reconstruct is the Pomet or the lost comedy that comes before Uncle Maroye that hasn't survived. So that is also done through generosity and openness of the museum, and it's a really, really sweet and informative museum in Dubrovnik. They are so welcoming and open. I think the wish of the director is to make it more like an international research centre on Držić, so any attention that we can bring on Držić and on that museum is incredibly welcome.  I don't think that it needs to be pushed or no one needs to be forced to see how great he is: you just need to maybe sit down and see or listen to his verse.

He comes from a very long theatrical tradition of open air theatre. Dubrovnik has centuries old open air theatre tradition. Plays were performed either in courtyards or at the Rector's palace in the centre of Dubrovnik, and if it was performed at the wedding feasts - and you mentioned weddings - you would have commoners next to the walls listening. It's almost like a radio play. And that was continued further in Dubrovnik's summer festival, which is one of the oldest in the world that has all the open air theatre happening. In fact, they will be staging Skup or Pinch Hoard in about 2-3 weeks in central Dubrovnik, and it's going to be, I think, a blast.

What would also help us as well is that we would plan and I would love to do an adaptation, but rather stage the play A Fool Fooled with six actors. Because it's a short play of 40 minutes, it can travel. I'm not expecting, of course, at all, but there is a possibility of actually bringing British actors to universities or performance spaces in England and showing off what they can do in English.

Laura Seymour: Yes, yeah. So if people want to get involved with that - I mean, that would be that would be amazing - can they get in touch with you?

Filip Krenus: Yeah, when it becomes. I mean, it's always a question of finances and a question of, you know, pushing that and making it real. I think the other option is also to record the play and maybe even publish it or present it in some way online. I would prefer to have these books published in England, or Wales, or Scotland. As you know, a physical copy is always a wonderful thing to have. But yeah, if, if there's also an option of publishing it online, I think UCL also has a possibility of doing that. I'm not a publisher, but I'm a translator, but you also kind of take the role of producer and actor, director, trying to make him known.

It will be a great step to finally stage at least one of his plays, and I think A Fool Fooled would be an amazing thing to stage and maybe also tour it around Shakespeare festivals in Europe, but it needs to either exist on its own or maybe presented as a pairing with another short play, shortened version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although it's not really necessary, I think it can stand on its own. It's really clear, fun piece to do and can showcase actors in a beautiful way.

So that's that's the goal in the next two years: one book dedicated to him, a story rather novel, another translation, a translation of his next play, which is Tirena, it was his second play, and there's also a shorter book just as an introduction to Držić called Marin, because Držić is incredibly unpronounceable to the English.

Laura Seymour: Yeah, you heard at the beginning when I tried to say his name!

Filip Krenus: Yeah! Tried to say Držić! It's very, very difficult. His nickname was "Otter": "Vidra". It's like a nickname that was given to him as a term of endearment rather than the "upstart crow" that Shakespeare got from a jealous critic. So, that would be my pitch for Držić. It just needs, you know, a publisher and just needs interest to publish his work in any form in Britain and make it more accessible and present, you know?

Laura Seymour: Yes: make him more accessible and present. Thank you so, so much, Filip, for generously giving your time and your expertise and going into so much depth and really explaining all of the amazing nuances to this translation. Just a 40 minute play, but it's amazing everything that you have brought out from it, so thank you so so much.

FILIP KRENUS

Filip Krenus is a Croatian theatre maker, writer, actor and literary translator based in London. His work brings together theatre, translation and Renaissance literature, exploring how classical texts can speak to contemporary audiences through performance. He is the co-founder and Creative Director of the Midsummer Scene Festival in Dubrovnik, the only English-language theatre festival in South-Eastern Europe, whose productions have toured internationally.

He studied English Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb before training at East 15 Acting School, Drama Centre London and the Vakhtangov Institute in Moscow. He was the first Croatian actor to perform on the stage of Shakespeare's Globe.

Alongside his work as a theatre maker, Filip has established himself as the leading contemporary English translator of Marin Držić. Published by the House of Marin Držić, his translations constitute the first complete English translations in the history of the playwright's major works: Uncle Maroye (Dundo Maroje), Old Stan or A Fool Fooled (Novela od Stanca), Pinch Hoard (Skup) and Plakir, Son of Cupid (Grižula/Plakir). He also edited the English translation of Venus and Adonis (Venere i Adon). For Pinch Hoard and Plakir, he reconstructed the plays' missing endings in Renaissance English for contemporary performance.

His translations of Držić have been presented at the European Parliament Library, Conway Hall in London, York St John University, the Rector's Palace in Dubrovnik and the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival, where he lectured on Držić's dramatic legacy. He has also led workshops in acting, storytelling and literary translation at the University of Rijeka, the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka and the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek.

As a theatre maker, Filip co-produced Paul Anthony Morris's Conundrum for Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture, later presented at the Young Vic Theatre, where he also organised rehearsed readings of contemporary Croatian playwrights. His directing credits include Two Bards, exploring the relationship between Držić and Shakespeare. Together with director Sean Aita, he co-wrote A Poor Player, which toured internationally and was translated into Hungarian and Romanian.

As a playwright, his recent work includes One for All, inspired by the characters of Alexandre Dumas, and A Wizard in the Cave, a theatrical portrait of the Renaissance mathematician Marin Getaldić, accompanied by an illustrated companion volume by Zdenko Bašić. His play Rougher Magic, inspired by the life of John Dee, was shortlisted for the ESFN ShakesPHERE New Play Competition. He is currently completing Necromancer Speaks, a bilingual novel inspired by the tales of Marin Držić and Adriatic mythology, illustrated by Dubravko Kastrapeli.

Across his work as a writer, translator and theatre maker, he continues to explore the meeting point of Renaissance literature, myth, science and theatrical imagination.

Translator Filip Krenus

The House of Marin Držić: About House - House of Marin Drzic