Chapter 2 - Staropolski (Old Polish) Theatre

Summary

Mirosław Kocur defines ‘Staropolska’ as an umbrella term that is used to bring together multiple social, class, religious, ideological and aesthetic issues that signalled different cultural formations emerging in the period between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries in a territory which was not ethnically or politically homogeneous. In the same constellation, Agnieszka Marszałek approaches Staropolska from the perspective of spectators and diverse publics and argues that its theatre was ‘a combination of changing ways of demonstrating belonging to various communities and representing specific particular interests, models of behaviour, as well as signalling one’s own presence (and separateness) within what was then called the state, society or the nation’. Marszałek insists that theatre became ‘Polish’ only with the establishment of a public theatre (1765–67). Even then, a knowledge of foreign languages (French, Italian, German) was crucial.