This article is a critical reappraisal of Juliusz Słowacki’s translation of Calderón’s El príncipe constant (1843), which acquired a place of its own in Słowacki’s oeuvre and continued to attract a lot of interest throughout the 20th century. Its lasting appeal is due to its extraordinary unity of tone, dramatic construction and stylized language, which in effect, as some critics have said, out-Baroques Calderón’s Baroque original. This article analyzes this contention in detail and tries to answer the question what were the sources and reasons of Słowacki’s fascination with the 17-th century Spanish poet and playwright. The second part of the article deals with two of the 20th-century stage productions of the drama and the adapters’ handling of Słowacki’s text. The summary includes a brief survey of the treatment Calderón’s heirs accorded to his key trope perigrinatio vitae (‘life is pilgrimage’).

This article examines the reception of the féeries, French theatre productions known for their fantasy plots, lavish scenery and spectacular visuals, in the feuilletons by Zofia Węgierska, published in 1853–1869 by the magazine Biblioteka Warszawska. In her reviews of the plays and operas staged in the capital of the French Empire she tried to pinpoint those elements of the productions that were common to the Polish and the French early Romantic aesthetics. She highly appreciated the romantic fairytale magic, the clever juxtaposition of contrastive scenes and moods, historicism, metaphysics, and dazzling stage effects as long as they helped to impress upon the audience the didactic and moral message of a play. The unvarying reference points of her criticism are the plays of Alexandre Dumas père, the Polish Romantic drama, the reception of the Vien-nese romantic fairytale plays in Poland (until 1850) and the journalism of Théophile Gautier.