The experience of crisis often provokes new questions about the social role of art. The thematic block Theater – Crisis – Society opens with a theoretical sketch, which analyzes structural links between theater art and the art of the emblem, and on this basis proposes a concept of the emblem as a medium for the furthest-reaching social impact of the theater. This is followed by two articles on the ways in which national and local theaters and theater companies responded to crises caused by the 1854 cholera epidemic in Munich and the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland, respectively; they discuss not only the challenges faced by the theater in times of hardship, but also various possibilities of linking artistic practices and theories with the medical discourse. The question of the refugee and migration crisis, in turn, is a catalyst for considerations on the transformation of migrant and post-migrant theaters in Germany and on the crucial role of post-migrant theater in redefining theatrical and performative practices so as to make them into an important part of public life.

In the section Essays and Articles , we present our contributors’ attempts to follow the postulates of nineteenth-century theater scholars: a meticulous study of a palimpsest-like stage-copy of Schiller’s The Robbers, whose bottom layer is the Polish translation by Jan Nepomucen Kamiński, and an article formulating important historiographical questions based on a critical analysis of documents and secondary sources concerning the legendary Warsaw premiere of Hamlet in 1871.

In Presentations, the theme of the social role of the theater reappears in reviews discussing books by Grzegorz Niziołek, Tomasz Kubikowski, David Wiles, and Piotr Dobrowolski, and the theme of migration – in a review of Tymon Terlecki’s essays on London theaters.

On the cover: Tomasz Treter, Symbolica vitae Christi meditatio, Brvnsbergae 1612: typis Geor. Schönfels, s. 178.