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This article discusses the performance of Hamlet that premiered at Teatr Wielki [Grand Theater] in Warsaw on 24th March 1871. Produced as part of the celebrations of Helena Modrzejewska’s achievement, it is regarded as an important chapter in the history of Warsaw theater in the second half of the 19th century. The author separates historical documents dating from the period in question from later interpretations in order to complicate and problematize the image of this legendary staging created by Józef Szczublewski in the 1960s. Research using archive materials enables a discussion of the instability of facts, the mechanism of creating theater legends, and the dilemmas concerning the description and evaluation of historical phenomena. An important part of the historiographic analysis undertaken in the article is also to problematize the tension between a literature-oriented and theater-oriented approach to studying theater history.

At the beginning of 1866, the Warsaw-based photographic studio of Konrad Brandel took a series of photographs of two well-known dramatic artists, Michał Chomiński and Jan Królikowski. The actors were captured dressed in their stage costumes and re-enacting before the camera snippets of selected parts from their rich repertories. Circulating both as photographic prints and as reproductions published in the Kłosy illustrated weekly, they are among the most widely recognised portraits of 19th-century Polish actors to this day. The photographs under discussion are quite familiar to historians of theatre, and they have served as illustrating material for its history numerous times. The author, however, proposes that we stop treating them only as images documenting some staged situation and undertake to examine the circumstances in which they were made and reconstruct the message that the actors and the photographer intended to convey to the public. For Chomiński, Królikowski and Konrad Brandel, were a means to boost their professional and social status and to project a certain image. The portraits took on additional meanings, often different than what their authors had intended, when they started being published by the press, found their way to private photo albums, and later, when they became part of museum or archival collections. Interdisciplinary study into the history of photography and theatre encounters provides a chance to get a better understanding of the cultural forces behind the mass production of portraits of actors in their parts. Consequently, the photographs become a document that can tell us a lot not only about the history of photography and theatre, but also about the history of the social order in which they functioned.