Written and performed during a time of political upheaval and fierce religious polemics, early modern Ukrainian plays both entertained their audiences and helped to educate and shape a national and religious identity. This rich body of serious, mostly religious, dramas and of comic intermedia was remarkable for the original ways it elaborated on and transformed the models of the European Renaissance and Baroque theater. Paulina Lewin’s Ukrainian Drama and Theater in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is the first English-language general history of that subject.

Relying on her thorough knowledge of the primary sources and cultural legacies of early modern Ukraine, Russia, and Poland, Lewin analyzes how drama and theater functioned in Ukrainian society in the 17th and 18th centuries. Having thoroughly studied the extant dramatic texts and handbooks of rhetoric and poetics, she elucidates the deeper structures of meaning in the dramas and reconstructs the techniques and atmosphere of their contemporary performances.