ABSTRACT
The eruption of volatile ludic energies, released by the political change of 1989, was paralleled by the revival of Shakespearean comedies on the Bulgarian stage. Considering this development during the early 1990s, Evgenia Pancheva found that, at that time, comedy had come ‘too suspiciously close to tragedy’ and discovered a Shakespeare ‘hushed down, borrowing from himself and others, trimmed to alleviate – or exacerbate? – the wounds of a guilty, slanderous, politicizing, revengeful, sexually aroused banished and re-acknowledged, thinking Bulgaria’ (Pancheva 1994: 260). Ten years on, Shakespeare is still trimmed, full of borrowings, radically rewritten, with the same taste for sad endings.
