Part I. Towards Drama : Romantic Shakespeareanism and 19th-Century Opera -- 1. In the Orbit of Harmonious Dissonance : Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Carl Maria Weber’s Oberon -- 2. Ariel Enchanted into a Gesture : Jacques Fromental Halévy’s The Tempest -- 3. Fear of the Unknowable : Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth -- 4. A Stream of Light in the Infinity : Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet -- 5. Hamlet Sentenced to Life : Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet -- 6. Eternal Beauty of a Dark Face : Gioachino Rossini’s Otello and Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello -- 7. “The whole world is a grotesque”? Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff -- Part II. Towards Theatre : Pages from the History of the Warsaw Opera Introduction -- 8. Fight for the Original Shakespeare, the Romantic Theatre and the National Opera during the pre-November-Uprising Romanticism : Gioachino Rossini’s Otello -- 9. The Romantic Aesthetics of Terror and the Cultural Categories of North and South : Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth -- 10. Shakespearean Passions, Contrasts and Local Colour : The Operatic Theatre in Warsaw during the Post-Uprising Revival of Shakespeare’s Plays : Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet -- 11. “Lyrical Drama” at the End of the Century : A New Face of a Syncretic Operatic Work : Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello and Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet -- Conclusion.