Juliusz S¿owacki (1809-1849) is universally recognised as the father of modern Polish drama. His twenty-five plays, many of them inspired by the works of his beloved Shakespeare, are the only important dramatic works of the romantic period to be written expressly for the stage. Besides his plays, he is the author of digressive epics in the style of Lord Byron, prose works of a mystical bent, and some of the most beautiful lyric poems in the Polish language. He travelled to London in 1831 as a courier for the insurrectionist government during the November Uprising against Russia, and elected to remain in exile thereafter, returning to Poland only once, near the end of his life in 1848, to take part in the revolutionary activities of that "Spring of the Peoples." Considered along with Mickiewicz and his friend Zygmunt Krasi¿ski to be one of the "three bards" of Polish Romanticism, S¿owacki achieved a great popularity in the early part of the twentieth century, which has only grown with succeeding years.