Prominent Bulgarian Shakespeare scholar

The Bulgarian people first encountered Shakespeare a hundred years ago, when Romeo and Juliet was staged on our stage. Since then, his name and his work have become part of the cultural heritage and the Bulgarian cultural reality. Shakespeare's dramatic works are translated, staged, studied and researched. In the beginning, mainly translators wrote about Shakespeare. The first critical article about the great English playwright was the preface by I. P. Slaveykov to his translation of Julius Caesar (January 1880). The first Bulgarian researcher was, in a sense, B. Raynov, who translated twelve of Shakespeare's plays and wrote relatively extensive introductions to each of them. His translations are accompanied by numerous notes and explanations. Another one of Shakespeare's early translators, T. Ts. Trifonov, also wrote introductions in which he gave an assessment of the respective plays. These are works in which some observations and thoughts are found, but they are mainly popularizing and imitative.