In suggesting an answer to the question which forms the title of this article, Jan Kott seeks relevant connections between the rites of a past civilization and the history of the twentieth century – each age sharing across the millennia the capacity to hate those it chooses to make its victims. Since the publication of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in 1964, Jan Kott has published in a wide range of fields, always displaying a characteristic combination of critical perception, insight into performance potential, and open sensibility towards the cultures of past and present. Jan Kott has also from the first been an Advisory Editor of Theatre Quarterly as of New Theatre Quarterly. He will be eighty in 1994, and in NTQ40, due for publication in November of that year – as it happens, also the eightieth issue of this journal and its predecessor – we plan a special issue by way of celebration. Although a number of contributions have already been commissioned, further ideas for articles of a kind appropriate to the occasion are welcome.