Jesuit Drama

Jesuit Drama, term used to describe a wide variety of plays, mainly in Latin, written to be acted by pupils in Jesuit colleges. Originally, as in other Renaissance forms of school drama, these were simply scholastic exercises, but over the years, particularly in Vienna under the influence of opera and ballet, they became full-scale productions involving elaborate scenery, machinery, costumes, music, and dancing, as well as an almost professional technique in acting and diction.

The earliest mention of a play produced in a Jesuit college dates from 1551, when an unspecified tragedy was performed at the Collegio Mamertino in Messina. In 1555 the first Jesuit play was seen in Vienna, Euripus sive de inanitate verum by Levinus Brechtanus ( Lewin Brecht), a Franciscan from Antwerp. This was followed by productions at Cordoba in 1556, at Ingoldstadt in 1558, and in Munich in 1560. There were already 33 Jesuit colleges in Europe when Ignatius de Loyola, the founder of the Order, died in 1556: by 1587 there were 150 and by the early 17th century about 300. For over two centuries at least one play a year was performed in each college. The total of plays specially written for these performances was enormous. Only the best were published, but recent researches have brought to light a great many manuscripts. The early plays were based mainly on classical or biblical subjects—Theseus, Hercules, David, Saul, Absalom—but later, stories of saints and martyrs—Theodoric, Hermenegildus—were also used, as well as personifications of abstract characters—Fides (Faith), Pax (Peace), Ecclesia (the Church). The popularity of plays based on the stories of women—Judith, Esther, St Catharine, St Elizabeth of Hungary—led to the early abolition of the rule against the portrayal on stage by the boy pupils of female personages. The use of Latin was less easily disregarded, bound up as it was with its use in class and in daily conversation between masters and pupils. The vernacular seems first to have been used, in conjunction with Latin, in Spain, but the Christus Judex (1569) of Stefano Tuccio (1540–97) was translated into Italian in 1584 and into German in 1603. During the 17th century many plays appeared in French or in Italian, and by the beginning of the 18th century most Jesuit plays were written in the language of the country in which they were to be produced. Parallel with the increased use of the vernacular went the introduction of operatic arias, interludes, and ballets. Of all the splendid productions given in Vienna the most memorable appears to have been the Pietas Victrix (1659) of Nikolaus Avancini (1611–86) which had 46 speaking characters as well as crowds of senators, soldiers, sailors, citizens, naiads, Tritons, and angels. The technical development reached by Jesuit stagecraft can be studied in the illustrations to the published text of the play, which was acted on a large stage equipped with seven transformation scenes. Lighting effects became increasingly elaborate; though the plays often began in daylight, which came through large windows on each side of the stage, they usually ended by torchlight, while in the course of the action sun, moon, and stars, comets, fireworks, and conflagrations were regularly required. All this, added to the splendour of the costumes and the large choruses and orchestras—often employing as many as 40 singers and 32 instrumentalists—made the Jesuit drama a serious rival to the public theatres. In Paris in the 17th century the three theatres in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Louis XIV and his Court often watched the productions, were better equipped than the Comédie-Française and almost on a par with the Paris Opéra. Jesuit drama continued to flourish in such conditions all over Catholic Europe until the Order was suppressed in 1773. It left its mark on the developing theatres wherever it was played, notably through the works of such authors as Avancini in Austria, Bidermann in Germany, and Tuccio in Italy, and through its influence on pupils who were to become playwrights, among them Calderón, Corneille, Goldoni, Lesage, Molière, and Voltaire.