FROM the beginning, tragedy was a very unstable compound. In its earliest manifestation, sometime in the seventh century BCE, it was connected to the choral lyric, the dithyramb, which formed part of the religious worship of the god Dionysus. Later, “tragedy” referred to narrative poetry. Aristotle, for instance, explicitly identified the Iliad and the Odyssey as tragic genres in his Poetics (1448b–1449a), commending the former for its pathetic finale and the latter for its retributive resolution whereby the hero received his just rewards (1459a). Other tragic precepts of Aristotle, which influenced later poetics, included his famous definition of tragedy as “an imitation (mimesis) of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, adorned with elevated language” (1449b 24–26); his preference for heroic myth as subject matter; and his ideal protagonist who is virtuous but who, through some flaw (hamartia) in him, falls precipitously from his prosperity and good fortune to adversity, a reversal (peripeteia) that arouses in spectators the emotions of pity and fear (1453a). Thus, from the beginning, tragedy was about great men and women who were forced to make decisions amidst impossible choices. The purpose of tragedy’s emotional arousal was to bring about a release, a cleansing (katharsis), of these feelings that produced pleasure and represented a process unique to this form of art. Although the concept of catharsis is well known today, it did not seem to play an important role either for Aristotle himself or for his successors in poetics, until the early modern period. As we shall see, however, most later discussions included an emphasis on pitiable and pathetic events, especially in the resolution of the tragedy.
Some important modifications to Aristotle’s theory can be found in the late antique grammarians Diomedes and Donatus, who were widely read in the medieval period. Both authors emphasized the unhappy ending and extended the kinds of characters suitable for tragedy to historical persons of high social status (Kelly 1993, 9–12). Implicit, too, in their approaches to the tragic resolution was an acceptance of Aristotle’s goal for tragedy: to affect the emotions of the audience morally and aesthetically. There were many definitions of tragedy formulated by other grammarians and rhetoricians during the late classical world and the Middle Ages. The writings of Lactantius (fourth century), Boethius (sixth century), Isidore of Seville (seventh century), Remigius (tenth century), and William of Conches (twelfth century), among many others, all testify to the ongoing readjustment, adaptation, and refashioning of the genre. The definition of tragedy was in a continuing state of flux and realignment, but it was precisely out of what seemed its permanently unsettled state that its adaptability emerged. Tragedy’s very instability became the source of its utility in succeeding centuries. Later Neo-Latin dramatists would deploy tragedy as an instrument in propaedeutic and pedagogical instruction, in doctrinal and sectarian debate, and in historical orientation and national identity.
A critical turning point was reached, however, in the ongoing discourse regarding tragedy with the rediscovery of the eleventh-century Codex Etruscus of the tragedies of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (first century CE) at the Benedictine abbey of Pomposa, near Ferrara, in Italy by the Paduan scholar Lovato dei Lovati (1240/41–1309). This manuscript represented the earliest complete collection of Seneca’s nine tragedies—Hercules Furens, Troades, Phoenissae, Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, and Hercules Oetaeus—and served as a fundamental text in the revival of tragedy. In fact, the history of Latin humanist tragedy in Italy during the Trecento and Quattrocento is largely the story of the imitation and adaptation of Seneca, with Padua and Lovati’s learned circle providing an influential model (Witt 2000, 81–116).
Seneca’s tragedies are filled with moral precepts. In addition, his moral essays and letters, which were well known in the Middle Ages, continued to exert an influence on humanist curricula as many educators mined Seneca’s writings, including the tragedies, for their sententiae (Grendler 1989, 250–60). The plays tended to focus, too, “on the inner workings of the human mind, on the mind as locus of emotional conflict, incalculable suffering, insatiable appetite, manic joy, cognitive vulnerability, self-deception, irrational guilt” (Boyle 1997, 25). Seneca’s inflated style—his long, declamatory speeches, his bombast, his stichomythia, his rhetorical characters (especially the nuntius [“messenger”])—had its core in Stoic wisdom and was never executed for ornamental display alone but was directed toward tragic characterization.
After Lovato’s discovery of Seneca’s plays at Pomposa and the establishment of Padua as the epicenter of Senecan scholarship, it was perfectly fitting that the first Senecan humanist Latin tragedy, the Ecerinis, would be written by Lovati’s disciple Albertino Mussato (Locati 2006). The drama was written in 1314, and, though the dramatis personae are not made up of mythological characters, Mussato himself said that the title character in his Ecerinis reminded him of Seneca’s Medea and Thyestes. The play is also like a Senecan drama in that it has five acts, a chorus, dialogue, and employs the dramatic iambic trimeter in its narrative passages. The central character was Ezzelino III da Romano (1194–1259), the “tyrant of Padua” as he was called, who as Frederick II’s lieutenant was a central figure in the Guelf–Ghibelline conflicts of the thirteenth century. His Latinized name “Ecerinus” plus the epic sounding suffix –is accounts for the title Ecerinis. However, Mussato’s historical narrative was a carefully crafted portrait of the Veronese tyrant Cangrande della Scala, who threatened Paduan sovereignty during Mussato’s tenure as diplomat and soldier in the wars between Verona and Padua from 1312 to 1328. In short, the Ecerinis was written as a warning to Mussato’s fellow Paduans.
Besides his use of Seneca’s Thyestes, Mussato also drew on the pseudo-Senecan Octavia, a fabula praetexta. Such ancient dramas—and the Octavia is the only surviving example—dealt with historical subjects, in this case with the murder of Nero’s ex-wife on her ex-husband’s orders. Ezzelino played the same role in Mussato’s tragedy as Nero did in the pseudo-Senecan play; they were both monsters, guilty of unspeakable atrocities, and destined to fall. And just as the Roman tragedy dealt with traditional nationhood and Roman identity, the Ecerinis prominently featured the Paduan citizenry in a leading role, clearly as the protagonist of the play, as the moral anchor in a tempestuous world. The play was so successful that Mussato was honored as poet laureate of the city-state on December 3, 1315, and a statute was passed that the play should be read to the public every Christmas to strengthen their patriotism. The dramatic convergence of history and myth discernible in the Ecerinis would have far-reaching consequences.
There were ten Latin humanist tragedies written during the Trecento and Quattrocento (for an accessible selection of texts, see Grund 2011), and in its treatment of Italian history, Mussato’s Ecerinis influenced at least four of them: The Misfortune of Cesena (De casu Cesene, 1377) by Ludovico Romani da Fabriano; an unfinished tragedy (fifty-eight verses of the Chorus have survived) by Giovanni Manzini della Motta (1387) on the fall of Verona and of Antonio della Scala; the Tragedy on the Captivity of Duke Giacomo (De captivitate ducis Iacobi tragoedia, 1465) by Laudivio Zacchia da Vezzano; and the Tragedy of Italian Affairs and the Triumph of Louis XII, King of France (De rebus Italicis deque triumpho Ludovici XII regis Francorum tragoedia, 1499–1500) by Giovanni Armonio Manso (Stäuble 1991, 205–6). Mussato’s choice of recent history as tragic subject matter, however, was not followed by his immediate successors; they chose instead to select episodes from ancient legend or history that Seneca had not used and to treat them as Seneca might have done. The goal, in short, was to “out-Seneca” Seneca.
Antonio Loschi, perhaps best known for his exchange of invectives with Coluccio Salutati regarding the wars between Florence and Milan from 1390 to 1401, wrote his Achilles sometime around 1387, a work that from its title would seem to indicate Loschi’s source would probably be the same collection of Homeric heroic plots from which Seneca drew. Loschi’s source, however, was not Homer but the late antique prose narrative De excidio Troiae (The Destruction of Troy) by pseudo-Dares the Phrygian, one of the most important agents in the transmission of Homeric legends to the Middle Ages. In its adaptation of Senecan dramatic convention, the Achilles followed Mussato’s Ecerinis—both use dramatic meter and choruses, and both relied on the operation of the Senecan lex talionis, the law of retribution, to resolve the play—but Loschi’s play presented two tragic protagonists, Paris and Achilles; two competing choruses, one Greek and the other Trojan; and insisted on a much more pagan (and Senecan) fortune than is found in Mussato’s work: “All our acts depend on the turning stars, and the course of the heavens rules all things on earth. Not even a god himself can alter whatever is woven by the Fates on high” (ll. 937–40). In addition, love is made the vehicle of retribution, an idea that is neither Homeric nor Senecan (Herrick 1965, 13). The plot of the play is characterized by a constant oscillation between the two warring camps and the two overconfident heroes made vulnerable by love. Loschi’s interest is in the melodrama of the love-intrigue. His obsession with the cruelty and treachery surrounding Achilles’s murder by Paris will be repeated in a story of sexual desire and unimaginable horror, Gregorio Correr’s Procne (ca. 1429), written when he was eighteen years old.
Correr’s subject was also not drawn from the reservoir of Homeric plots but from the much more sensational Metamorphoses of Ovid where the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela is, perhaps, the most horrific of all (6.424–674). Accentuating the unspeakable nature of the action, characterized by rape, murder, and cannibalism, was Correr’s choice to name his play, not after the victim of the lex talionis as Mussato and Loschi had done, but after its enforcer. The play was, furthermore, condensed into a few days of dramatic time so that the final banquet scene when Tereus eats the flesh and drinks the blood of his son Itys seems to come very quickly; the scene is also not reported but takes place onstage. Correr was very aware of the differences between simply narrating tragedy and theatricalizing it.
Like his predecessors, Leonardo Dati in his Hiempsal (ca. 1442) employed the same conventional Senecan devices but selected his plot neither from Homeric legend, Ovidian narrative, nor Italian history, but from Roman history, actually from an African episode in Roman history presented by Sallust in his Jugurthine War (ca. 41–40 BCE; Hiempsal was a rival of Jugurtha). Sallust was very concerned in his history of war in Numidia and the subsequent transference of power to express his own fear of the decline of Roman moral virtue. And like Mussato, who still clung to the traditions of medieval allegory by introducing Satan into his tragedy, Dati couched his entire play in the same moralistic context by having the subject (and character) of Envy frame the work along with Ambition, Modesty, Discord, and Perfidy. This reimagined morality play also functioned, we have come to learn, as Dati’s submission to the second proposed certame coronario, a literary contest in Florence organized by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) on the subject of envy. The contest never took place, but in the midst of a politically charged climate (Gorni 1972, 135–81) Dati’s Hiempsal contextualized Florentine history and mirrored Sallust’s method regarding ancient Roman history.
Humanist Neo-Latin tragedy in Italy had a much shorter shelf-life than comedy and apparently had little appeal for Renaissance readers. Thus, Hiempsal was never printed, Procne not until 1558, and Ecerinis and Achilles not until the seventeenth century. Some of the reasons may be obvious: tragedy was always concerned with larger-than-life men and women faced with impossible decisions, while humanist comedy dealt with the popular subjects known from Roman Comedy—love, sex, money, and manners. Tragedy was aristocratic, courtly, and rhetorical; comedy, everyday, ordinary, and conversational. Although the records of performances are scanty, comedy was acted before audiences more often and was found to be much more attractive to later vernacular dramatists.
By the end of the Quattrocento, the genre of tragedy had become further problematized by politics, and, although the final works in this period are negligible as drama, they maintained and transmitted the tradition that tragedy could deal with contemporary history. Both Carlo Verardi’s Historia Baetica (Andalusian History, 1492), which concerned the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors by Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Carlo’s nephew Marcellino Verardi’s Fernandus servatus (Ferdinand Preserved, 1493), which dealt with an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Ferdinand, represent dramatic hybrids. They were vehicles of political propaganda set uneasily within the dimensions of Senecan drama. Both plays were performed before the newly elected pope, Alexander VI (1431–1503), and members of the papal court at the Palazzo Riario in Viterbo. The popularity of Ferdinand as an appropriate subject for drama may be partly explained by the recent election on August 11, 1492, of a Borgia pope, who was born in Valencia and whose uncle, Pope Calixtus III (1378–1458), was another Spaniard. Carlo advertised his play not even as drama but as history, while Marcellino called his work a tragicomoedia in its preface because, echoing Plautus’s prologue to his Amphitruo, “the rank of the characters and the impious attack on his Majesty point to tragedy, while the happy ending belongs to comedy.” While the Fernandus servatus represents an unusual compounding of history with epic myth (the play is written in dactylic hexameters), of ancient pagan drama with Catholic propaganda, and of medieval morality (Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, appears to Isabella) with theatrical spectacle, it does seem to have had some influence on later manifestations of historical tragedy.
For example, Jakob Locher, an ardent German humanist well known for his Latin translation of Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) in his 1497 Stultifera navis, probably came into contact with Verardi’s Historia Baetica during his trip to Italy in 1493 because, two years later, Locher wrote and produced in Freiburg his Historia de rege Franciae (History of the King of France). This work, more documentary history than tragic drama perhaps, despite its use of Senecan conventions, dealt with the campaigns of Charles VIII against Naples in 1495. Apparently, the play achieved a measure of success, since Locher published two other tragedies: the Tragedia de Thurcis et Suldano (Tragedy about the Turks and the Sultan, 1497) and the Spectaculum more tragico effigiatum (Spectacle, Written in the Form of a Tragedy, 1502).
Another German humanist also influenced by Verardi, Johann von Kitzscher (d. 1521), studied in Rome and Bologna and composed his Tragicocomedia de Iherosolomitana profectione illustrissimi principis Pomerani (Tragicomedy about the Famous Duke of Pomerania’s Journey to Jerusalem, 1501) on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem of Duke Bogislaw X. Hermann Schottenius’s tragic prose drama on the Peasants’ Rebellion, Ludus Martius (War Play), was published in 1525 and owes more to the medieval morality play—Bellona is opposed by Peace—than to Italian humanism. Still, the potent combination of contemporary history and Senecan dramatic convention continued to resonate well into the sixteenth century. Thus, as late as 1558, the Portuguese humanist Diogo de Teive composed his Ioannes Princeps sive unicum Regni ereptum lumen (Prince John, or The Kingdom Bereaved of Its Only Light) about the untimely death in 1554 of João Manuel, Prince of Portugal, the son of King John III who himself died in 1557. The play is gravely Senecan, laden with omens and a melancholy chorus, which expresses a dread of the extinction of the dynasty and the loss of independence (Frèches 1964).
It is clear that humanist tragedy was never confined to its birthplace in Italy, but as it moved north and west, its characteristic attributes were altered to meet many different cultural, political, and religious demands. In Spain, one of the earliest printed plays was the tragedy Galathea (1502; the title is from the eponymous heroine), composed by a Greek humanist who lived in Spain, Hercules Florus—a play that also looked back to the moral allegories of the Middle Ages in its use of such characters as Ratio (Reason), Occasio (Opportunity), and Ultima Necessitas (Ultimate Necessity) and warned in its sober conclusion that all earthly love leads to tragedy. The dramatic components of this tragic romantic pastoral, of course, call to mind another influential composition from the period, La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, written in the vernacular in 1499. The influence of this work and the paucity of Neo-Latin tragedies outside of the schools suggest how firmly the vernacular would dominate later Spanish drama (Briesemeister 1985, 1–28).
It is fair to say that from the sixteenth century onwards, most Neo-Latin drama was written specifically for schools and universities across Europe. Seneca (as well as Plautus and Terence) continued to play an important role in pedagogy, both for his moral precepts and for his eloquence. “Since Cicero and Quintilian had both underlined the importance of enunciation (pronuntiatio) and memory (memoria) in the rhetorical training of the orator, the schoolmen were easily moved to promote school performances of the classical plays” (Parente 1987, 13–14). The early exuberance of humanist idealism, however, began to clash with the tenets of Christian orthodoxy, and this was especially the case as the sixteenth century wore on. Christian humanists like Konrad Celtis (1459–1508), Erasmus (1466–1536), Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), and Johannes Sturm (1507–1589) staunchly defended ancient drama, claiming, first, that classical grammar and rhetoric were essential for the contemporary theologian, for without this knowledge he would be unable to understand God’s Word (Boyle 1997, 3–25), and, second, that ethical lessons could only be derived from a play, regardless of its genre, if the viewers were confronted with a choice between virtuous and evil behavior (Parente 1987, 20). Still, the unspeakable acts Senecan tragedy dealt with weighed uneasily on the minds of Christian schoolmasters. Though the works of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca continued to be performed in the schools, religious Neo-Latin plays outnumbered their secular counterparts, and both existed in a very uneasy alliance.
In Germany, and generally in Northern Europe, humanist drama was quickly adopted by the schools, although it would be quickly tempered by the religious concerns of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as we shall see below. Dutch and German schoolmasters regularly performed plays with their students, and the same was true at universities across Europe. Thus, George Buchanan, a Scotsman whose Latin erudition took him to teaching posts in Paris and Bordeaux, where one of his pupils, Michel de Montaigne, had acted in his plays, and finally to Coimbra, where he was imprisoned (along with Diogo de Teive) by the Inquisition, composed two tragedies for performance by his students, Iephthes (1554) and Baptistes (1577). So, too, Marc-Antoine Muret’s only play, a Latin tragedy, Julius Caesar (1547), was presented at the college in Bordeaux, and in Paris, Claude Roillet published three tragedies in 1536, Philanira, Petrus, and Aman, to be acted by his pupils. Because of the wide availability of printing, universities could also import and export a variety of academic plays.
The enthusiasm of Continental humanists and reformers for the acting of classical plays as a method of educational training soon spread to academic circles in England (Boas 1914, 16). Oxford and Cambridge provide us with extensive records of performances of both religious and secular drama. The tragedies of Naogeorgus, Buchanan, and Roillet are duly represented in early Tudor years, and there can be no doubt that Continental Neo-Latin plays on biblical subjects influenced the work of the first Oxford dramatist, Nicholas Grimald (1519–1562), whose reputation in England is more closely attached to the lyric poems he contributed to Richard Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557. Grimald wrote eight plays, six of which were in Latin, although only two have survived: Christus redivivus (Christ Revived, 1543) and Archipropheta (Arch-Prophet, 1548). The first play is indebted to a French humanist, Nicolas Barthélemy de Loches, whose Christus xylonicus (Christ Triumphant Through the Cross, 1529) ends with Christ on the cross and at the tomb, while Grimald’s begins with his resurrection. Possibly the only trace of Senecan apparatus is to be found in the creation of the character Cacodaemon from Tartarus, a sort of pre-Miltonic Satan, who functions as an ally to the high priest Caiaphas. Nevertheless, the play seems to have exerted a strong influence on German school drama—it was also acted at Augsburg—and became absorbed in the German text used for the Passion play at Oberammergau until 1740 (Wilson 1969, 91). Grimald’s Archipropheta also appears to have benefited from another Continental source, the Ectrachelistis sive Ioannes decollatus (The Man with the Broken Neck or John Beheaded, 1546) by Jakob Schöpper. Despite the fact that Grimald’s rendering of the career of John the Baptist seems to beg for comparison to Buchanan’s Baptistes (written during the 1530s but not published until 1577), Grimald’s interweaving of romance and tragedy is far from the solemn austerity of Buchanan (Boas 1914, 41). At Cambridge, where the acting of comedy was more sought after, very little stands out except for, perhaps, Thomas Watson’s Absalon (acted ca. 1540), until Thomas Legge’s neo-Senecan tragedy Richardus Tertius (Richard III, acted in 1579), a play that has the distinction of being one of the first plays based on English history.
The overwhelming majority of tragedies written for schools and universities were on biblical themes. Of Old Testament stories, without question the most popular were those involving Joseph. “After Joseph the favorite figures were Adam and Eve, Isaac, David, Esther, and Susanna. … Other subjects dramatized were Abel, Agag, Elijah, Deborah, Gideon, Jereboam, Jeremiah, Jonah, Job, Jephthah, Ruth, Saul, Samuel, Solomon, Sodom, Tobias, and Zedekiah” (Bradner 1957, 41–42). And because moral improvement was far more important than adherence to classical form, not only were school plays often only marginally Senecan, but they also tended to similarly blur the generic distinctions between tragedy and comedy. Tragicomedies—serious stories with happy endings—predominated and, indeed, seem to have contributed to the growth of tragicomedy as a genre in the later Renaissance (Herrick 1955).
Many plays that drew on narratives from the New Testament focused on the theme of the Prodigal Son and, of course, on events from the life of Christ. Those that dealt with his trial and crucifixion would appear to be ideal subjects of tragedy, and there was even some precedent in Italy post-1500 for such experiments: namely, the Theoandrothanatos (God-Man-Death, 1508) by Quintianus Stoa, who would also publish a tragedy in Paris six years later on the Last Judgment, the Theocrisis (God’s Judgment), and the Christus (1556) by Coriolano Martirano (1503–1557). Stoa has the distinction of being the first to apply the style and structure of Senecan tragedy to a Christian subject. Of particular note because of its highly unusual adherence to classical precedent, in this case Aeschylean tragedy, was the much later Parabata vinctus, sive triumphus Christi (Parabata [i.e., Lucifer] Bound, or The Triumph of Christ, 1595) by Jacques-Auguste de Thou. Although de Thou’s source was Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (as well as one of Martirano’s classical plays, the Prometheus), de Thou’s Prometheus was replaced by Lucifer, Hephaestus by the Archangel Michael, and Oceanus and Io by Job, Elias, and John the Baptist. Plays on classical subjects were relatively scarce, but beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, this pattern was reversed.
The translation, dissemination, and commentary on Seneca’s tragedies reemphasized that tragedy could be adapted to didactic purposes; as we have seen, this was a principle adopted by early humanists like Erasmus and Melanchthon. Muret’s Julius Caesar in 1552 may well have initiated the shift in taste since, in the next hundred years, at least forty plays on classical subjects appeared (Bradner 1957, 47). Many dealt with the events in the Virgilian epic, in Ovidian narrative, or ancient Roman history, such as Michael Virdung’s Brutus (1596) and Thrasea (1609), Nicodemus Frischlin’s Dido (1584), and Matthew Gwinne’s Nero (1603), among many others (CNLS 2:145). Along with Gwinne at Oxford was William Gager, the author of three tragedies: Meleager (acted in 1582, printed 1592), Dido (acted in 1583), and Ulysses Redux (acted and printed in 1592). Perhaps the most gruesome of Senecan tragedies (and not even based on a classical story) performed at Cambridge was William Alabaster’s Roxana (acted in 1592, printed 1632), which boasted such delightful elements as murder, suicide, incest, flagellation, poisoning, infanticide, and cannibalism. Even Gregorio Correr’s Procne, which Alabaster was apparently familiar with, since an adaptation was performed on the same stage in 1566, had the decency to depict these unspeakable things offstage in appropriate Senecan fashion.
From its early adoption in European schools and universities, religion was one of the dominating concerns of Neo-Latin drama. But its development in the context of religious controversy so pervasive in the sixteenth century deserves a section of its own. Although Protestants and Catholics sparred over the spiritual authority of the pope, the main objective of humanist religious drama in the sixteenth century was the dissemination of moral guidelines for the attainment of salvation (Parente 1987, 61). Clearly, of course, the theological differences were significant as the two sides argued over matters of faith and good works, but on the sixteenth-century stage, both Protestant and Catholic dramatists agreed on the basic possibility of salvation. Strangely, there was a good deal of cross-fertilizing. For example, at the Protestant Strasbourg gymnasium, founded in 1538 under the rectorship of Johannes Sturm (1507–1589), who was, perhaps, the most renowned educator associated with the Reformed Church, Gregorius Holonius’s 1556 Catholic martyr-tragedy Laurentias was performed to great acclaim; in Jesuit schools as well, Protestant plays were performed rather regularly. The demands of pedagogy abrogated the polemics of theology. Thus, two anthologies of biblical plays printed in Basel by Brylinger (Comoediae ac tragoediae aliquot ex novo et vetere testamento desumptae [Several Comedies and Tragedies Taken from the Old and New Testaments], 1540) and Oporinus (Dramata sacra [Sacred Plays], 1547) included both Protestant and Catholic tragedies.
Instead of focusing on doctrinal differences, much Counter-Reformation tragedy engaged in attacks either on the legitimacy of the Protestant revolt or on its initiator, Martin Luther. For example, in the many tragedies of Hieronymus Ziegler (1514–1562), the Old Testament was the source of his condemnation of the Reformation, paralleling biblical events with the Lutheran schism. Andreas Fabricius also employed in his Ieroboam rebellans (1585) the rebellion of Jeroboam against the house of David in I Kings 12–14. Protestant responses were not lacking. Tales from the Bible were composed to mirror the conditions of the times, often with satirical intentions. We have already mentioned Thomas Naogeorgus, a fervent Lutheran pastor and important anti-Catholic polemicist, whose Iudas Iscariotes (1552) Creizenach (1918, 126) characterized as a drama of hate and anger. Judas is Naogeorgus’s metaphor for those early converts to the cause of the Reformation who were now returning to Catholicism and undermining Lutheran advances. The conception of Judas is on one hand thoroughly medieval—the two allegorical figures of the Devil and Conscientia contend for the possession of Judas’s soul—but Naogeorgus focuses on the emotional context of the betrayal and, on the other hand, casts Judas as a tragic figure in the Senecan mode with choruses punctuating each act. Two other plays, Pammachius ([The Pope] Who Fights Against Everything, 1538) and Incendia (Fires, 1541), are violent attacks on papal authority. When Naogeorgus turned his attention to biblical narrative as he did with Iudas Iscariotes, Hamanus (1543), and Hieremias (1551), he read the Bible as contemporary allegory; biblical drama and polemical drama were inseparable (Bradner 1957, 40). Although few editions of his Latin plays are extant, Naogeorgus’s works were quickly and widely translated into vernacular languages across Europe.
Early in the sixteenth century, Neo-Latin religious drama was primarily an instrument in school curricula, designed for the inculcation and exposition of the articles of the new, reformed faith, and not as a weapon for evangelical change. The polemical potential of drama would be fully realized, however, with the advent of the Counter-Reformation. As we shall see, Jesuit school dramatists discovered that Christianizing classical drama was problematic, as students were increasingly drawn to the pleasures of pagan literature; new restrictions would inevitably be placed on the use of ancient texts. At the same time, the humanist inheritors of Lutheran zeal, especially in the Netherlands, also confronted the dilemma of what Christ had to do with Apollo. A good deal of the consternation was occasioned by the reinvention of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Before 1498 when Giorgio Valla (1447–1500) published his Latin translation of the text, the Poetics was largely unknown. Despite the translation into Latin by William of Moerbeke in 1278 (only two manuscripts of that work have survived), Averroës’s paraphrase translated from the Arabic by Hermannus Alemannus in 1256, or the publication of the Greek text in 1508 by Aldo Manuzio, the work was known only to a few scholars. It was only during the second half of the Cinquecento that Aristotle’s text became more intelligible and influential; the surge of interest was stimulated by Francesco Robortello’s commentary of 1548. Here, Robortello sees drama, and poetry in general, as having two ends: the pleasure and the instruction of the audience, much as Horace does in his Ars poetica. The instruction consists of the moral betterment of the audience through exempla, striking demonstrations, and sententiae. The rhetorical demands or expectations of the audience are the key.
Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) in his posthumous Poetics (1561) shared the beliefs of Robortello and others about the emotional effects of tragedy and, in fact, did more to reintroduce the Renaissance world to the rhetorical aspects of the genres of content (Francis Cairns in Grafton, Most, and Settis 2010, 391). Scaliger defined tragedy as an oratio gravis, culta, a vulgi dictione aversa, tota facies anxia, metus, minae, exilia, mortes (“a dignified oration, refined, distinct from vulgar diction, its entire form troubled, dealing with fears, threats, exiles, and deaths”; Parente 1987, 53), discarded the concept of catharsis from serious consideration, and adopted Seneca as his tragic epitome. Senecan violence and horrors, therefore, were the chief method of stimulating the appropriate responses from an audience. Despite the fact that Senecan tragedy turned on the seemingly Judeo-Christian idea of the lex talionis, the law of retaliation in kind, where crimes are punished according to their deserts in this life, Scaliger’s vision was cynical, fatalistic, and pessimistic, so it inevitably clashed with the Christian emphasis on history as soteriological, where God’s divine justice and Christ’s redemptive act prevailed. To forestall such potential doubts implicit in biblical tragedy, the tragedies of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655) attempted to demonstrate that Christ’s promise of salvation could turn tragic despair into Christian victory. Their experiments further problematized an increasingly uncertain genre. The growing amalgamation and syntheses of biblical Christianity and Senecan Stoicism in neo-Latin Reformation and Counter-Reformation tragedy represented the broad adaptability of the genre but underscored their uneasy alliance.
During the early Cinquecento, we should recall, Quintianus Stoa had composed his Theoandrothanatos (1508) on the Passion of Christ according to strict Senecan principles: a five-act structure, punctuated by vivid descriptions of the bloody torture of Christ, and a marked insistence on the inconsolable grief of the Virgin Mary expressed in long, declamatory speeches. Stoa had secularized a Christian subject, especially in emphasizing the Stoic fortitude of both Mother and divine Son; it was as if their suffering was an example of the immutable vicissitudes of fortune. When Grotius and Heinsius wrote their Christian tragedies, conversely they were acutely aware of the limitations of Senecan tragic theory. In Adamus exul (Adam in Exile, 1601) Grotius characterized Satan as the operator of the Senecan lex talionis who persuaded Eve through the use of Stoic arguments from the moral essays of Seneca. In other words, the Fall was brought about by a combination of Satanic revenge and the human weaknesses of Adam and Eve, and yet all would be made whole by the promise of a Redeemer: Ipse veniet, ipse carnem sumet humanam Deus (“He himself will come, God himself will take on human flesh”; Parente 1987, 58). In his later Christus patiens (The Suffering Christ, 1608) and in Heinsius’s Herodes infanticida (Herod the Infanticide, written 1611, printed 1632) the Christianizing of Seneca continued by contrasting the victorious era of grace to the hopelessly limited vision of the pagan world. Heinsius, too, contributed in his De tragoediae constitutione (The Nature of Tragedy), a treatise published as a supplement to his 1611 edition of Aristotle’s Poetics, to the ongoing codification of dramatic principles noted above, but in his work, seventeenth-century religious drama was put on an equal footing with secular theater. A similar respect for sacred content, thus, animated the work of many other humanist writers of biblical tragedy, including Rochus Honerdus in his Thamara (1611), which was dedicated to Grotius and Heinsius.
Almost immediately after its founding by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1530s and the formal confirmation of the order by the papal bull of Pius III, Regimini militantis ecclesiae (To the Government of the Church Militant) in 1540, the Society of Jesus included dramatic activities in its astoundingly successful program of instruction. Like the Lutheran schools in Germany, Sturm at the Strasbourg gymnasium, Buchanan at Bordeaux, and the university drama in England, the Jesuit colleges recognized the pedagogical utility of Latin drama, an important component in Christian humanism, both as a means of perfecting eloquence in the ancient language, and as a way of exalting a devout life and inspiring the audience with the Christian virtues of humility and piety. Thus, in the hundreds of Latin Jesuit plays that have been printed (more than 100,000 may have been written) from its foundation until the temporary suppression of the order in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV, there was a decided concentration, first of all, on developing vocabulary fluency in Latin (copia verborum); and then on the resolution of the plot through the protagonists’ piety and reward of heavenly bliss, or their tragic refusal to acknowledge God’s Word. The Jesuit system of education, building on the curriculum devised by Renaissance humanists and recommending the inclusion of drama, was codified in the Society’s curriculum, called ratio studiorum, of 1586, 1591, and (in its definitive form) 1599.
Jesuit drama was, of course, also propaganda drama. Many scholars have called attention to the timely coincidence of Ignatius’s conversion and the spread of Reformation zeal. In any case, it may surely be stated that the Society of Jesus spearheaded the Counter-Reformation. The first recorded performance of a Jesuit play, in 1551, was an anonymous Latin tragedy staged at the Collegio Mamertino in Messina, Sicily, three years after the founding of this first Jesuit college. As the Reformation gained ground, the expansion of Jesuit colleges was dizzying: 33 in 1556, 150 by 1587, 300 in 1600, and more than 500 by 1700. Their mission stretched from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, with Jesuit drama adapting itself to local tastes and customs. Their plays were performed most regularly and successfully in Europe, but also in places as far away as the Jesuit college at Goa in India.
Although most authors of Jesuit drama were anonymous, in the case of a particularly gifted dramatist, we can identify the names of individual authors. Thus, we can point, for example, to the work of Pedro Pablo de Acevedo at Seville, a priest who wrote twenty-five plays from 1556–1572 and might have been the tutor of Cervantes; Stefano Tucci at Messina whose most popular tragedy, Christus iudex (Christ as Judge, 1569), achieved a prominence across Europe; Jakob Bidermann, surely the most successful of Bavarian dramatists, whose Cenodoxus (Vainglorious, the speaking name of the protagonist; first performed at Augsburg in 1602) attacked secular humanism, had his plays published posthumously in the collection Ludi theatrales sacri (Sacred Dramatic Plays, 1666); the Viennese Jesuit Niccolò Avancini (1612–1686) who wrote twenty-seven tragedies, many on ecclesiastical history; the Englishman Joseph Simons, who composed and performed his five tragedies at the English College at St. Omer between 1622 and 1631; and, lastly, Nicolas Caussin (1580–1651) who, along with Jean Surius and the Portuguese Luís da Cruz, published tragedies in the first decades of the seventeenth century in France. A number of tragedies were published in collections, some like da Cruz’s Tragicae comicaeque actiones (Tragic and Comic Plays, 1605), Surius’s two volumes of Morata poesis (Poetry Adapted to Manners, 1617–1618), and Caussin’s Tragoediae sacrae (Sacred Tragedies, 1620) containing only each author’s works, but there was also the well-known general collection Selectae PP. Societatis Jesu tragoediae (Selected Tragedies of Fathers of the Society of Jesus), published in Antwerp in 1634.
As far as subject matter is concerned, the Bible, of course, provided much useful material, but plots were usually—and differently from Protestant drama—selected from the lives of Christian martyrs and saints or, hence, from the early history of the church during its years of persecution by Rome. Some attention was also paid to topical matters of secular history, and, in the eighteenth century, to stories and heroes from classical antiquity. The most popular genre of play was tragicomedy, tragedy with a happy ending, as exemplified by the typical martyr play in which the hero triumphs in death. During a period of more than two centuries, from 1551 to 1773, the Jesuits acquired a remarkable repertory of tragic plays, which drew on such time-honored traditions as Senecan drama, biblical narrative, morality drama, and Catholic hagiography, all while fashioning their compositions to very distinctive national and cultural demands. At the heart of Jesuit tragedy is an insistence on individual responsibility and the exercise of free will, set within the overarching context of an omnipotent Providence. The difference from Luther’s tenet of the bondage of the will (to translate the title of his famous treatise De servo arbitrio of 1525) was programmatic here. The dramatic ramifications of this endless struggle concerning the destiny of humankind were varied, but it is important to remember that many European writers looked back to the Jesuit school theater where they first came into contact with the stage as part of their schooling. We may point to Molière, Corneille, and Voltaire in France; Lope de Vega and Calderon in Spain; as well as to Protestant writers Joost van den Vondel, a later convert to Catholicism in Holland, and Andreas Gryphius in Germany (Schnitzler 1952, 289).
Both in theory and in practice, as we have seen, tragedy proved to be a very flexible, responsive, and fertile medium. The theoretical distance traveled from the speculations of Aristotle about the origins of tragedy to the realignment of Aristotelianism in the theories of Scaliger, for example, seems immense, almost exponential, spanning more than two millennia, and yet tragedy as a genre continued to have at its core an adaptability to the exigencies of cultural, social, political, and religious forces that determined its character.
Practice, of course, always precedes theory. The many Neo-Latin tragedies discussed in this chapter (of the countless written up to the eighteenth century) display a continuing awareness of changing cultural imperatives and, thus, were written to mirror not just the universal truths contained in ancient tragedy but the evolving struggles of contemporary life. The creation of the hybrid form of tragicomedy, the inclusion of historical subject matter, and the reliance on biblical themes represented the dramatic response to emerging societal needs. Thus, from this perspective, the thematic distance from Mussato’s Ezzelino to Naogeorgus’s Judas seems short: Paduan independence is as appropriate a subject for tragedy as German Reformation politics. The increasingly moral view of the genre, too, that employed classical, biblical, historical, and allegorical characters provided writers of drama in very different epochs with the opportunity to depict what will always be the central concern of tragedy, the endless struggle between the forces of destiny and human responsibility.
SUGGESTED READING
The subject of Neo-Latin drama is particularly extensive, largely because the genre was international, cross-cultural, and adapted to very different audiences throughout its history. The standard reference is now Bloemendal and Norland (2013). In addition, the mise en scène of neo-Latin tragedy has been the subject of many studies. For information on scenic design in Italian Neo-Latin theater, see Andrioli Nemola et al. (2000); on music and dance in Jesuit school drama Walsh (1954) and Devlin (1972). Regarding Jesuit drama, furthermore, the single most important book on Jesuit drama in any European region is Valentin’s 1978 study of the German-speaking countries. Of the many European Neo-Latin entertainments, see Béhar and Watanabe-O’Kelly (1999), as well as more specialized national or cultural studies such as the study by Binns (1990) on Elizabethan Latin culture; for historical studies of Neo-Latin drama and its reception in Baltic countries, see Ekrem, Jensen, and Kraggerud (1996); for Nordic Neo-Latin theater, Jensen (1995); and on the subject of Neo-Latin historical drama, Lindenberger (1975) and Bloemendal and Ford (2008).
REFERENCES
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Béhar, Pierre, and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly. 1999. Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1580–1750). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
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