Protestant school theatre

In Protestant dramas one cannot feel the radical and definite changes which can be traced with most Catholic school stages around 1750-1760.

In the number of school performances in Hungary up to 1800,¹ we found a relevant difference, which is much higher than might be ex-pected, given by the ratio of Protestantism within the whole population of Hungary. We know about 631 Protestant performances as opposed to the 7176 Catholic data. We can find two main reasons, an external (1) and an internal (2) explanation. 1) The 17^th century involved continuous danger, oppression and frequent purges for the Hungarian Protestant population. Their schools were under continuous threat and often occu-pied, so these circumstances were not favourable for theatre activities.

2) The Lutheran Reformation reached Hungary very early, especially in German speaking towns,² but around the mid 16^th century The Confes-sion by Calvin and Bullinger had a stronger influence among the Hun-garian speaking population, mainly in the eastern region and in Tran-sylvania. In the second half of the 16^th century, Hungarian Calvinism accepted Calvin’s strong and strict orthodoxy,³ which was strengthened

1 From István Kilián; see Table 1 on page in the present work, p. 29.

2 Ethnic German and Saxon students from Hungary visited Wittenberg as early as 1522 and they were the first to ‘import’ Luther’s principles. Melanchton had a strong influence and his Confessio fidei Augustana (1530) was soon accepted in Hungary.

(See: Horváth 1957, 17-18; Varga 1995, 13-14.) 3 Cf. the Confessions of Debrecen and Egervölgy, 1561-62.

in the 17^th century by the frequent purges of the Hungarian Protestant population. Calvin was definitely against theatre,⁴ thus the Hungarian Calvinist stronghold, the college of Debrecen, did not have a theatre until 1790.⁵ This was not general, however, as other important Calvin-ist colleges produced dramas quite regularly, e.g. the famous Sárospatak college became the centre of Calvinist school theatre, already in the 17^th century – due mainly to the stay of Comenius (Komenský).

Lutheran and Calvinist dramas surviving with full text Language Lutheran dramas Calvinist dramas

Latin 63 20

German 22 –

Slovak 10 –

Czech 7 –

Latin-Hungarian 5 2

Hungarian 10 82*

* Not including the dramas of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, the greatest poet of the 18^th century, who performed some dramas with his pupils of the Calvinist school in Csurgó.

The table shows the number of surviving Lutheran and Calvinist dra-mas (the Unitarian corpus being too small). The difference in the lan-guage used on the stage can be explained by the different population: the Calvinist and Unitarian populations were almost all Hungarian, while a large part (probably more than half) of the Lutheran population was Saxon (in Transylvania and in Upper Hungary) or Slovak.

4 Just one non-Hungarian example of the long-lasting effect of Calvinist orthodoxy:

we should remember the Geneva entry written by d’Alembert for the French Ency-clopaedia followed by a huge scandal and Rousseau’s famous Letter to d’Alembert on theatre (1757).

5 No wonder, for centuries Debrecen has been called “the Calvinist Rome”.

2. About some Calvinist themes⁶

Generally, studying drama themes is not worthwhile, but in the case of Calvinist dramas our research has uncovered some important and char-acteristic topics.

Biblical themes. Unlike Lutheran schools, the Calvinist ones rarely performed Biblical stories. If they did, they never involved Heaven or Hell, i.e. non-earthly scenes.⁷ When they could not avoid supernatural elements, they always used Gods of ancient, most often Roman, mythol-ogy in places undefined. They never performed passion plays either.⁸ As there are quite a few “bare data”, i.e. without any information about the topic, theme, etc., we examined the themes using the “meaningful data”:

“Meaningful”

(titles, programmes data or full texts)

Old Testament New Testament

Lutheran 304 52 50

Calvinist* 123 6 5

Unitarian 29 2 6

* Not including the dramas of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz.

Mythology. The class of poesis was to give the pupils a rich repertoire for funerary and other occasional poetry, as well as chapters of classical literature to be known by heart. That is why they staged quite a few sto-ries of ancient Greek and Latin mythology. These mythological dramas

6 Cf. Demeter 2003

7 We know of only one interesting exception from Sárospatak, written in 1776: it is a funeral dialogue between the deceased József Szathmári Király willing to enter Heaven and Saint Peter at the Heavenly gate. (See Nagy 1999.) The atypical super-natural scene is either accidental or is connected to the different rules of funerary poetry.

8 We know of 19 Lutheran, two Unitarian, and no Calvinist passion plays. Luther did not forbid acting and representing Christ’s story on stage; yet most Lutheran passion plays are rather declamationes, i.e. they are told rather than acted. Christ appears only in one or two scenes and speaks very little, and there is no supernatural scene. (Part-ly this tradition is reflected in Bach’s passions, too.)

are of strong dramatic strength, which we must emphasize because Cal-vinist playwrights never used Latin comedies or the neo-Classical Eu-ropean comedies or tragedies as their source.⁹ The mythological dramas were written quite late, mainly in the 1770s-1790s, often as exam pieces or exam poems later inserted into dramas.

School life. Many, rather short plays described the life and works of pupils in the school; most of them are either exam pieces, when they indicated what they had learnt during the year, or plays to attract new pupils to the school.

3. Popular late Baroque