This book grew out of a fascination with the power of theatre. Like the music of Timotheus, the favourite musician of Alexander the Great, theatre has the power to influence our emotions and guide our actions. It can remind one of one’s pedigree, excite admiration or encourage vanity. It can soften the heart to pity as a reminder of tragic events and it can awaken the heart with a call for vengeance or turn the audience’s thoughts to love and virtue. This was the case of the Jesuit school theatre all across the early modern Europe. From Messina in Sicily to Połock in Lithuania (modern Belarus), the Jesuits taught their pupils to play their part. While Plato ousted the poets from the Republic, the Jesuits welcomed them and assumed the role of poets and playwrights themselves – this was poetry put to good use. Through a carefully designed curriculum the Jesuits taught their students language and public speaking, versification and writing. They challenged their students to write speeches, to compose poetry, to act in a series of year round performances in the colleges. These were lifelong skills that carried the Jesuit graduates through the many public roles they would eventually take up.
Jesuit drama has fascinated researchers for decades, as neo-Latin literature, as chapter in histories of the Society, it was an important source to talk about history of the missions, Jesuit accommodation, political history, and more recently, about history of emotions. While it undoubtedly serves all these areas well, the Jesuit drama and school theatre needs a new and complete appreciation in its own right. It was an institution, a widespread practice, an intellectual and artistic exercise not matched by any other in Europe in the period between 1551 and 1773. Its effects, however, lasted well beyond that date. Wars and plagues swept across Europe, the Danube froze over a dozen times, as did all the beautiful rivers of Poland and Lithuania, but the Jesuit pupils invariably put on their plays, dialogues and interludes for the patrons and guests of the college. The theatre season of the Jesuit colleges ran according to the school calendar, according to the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, and – a unique feature of the Polish-Lithuanian Jesuit Province – was well tuned to the calendar of Polish and Lithuanian court and local parliamentary sessions.
If we survey these tales crafted for the stage, we will find an astonishing variety of story designs. The Jesuit artists worked creatively with their material, experimenting with the number of protagonists, the pacing of the plot and genre conventions to bring closer their worldview and their set of values to the actors and audiences. Their plays reverberate with images of powerful conflicts, tragic deaths and sudden transformations, but they also have moments of quiet beauty and depths of simplicity that continue to be felt and remembered long after reading a playbill. Thanks to the playbills, we know much about how and why the playwrights chose to shape their stories for the stage, how the audience received their work, its meaning and the space these plays occupied in the universe of storytelling.
I have written this book with the hope of making the Jesuit theatre of Poland-Lithuania, and the unique culture that nurtured this theatre, better known and more accessible to readers who are not necessarily familiar with the history and culture of the northeast of Europe. Though geographically distant from Rome, the cities of Vilnius, Minsk, Braniewo, Witebsk, Płock, Grodno and over sixty other cities of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had Jesuit colleges, were cities of many cultures, including Roman culture. These were cities with many Christian and non-Christian religious denominations whose cultural and spiritual ties with Rome can still be uncovered in Poland, Lithuania, Latgalia in eastern Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Slovakia, despite the terrible devastation brought by the partitions, the two world wars, decades of Communism and the current Russian aggression. Their rich Roman Jesuit intellectual tradition is what makes the cities of Pułtusk, Jarosław, Lviv (Lwów) and Kražiai (Kroże) twin cities with Douai, Dillingen, Prague and Pont-à-Mousson.
I work with Jesuit playbills to tell the story of an important and long-lasting artistic endeavour. Anyone who has ever been in a play or produced a play will know what tremendous collective effort it takes to stage one. And it takes even more effort to produce an elegant theatre programme, which the Polish-Lithuanian Jesuits did so often. I saw traces of that effort in playbills as well as in college diaries and playbooks: the records of theatrical activity ceased in times of plague or war – and again, it seems that theatre was one of the first institutions to return to school once the time of war and pestilence was over. The resilience of theatre, its power to regenerate and reinvent itself is fascinating, and with over 800 extant playbills and documents to testify its longevity, Polish-Lithuanian Jesuit theatre continues to be a remarkable storytelling project.
The book builds on the archival material and new finds scrutinised over the course of several years in research libraries, former Jesuit archives, diocesan libraries and private collections. From Poznań to Vilnius, from Braniewo to Sandomierz, these were collections that survived years of neglect, were dissipated, lived through political changes and the sheer barbarity of our century. They were painstakingly catalogued by the dedicated librarians and archivists and may now tell their stories again to an informed and eager reader. The experience of reading and perusing these old records is perhaps best summed up by Czesław Miłosz, Polish Literary Nobel Prize laureate and a graduate of law from Vilnius Stephen Bathóry University, the former Jesuit Academy:
I tell the story of Polish-Lithuanian Jesuit theatre through its treatment of history, in particular through its rendition of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian dynasty of the Jagiellonians and through English and Scottish themes evoked in a number of plays. History was paired with moral lessons that matched the school and the liturgical calendar. I am therefore looking at the local and at the foreign to see how the Jesuit theatre operated and what the specific uses of history in school context were. It is for that reason I have dedicated this book to all students of literature, history and drama. Jesuits combined the study of texts with rhetoric and acting – it is this outstanding multi-disciplinary approach and a shared use of knowledge that should inform our own academic enquiry and eventually bring us together.
Jolanta Rzegocka
Kraków, Easter 2025
Czesław Miłosz, ‘And Yet the Books’ (Berkeley, 1986), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass reprinted from: Czesław Miłosz, Poezje wybrane. Selected Poems (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1996), p. 319.