Five Tragedies, by Joseph Simons. This seventeenth-century English Jesuit who fled his country's anti-Catholicism directed plays, his own and classics, at the Jesuits' St. Omer's College in France.
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Five Tragedies, by Joseph Simons. This seventeenth-century English Jesuit who fled his country's anti-Catholicism directed plays, his own and classics, at the Jesuits' St. Omer's College in France. |
The audience is assembled. Murmurs of anticipation fill the Great Hall. Backstage, the air is charged with excitement and nervousness as final adjustments are made to costumes and makeup. After weeks of rehearsal, the actors, stagehands, and director prepare for opening night. Time: 7:55 p.m. Place: St. Omers College in France. Date: May 15, 1623.
Tonight's play is Vitus, by Joseph Simons, SJ. There is a large cast of characters, including a chorus of angels, and spectacular special effects. The playwright paces backstage. Tonight's production, though not the first Jesuit play at the school, is nonetheless the first in a decade of grand openings for Simons.
Theater at St. Omers
St. Omers was one of several colleges founded in Europe by English Jesuits during Catholic restrictions imposed by Elizabeth I. Begun in 1592, this school for English boys thrived for 170 years where it was founded, near Calais in France. The majority of boys at St. Omers were upper-class English, "gentlemen's sons," as one contemporary put it; another called the student body "the flower of the English Catholics."
The first known reference to theater at St. Omers shows that plays were being produced there just five years after its founding. Jesuit schools were quick to include drama in their curriculum; the earliest recorded performances were in Sicily around 1550. Jesuit teachers knew the value of theater training. Dramatic art provided a means to teach elocution and deportment, but it also instilled discipline and control and encouraged creativity in students. Theater, entertaining for actors and spectators alike, was also a platform for moral and religious instruction. Finally, theatrical productions became public exhibitions of the schools' educational attainments. And theater at St. Omers elevated these standards of Jesuit drama.
Plays
Subjects for drama at St. Omers included Old Testament and Church history stories and the lives of saints and martyrs. But secular subjects were also dramatized; figures from English history, including Henry VI and Sir Thomas More, were especially popular, and there were even some exotic tragedies based on Byzantine history. A certain variety of form was also admitted; an elaborate masque produced in 1625 honored the visit of Princess Isabella, ruler of Belgium, to the city of St. Omer.
However, most productions were inspiring stories of religious fervor. The plot of Vitus is typical: Valerius, son of the Roman emperor Diocletian, is possessed by an evil spirit. After every type of remedy has been applied in vain to alleviate his suffering, Vitus, a Christian, is summoned. He is only fourteen but highly renowned for his miracles. By God's power he expels the demon and wins Diocletian's favor. But when Vitus cannot be induced to abandon Christ either by promises of rewards or by threats of punishment, including encounters with molten lead and a lion, the emperor orders his torture to death on the rack.
The play had much to recommend it, including dramatic tension and theatrical effects. In addition to wonderful leading roles, especially for two boys in their teens, the cast called for a troupe of Italian players, a chorus of angels, and even a twelve-year-old Christ.
Actors
Guest artists were at times invited to participate, but plays at St. Omers were generally performed wholly by students, and the large numbers of boys from whom the director could select was an advantage. The enrollment in 1621 was 120; by 1634 it was at 200. Students were certainly accustomed to giving oral presentations in poetry and rhetoric classes, and drill in declamation improved vocal control and interpretation. They were further trained in composition of dialogue and scenes, even in the planning of complete tragedies. A letter concerning an early St. Omers production contains high praise for the actors. After mentioning the splendor of their costumes, the writer continues:
But these things certainly dwindle in importance when we compare them to the comeliness, the wit and the humor of the actors . . . All of them were but twelve, or at most thirteen years old; they did their parts with such vigor and effectiveness that their earnestness, their gesture, voice, and delivery won the highest admiration and the good will of all present.
It was customary during this period for boys to play female roles, as in Shakespeare's theater, but in Vitus and Simons's other works, there are no female roles; there were Jesuit rules forbidding feminine characters and dress on the college stage. Not all Jesuit playwrights, however, followed these restrictions. Female characters do appear in some Jesuit plays, but again, as in Shakespearean comedy, they often spend most of the play in male attire.
Spectators
Plays at St. Omers, presented for the student body, faculty, and community, often coincided with official visits from guests such as bishops, deans, or local dignitaries. Occasionally a special performance was designed as a personal tribute to someone: one was produced for the newly consecrated bishop of St. Omer in 1602 and another in honor of the abbot of St. Bertin in 1653. But distinguished guests from out of town were frequent; a chronicler noted that scarcely any person of prominence coming to town failed to visit St. Omers. When the governor of Artois arrived in 1624, students produced, on a day's notice, an original play that delighted the audience.
The numbers and frenzy of the townspeople who attended plays rivaled those of some of today's Broadway shows. Prevented from seeing a performance in 1602 by an overcrowded house of nobles, the commoners were invited to a special second showing. Passion of Christ in 1614 attracted crowds that the theater could not contain. In 1624 a writer related the favor enjoyed by the players with the common people as well as with educated classes and stated that the eager mobs of every rank who gathered at the theater doors were in danger of crushing one another.
Stage
Plays were staged at St. Omers in a large hall reserved for such purposes. Before 1684, more than one playhouse was available, but we have no plan of the college as it was at that time. An engraving of the school as rebuilt in 1685, following a fire (above), does indicate a "Great Theater" and a "Little Theater." From this date at least, players were amply provided with places for performances.
The detailed stage directions in Simons's tragedies offer excellent evidence of the stage used at St. Omers, a combination of medieval multiple setting, Renaissance Terence stage, and Elizabethan platform thrust. A neutral forestage represented a common place, such as a street or a forest. A wide alcove, upstage and hidden by a moveable curtain, served for places of major importance. When the forestage was a street, the alcove could represent the interior of a palace. Two smaller curtained alcoves on either side of the large alcove could serve as anything from prison cells to houses of secondary characters. All the alcoves could be entered from the back or from the forestage. Their common roof furnished a second floor for additional scenes such as balconies or, in Vitus, a platform for angels.
Costumes, Sets, Special Effects
The number and variety of costumes for a Simons play could be substantial. Vitus calls for at least 30, including royal and heavenly robes. The rector of the school often requested money for costume material, including "cloth of gold, brocades and silks, gems, silk stockings, and gloves." Students were also known to write home requesting money for costumes.
The use of painted scenery is indicated, but for most plays scenic elements were minimal, visual emphasis being on costumes and set pieces, smaller props and furniture easily carried on and off between scenes.
Jesuit theatrics usually called for spectacular special effects. The list of superhuman occurrences in Vitus is formidable: The hero drives out a demon possessing the emperor's son. The court comedian is converted -- a cloud appears over him with a hand extended from it, and angels appear. With a word, the hero causes statues of pagan gods to fall prostrate. Christ appears to the hero in prison, and an angel rescues the hero during a thunderstorm and transports him home, where he later dies in peace.
We know little about the methods used to achieve these marvels, but there is little doubt about the effect they had on the spectators. The following describes the audience reaction to the play Euripus:
Our students recently produced a religious tragedy . . . with the twofold purpose of giving evidence of their training and of winning the souls of the spectators from worldly vanity . . . There was present . . . a multitude of both sexes, whom the pitiful plaints of the damned soul of Euripus, coupled with the terrifying spectacle of the make-believe hell, so thoroughly stirred as to make not a few of them resolve on a better manner of life.
It is 8:00 p.m. Anticipation increases. The audience has no way of knowing that tonight's opening of Vitus will inaugurate a spectacular decade of drama, nor indeed can they foresee the great traditions of Jesuit theater yet to come. For now, they simply await the "two hours traffic of our stage." Suddenly, candles flicker as actors appear. A hush falls over the crowd. The play begins.
Dr. William Hutson, who teaches theater at Creighton University in Omaha, has played Holofernes in Love's Labors Lost with the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival and the role of C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands at the Omaha Community Playhouse. He thanks William McCabe, SJ, who wrote An Introduction to The Jesuit Theater, and Louis Oldani, SJ, and Philip Fischer, SJ, editors of Jesuit Theater Englished: Five Plays of Joseph Simons.
Page maintained by R VandeVelde, vande@math.luc.edu. Updated: Sun., February 16 1997