The digital repository Drama Activity by the Ljubljana College of the Society of Jesus (1596–1773) is the result of the project Jesuit Plays as a Factor in the Development of Early Modern Drama: The Slovenian and Central European Context (Z6-8260), which was financed by the Slovenian Research Agency from the national budget. The project’s research topics were Jesuit drama activity with its very diverse content and types, and Jesuit theater as one of the most successful and durable theater institutions in Europe in the early modern period (from c. 1555 to 1773). Jesuit drama activity also played an important role in cultural development in Slovenian territory, and so the main goal of the project was to inventory primary sources and analyze them in detail, and to draw comparisons with the broader central European context to show that Jesuit drama and theater were among the most important factors in the development of theater in Slovenia.
A great deal of new primary material about theater activity by the Ljubljana Jesuits between 1640 and 1727 came to light during the research. This material constitutes the core of the repository, where it is also available in the form of digital facsimiles. When permission for online publication was obtained, the material is presented in its entirety, and otherwise only title pages are published.
Jesuit theater was initially based on Latin humanist and medieval spiritual drama, and it became an important medium for teaching and religious propaganda. The starting point of Jesuit drama activity was educational: emphasizing linguistic and rhetorical skills and preserving the vitality of Latin. Vernacular languages were only exceptionally used (especially in the German-speaking environment) in school performances. In declamations, dialogues, acted scenes, and short and long plays the Jesuits saw an ideal opportunity for applying in practice the rhetorical and linguistic knowledge acquired in school. Their performances were not for closed circles only, but instead oriented toward as wide an audience as possible, thus clearly representing the success of the Jesuit school system and its pupils. Performances were held at least once a year under normal circumstances in the colleges, and frequently more often; exceptions were years when public life was brought to a standstill due to an epidemic, war, or other disasters.
Jesuit drama can roughly be divided into two main types: school performances—that is, plays at the end and beginning of the school year and on other occasions—and religious performances, which were part of the Jesuits’ pastoral activity and were connected with celebrating the most important feasts of the liturgical year. Major performances were usually prepared by pupils in the last two grades of school (studying poetics and rhetoric) together with their teachers, and pupils from the lower grades also participated.
The Jesuits’ drama production was extensive, but they mostly printed only program notes (periochae; that is, brief summaries of the plays by acts and scenes and with lists of cast members) and the works by the most prominent Jesuit playwrights; for example, Jacob Bidermann (1578–1639), Nicolaus Caussin (1583–1651), Jacob Masen (1606–1681), Nicola Avancini (1611–1686), and Franz Lang (1654–1725). In the Jesuits’ former Austrian Province, which also included the Ljubljana college, and also in the broader German-speaking area, program notes were printed in Latin or German, and were often bilingual in both of these languages. The Jesuits did not print program notes for all of their performances, but only for major or more important ones, especially those that they staged at the end of the school year, which also included the presentation of awards to the best pupils in individual grades. Printing the program notes largely also depended on whether there was a printer in the immediate vicinity of the colleges; fewer of them were printed on the fringes of the Jesuit provinces than in major centers (e.g., in Vienna, Graz, Linz, etc.). For the Ljubljana college, for example, an increase in the number of program notes printed, and consequently preserved, can be observed after 1678, when a printshop was once again established in Ljubljana. Prior to this, program notes were printed in Graz or Klagenfurt.
The scripts of Jesuit plays were primarily a framework and tool for presenting them on stage, and they were not written to be printed for people to read. The preserved Jesuit play scripts therefore cannot be viewed as literature in the modern sense of the word. The texts were largely created in an impromptu manner, written down by the members of the order responsible for staging the play on a particular occasion. As already mentioned, in the great majority of cases such texts were conceived only as an aid to the staging and theater performance, and so most of them remained in manuscript form. From preserved notes in Jesuit diaries, annual reports for the Jesuit leadership, and the annals of individual colleges, it is possible to conclude that these manuscripts served as an internal Jesuit theater archive for an individual college and that over the course of time they became worn and scattered. This is also suggested by the fact that (judging from the preserved evidence) individual performances were staged more than once at the same college. Because the titles of certain repeated performances vary somewhat in their details, it is presumed that individual Jesuit play directors approached dramatic works or scripts that had already been written down with the intent of adding a new emphasis to the play’s content, staging, or performance. Similar titles of performances can be found across the Jesuits’ entire Austrian Province, and well as in broader (especially German-speaking) European territory, which points to three things in particular: 1) the same content-related point of departure; that is, drawing from the same historical, biblical, theological, hagiographic, and other sources; 2) the possibility of “migration” of individual plays together with ordained members of the order moving from one college to another; and 3) a close connection of Jesuit plays with contemporary social events and historical processes.
Following the dissolution of the Jesuit order, in the best case these plays and their printed (as well as manuscript) program notes were scattered among the various institutions that took over the material from the Jesuit archives and libraries, and in the worst case they were lost or destroyed. The scripts of some plays have been preserved until today through a chain of fortunate coincidences or because individuals took good care of them. It bode well for their preservation if they were dedicated to noble benefactors of the college and church dignitaries because in this way the plays (i.e., calligraphic copies of staged scripts) received a place in private libraries already during the time in which they were created and thus a greater chance of also being preserved during turbulent historical conditions for the Jesuit order.
All of the extant manuscripts of complete plays by the Ljubljana Jesuits were preserved due to the fact that, as expressions of gratitude and favor, they made their way out of the college already when they were created and became the property of men of distinction in Ljubljana. In one case, this was Ljubljana Bishop Sigismund Christoph von Herberstein (the play Lapis angularis), and in all other cases the dedicatees were members of the Auersperg family, especially Wolf Engelbert Auersperg (1610–1673), whose library preserves the manuscripts of plays covering thirty-two years of dramatic creativity in Ljubljana, from 1640 to 1672. His library preserves not only complete plays, but also printed and manuscript program notes. The majority of other Jesuit drama material in Ljubljana (i.e., program notes) was preserved due to the care and collecting zeal of Johann Gregor Thalnitscher (1655–1719).