English Jesuit Drama in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

In keeping with contemporary ideas about the value of drama as an educational tool, beginning toward the end of the sixteenth century and continuing well into the eighteenth, Latin plays were performed in English Catholic educational institutions in continental Europe. These plays were written and performed by Englishmen for the benefit of audiences composed of their fellow countrymen, and no doubt many inmates of these establishments had been exposed to the London popular stage, to university drama back in England, or both, and so had had their tastes and expectations shaped accordingly. There is therefore no reason why these performances should not be considered as a chapter in the history of English drama.

Latin plays by English authors were performed at Anglo-Catholic schools on the Continent. With the exception of the English College at Douai, these were all Jesuit establishments, so that the plays produced at all these locales were required to adhere to the rules of the Jesuit Order and to address its special needs. Only a very few Anglo-Catholic plays were printed, but fortunately a fair number have been preserved in manuscript and are available in modern editions. And a certain amount of scholarship has grown up around this body of literature, with the result that at least its main outlines are becoming visible and some of its playwrights are recognizable personalities. As long as it is realized that what can be said about Anglo-Catholic drama at this point may be somewhat preliminary and incomplete, it will prove useful to present the reader with a brief sketch of what we know about the subject.

The Jesuit Order regarded drama an essential feature of education because of its capacity for improving students’ Latin, teaching oratorical skills, training memory, and also because drama was considered an effective vehicle for inculcating Christian piety. Plays were first acted at Jesuit educational institutions in the 1550s, and became universal after the performance of plays was required by the 1599 version of the Jesuit Order’s guidelines for education, the Ratio Studiorum. This educational theory applied only to the acting of plays, not to their writing. Hence, with rare exceptions, an important difference between Anglo-Catholic drama and its English academic equivalent is that these plays were not student-written. The bylaws of the English College at St. Omers specify that plays were to be written by the professor of humanities, and no doubt similar customs applied elsewhere. At the same time, the Ratio Studiorum imposed one important limitation on dramatic productions. Beginning with the 1591 version, the use of female characters was forbidden. No reason is given for this injunction, but we may suppose that it was motivated by the same concern that loomed large in contemporary Puritan objections to the theater, a belief that having female parts acted by boys and men violated scriptural injunctions against transvestitism and possibly tended to foster homosexuality; it was therefore scandalous.¹

The plan here is to conduct a brief tour d’ horizon of dramatic activity at other English colleges on the Continent and then focus on the College of St. Omers, which supplies us with the bulk of our evidence. And when we come to St. Omers, comparatively little will be said about the premier playwright of that institution, Joseph Simons. This is because the five plays published in his lifetime have received a modern edition and his work has been the subject of a lengthy and penetrating analysis by Father William McCabe.² Given the length limitation under which this essay is written, it would seem to make more sense to emphasize those aspects of Jesuit drama that have not received such intensive study.

But we must first take note of the earliest Anglo-Catholic playwright, who did not write for an English institution. In 1574 the Oxford-educated Jesuit Edmund Campion (1540–1581) was appointed professor of rhetoric at the Clementinum in Prague, a position he held until 1580; there, one of his responsibilities was the writing of plays and other entertainments. He wrote the tragedy of Abraham and Isaac in 1575, and later that same year a six-hour tragedy, King Saul. Those plays are lost, but his 1578 Ambrosia (otherwise Tragoedia Ambrosiana, about the St. Ambrose’s struggles with the Empress Justina and the Emperor Theodosius) survives.³  Ambrosia describes itself as a comoedia, which is technically true in the sense that the play has a happy ending and contains some comic elements, but it can be more accurately described as a history play with a large religious content. This is an unusual Jesuit play for the large size of its cast (there are seventy-two entries in the dramatis personae list) and for having female characters. Campion was highly regarded as a playwright (some or all of his plays were attended by the Emperor Rudolf II and his royal guests). Ambrosia is the earliest example of a distinctive feature of Anglo-Catholic drama, a marked proclivity for history plays. An edition of two short dramatic pieces, Doctor Ironicus and Dialogus Mutus written by Campion as classroom exercises for lower-form boys at the Clementinum, have recently been published.

Most of what we know about the dramatic life of the English College at Rome derives from its Ms. 321, which contains the texts of six complete dramatic works together with the fragment of a seventh. Ms. 321 preserves the tragedies Thomas Morus (1612) and Roffensis (1618), which dramatize the deaths of Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, executed for their refusal to countenance the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, together with Thomas Cantuariensis (1613) about the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket. This last play contains a notable psychological portrait of Becket’s assassins. One imagines it was written by a priest who was able to draw on his professional insights into the nature of sin, repentance and redemption to produce more complex and nuanced representations of villains than was normal on the stage. A special feature of Jesuit drama at Rome was the existence of the intermedium, a short and humorous piece written in four acts, which were performed interleaved between the five acts of an accompanying tragedy (these were probably included because the principal, if not the only, occasion when plays were performed at the college was during Carnival Week, immediately before Lent). The manuscript preserves the intermedia performed with Thomas Morus and Thomas Cantuariensis, respectively entitled Vulpinus and Minutum, and a fragment of Somnium, the one performed with Roffensis. The seventh play preserved by Ms. 321 is the 1614 tragicomedy Captiva Religio, a rather strange play. Although it has plenty of clowning and some humor at the expense of English Protestants, the seriousness of the play’s fundamental theme (the mistreatment of the Catholic faith in England) and the genuine pain and depth of emotions experienced by some of its characters impart notes of earnestness and urgency foreign to comedy. The play is about Ergastes, a disguised Catholic pretending to be the court jester Joculus, who is discovered but rescued from execution in a comedy’s obligatory happy ending. But the effect of this conclusion is all but demolished by a final graphic reminder of the treatment actually meted out to Catholic Englishmen returning to their homeland. In retrospect, the happy ending seems artificial and unconvincing. Captiva Religio is considerably longer than the ms. tragedies, no doubt because, being a comedy, it was not written to be double-billed with an intermedium All in all, this play is an interesting but not entirely successful experiment in the recently invented dramatic genre that Sir Philip Sidney derided (in An Apologie for Poetrie) as the “mungrell Tragy-comedie.”⁴

Bodleian Library ms. Rawl. Poet. 171, fols. 60–82 preserves a Jesuit comedy called by modern scholarship (the ms. lacks a title) Psyche et Filii Eius. Since its Act III chorus mentions three rivers, the Guadalquivir, the Tiber, and the Pisuerga, it was probably acted at one of the two English Jesuit colleges in Spain, at Seville and Valladolid. And, since the play contains female speaking parts, it seems likely that it was produced at a Spanish college where Jesuit rules were not strictly enforced. The play itself has remarkably little Christian content. Rather, it adheres to what F. S. Boas once called “the contemporary fashion of personifying or allegorizing the parts and faculties of man.” And yet at the end of the ms. is appended a set of act-following choruses that recommend a specifically Catholic interpretation of the preceding action (Psyche is distraught because of her exile from England, the play somehow has to do with her miserable condition, and the character Thelema, interpreted as Free Will, is a representative of Protestant perversity, and so forth). It looks very much as if someone doctored a preexisting English academic comedy, of a familiar type featuring personified abstractions, for production at a Jesuit college. Strong resemblances to the anonymous Stoicus Vapulans, produced at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1618, suggest a Cambridge provenance for the play in its original form.

Douai was the chief Anglo-Catholic educational center on the Continent, with a university containing Scots and Irish colleges as well as an English one founded by Cardinal William Allen. The English College boasted a couple of playwrights of genuine distinction. One of these was William Drury (1584‒ca. 1643), who in 1620 published two plays, a tragicomic history play Alvedus, about Alfred the Great, and a comedy entitled Mors; contemporary translations of these were produced by Robert Knightley and Robert Squire respectively.⁵ In 1628 Drury published at Douai a volume with the title Dramatica Poemata, containing reprints of those two plays and a new comedy, Reparatus sive Depositum Tragicomoedia (this collection was sufficiently popular that it warranted an Antwerp reprinting in 1641).

The fact that the published Reparatus is identified as prima pars suggests that it was at least intended to have a sequel, and, since the spiritual progress of the reformed robber Reparatus (“Redeemed”) is far from complete at the end of the extant play, and since our play’s plot has other loose ends that require resolution, a sequel certainly would have been desirable. Nevertheless, if Drury ever wrote such a play, he did not see fit to print it. The primary interest of the play lies in the remarkable degree to which it is influenced by Shakespeare. It involves the coexistence and interaction of two radically different existential realms, the “big world” of its serious characters, who faced with truly pathetic problems and capable of genuine and deeply felt emotions, and the “little world” of clowns and buffoons, whose problems are essentially trifling and who are incapable of experiencing genuine pain. But Drury places his own distinctive spin on this existential dichotomy. In Shakespeare, the dividing line that separates these two “worlds” tends to be social class, whereas in Reparatus it is religious faith. Thus we are confronted with the spectacle of a “big world” woman married to a distinctly “little world” husband, and Reparatus has a foot in both camps: in some scenes he is confronted with a “dark night of the soul,” but in others he interacts with the “little world” characters on an equal footing, even adopting very different speech patterns for these encounters. In the course of the play Reparatus is gradually experiencing a Christian conversion; one could say that he is progressively moving from the one realm to the other. All of this is an intelligent and highly original appropriation of Shakespeare’s familiar comic formula for Catholic purposes.

The other notable Douai playwright was Thomas Compton Carleton (1592–1666), better remembered as one of the outstanding Jesuit philosophers of the seventeenth century. He appears to have taught at Douai from 1619 until 1623 and during that period produced three plays, Fatum Vortigerni (1619), Emma Angliae Regina ac Mater Hardicanuti Regis (1620), and Henricus Octavus (1623). The latter two are lost. Despite the fact that Fatum Vortigerni shows Carleton to have been a talented playwright, there is no evidence for similar literary activities at the other colleges where he taught. Fatum Vortigerni tells the story of Vortigern, the British king who was injudicious enough to invite the Saxons Hengist and Horsa to come to his land to help resist Scottish and Pictish incursions, in exchange for some territorial concessions, with the result that the Saxons gain control of most of Britain. The play is not freighted with the same heavy-handed and explicit ideological and polemical baggage that characterizes some contemporary Jesuit drama, but Carleton adds one feature that would have had special meaning for a Catholic audience. Carleton provides Vortigern with a nameless wife whom he is obliged to cast off in order to marry Hengist’s daughter Ronixa, which provokes the angry criticism of Bishop Wodinus. In a heated confrontation the king and the bishop debate the justification of Vortigern’s divorce, the relation of church and state, and the nature and limitations of royal power. Douai spectators would have duly noted the parallels with the Henrican divorce and the opposition put up by Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher.⁶

We might also note in passing the existence of another published Douai play, Adrian Roulers’ Maria Stuarta Tragoedia, produced at Marchiennes College in 1589 and printed at Douai in 1593.⁷ On the whole this is a straightforward albeit of course highly sympathetic account of the events leading up to Mary’s execution, although it contains the gross historical misrepresentation that she was put to death without the benefit of a trial.

The principal source of what we know about English Jesuit drama is the English College at St. Omers. The reason for this is that the college was forced to relocate owing to the French suppression of the Jesuit Order in the eighteenth century. After removing to Bruge in 1762, and then to Liège 11 years later, in 1794 it migrated to Stonyhurst, Lancs., where it still exists (as a coeducational secondary school) under the name of Stonyhurst College, and where a considerable number of plays, together with supporting archival material, are still preserved in the College library.

St. Omers is a town in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais several miles inland from Dunkirk, but in 1593 it lay within the territory of the Spanish Netherlands, when Robert Parsons founded the English College there. As early as 1602 we hear of the production of a play de Humphredo aulico confessionem repudiante, which McCabe (p. 81) suggested might have been about the martyrdom of the monk Humphrey Middlemore, executed in 1535 for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, and an assortment of archival evidence assembled by McCabe extends down to 1756. Thanks to this material, the dates of a number of plays, some surviving, can be ascertained, although neither archival testimony nor play manuscripts identify the authors of these pieces. The college Constitutiones required that plays be written by the professor of humanities. Since Joseph Simons’s Vitus was performed in May 1623 and his Zeno in August 1631, he must have occupied this position at least for the time-frame delimited by these dates. Other than Simons, we know little about the occupants of this professorship or their times of service. If further archival research could produce a list of masters for St. Omers, then we could begin putting names to at least some plays and some playwrights might emerge as distinct personalities.

St. Omers plays were typically written in three acts instead of the standard five and hence tend to be short (a typical play runs to approximately a thousand lines). Perhaps because of the size of the college, they do not require large casts. These considerations combined to place a premium on efficient dramaturgy and terse writing, so St. Omers plays tend to be mercifully free of the padding and luxuriant rhetoric which often characterized humanistic drama. Anglo-Catholic plays produced elsewhere appear to have been performed in front of a simple painted backcloth,⁸ but at St. Omers plays were written for a more elaborate arrangement in a permanent theater. From stage directions we can deduce that the back of the stage was a structure having three alcoves, each with a curtain that could be drawn to reveal an interior scene. The structure had a roof sufficiently sturdy that actors could stand on it in scenes representing such things as epiphanies. These staging facilities may have differed from the freestanding “houses” employed for academic drama at the English universities but were capable of representing an equally broad range of physical action.

A number of St. Omers plays by authors other than Simons have now been issued in modern editions. Those by unknown authors include Ananias, Azarias, Mizael sive Pietas de Impietate Victrix (date unknown), which dramatizes the biblical story of three youths better known by their Babylonian names of Schadrach, Mesaach, and Abednego. Daniel and the three boys are eager to suffer death to bear witness to their faith and comport themselves toward Nebuchadnezzar in a way that can only be described as provocative so as to achieve their end. To a modern reader they seem almost morbidly enamored with the idea of death. Its playwright appears to have imitated features of a couple of other St. Omers plays. Nebuchadnezzar’s son is Evilmerdoach is Daniel’s sympathetic friend, and he seems distinctly based on Abderramus son Zunelmus in Joseph Simons’s Sanctus Pelagius Martyr, even if his devotion to Daniel does not bring him to a similar bad end. And there is a distinct resemblance between a soliloquy between Seresar and a speech by the villainous Quicuxtemocus in the anonymous Montezuma of unknown date. The undated play Artaxerxes is a straightforward dramatization of the events leading up to the assumption of the throne of Persia by Artaxerxes I in 464 b.c. It contains a ghost apparition and plenty of court intrigue, but is remarkably short, simple, written in three scenes but undivided into acts. It seems likely this item was preserved as a specimen of plays written for performance by boys in lower forms Basilindus sive Ambitio Summum Gentis Humanae Malum tells how King Basilius is deposed and murdered by his brother Basilindus. This play is an easily deciphered psychagogic allegory for the derangement that occurs in an individual personality when ambition gets the better of reason. It is therefore a wholesome and effective vehicle for moral instruction. Its principal feature of interest is its unusually detailed stage directions.

The Crux Vindicata of 1616 dramatizes an incident in the history of the True Cross. Fortunae Ludibrium sive Bellisarius (1651) is a clumsily written history play notable primarily for imitating Joseph Simons’s 1631 Zeno in being divided into four acts labeled Protasis, Epistasis, Catastasis, and Catastrophe (terms taken from the analysis of plot offered in Aelius Donatus’s On Comedy and Tragedy, which was widely disseminated in editions of Terence). An equally imperfect play is the 1614 Magister Bonus sive Arsenius, which dramatizes the events leading up to the saintly protagonist’s departure from Theodosius’s imperial court to lead life as a hermit. Arsenius had been serving as tutor to the emperor’s elder son Arcadius, and in the play he is a paragon of all a good schoolmaster ought to be. Montezuma, which describes courtly intrigue at the Mexican court during the time of Cortez’s conquest, is an excellent play, arguably the best in the St. Omers repertoire. Neither its high quality nor the fact that it is preserved by a manuscript that otherwise contains two plays by Joseph Simons (that were never published) constitutes proof that Simons was its author, but the possibility certainly is worth entertaining. It is remarkable that the dark and bloody nature of Aztec religion offers a perfect opportunity for a justification of the Christian conquest of a pagan people and more specifically of the Christian missionary enterprise, but that the author does not touch on these themes. Morus is an unusually short yet effective dramatization of Sir Thomas More’s martyrdom. Certain similarities suggest it was written under the influence of the Henricus Octavus seu Schisma Anglicanum by the Louvain professor Nicolaus Vernulaeus [de Vernulz, 1583–1649].

Some St. Omers items are by identifiable authors. The two plays Felix Concordia Fratrum sive Ioannes et Paulus (1651), which dramatizes the martyrdom of two saints by order of Julian the Apostate, and Gemitus Columbae sive Theophili Lachrymae (1650 or 1651), about St. Theophilus the Penitent, were written collaboratively by P. Cuffaud and other upper-form boys, no doubt under the close supervision of the professor of humanities. Other than these collaborating schoolboys, only two St. Omers playwrights can be identified by name. The first is “P. Clarcus,” evidently a certain Father Clarke, author of Innocentia Purpurata, a historical tragedy about the latter stages of the War of the Roses. In a detailed study of this play, Martin Wiggins has shown how heavily it owes to Shakespearian borrowings, which he persistently identified as a case of plagiarism.⁹ Wiggins showed that Henry VI, Part 3, Hamlet, King John, and All’s Well That Ends Well were laid under contribution. His detailed analysis is persuasive, although his use of the word plagiarism is perhaps less so, since it arguably involves an anachronistic retrojection of modern legal and ethical notions about intellectual property. A contemporary spectator might have appreciated the many borrowings and imitations without being unduly troubled by them.

The best-known Anglo-Catholic playwright was Joseph Simons (1594–1671; his real name was Emmanuel Lobb), who served as St. Omers professor of humanities ca. 1623‒ca. 1631. As indicated, published studies of Simons already exist, so little is said of him here.¹⁰ Briefly, five of his history plays (Leo Armenus, Mercia, Theoctistus, Vitus, and Zeno were subsequently published: Zeno (1631) and Mercia (1624) were printed together at Rome in 1648, and Theoctistus (1624) was printed at Liège in 1653. These three plays with the addition of Vitus (1623) and Leo Armenus (between 1624 and 1629) were subsequently reissued in Tragoediae Quinque Josephi Simonis Angli (Liège, 1656) and became the standard canon of Simons’ plays. Leo Armenus and Zeno are also preserved in manuscripts in shorter versions that presumably represent the plays in their original St. Omers form, so we can see that the printed versions are considerably expanded and elaborated (some manuscripts of Zeno appear to represent intermediate stages in the evolution of the text), and it may be assumed that the three other printed plays, for which no manuscript evidence survives, had a similar history. No doubt the reason for these changes is that Simons rewrote his plays for revivals at other institutions, where St. Omers’s length-limitation did not apply. For some reason Simons did not see fit to print two further plays produced during his years at St. Omers, Sanctus Pelagius Martyr (1623) and Sanctus Damianus (1626), preserved in a Stonyhurst manuscript. The Tragoediae Quinque volume was occasionally reprinted, and the five plays it contains were produced in various Catholic European nations. It may not be unreasonable, therefore, to identify Simons as one of the most popular and influential English playwrights of the seventeenth century, conceivably second only to Shakespeare himself.

These are the St. Omers plays currently available in modern editions. Others, including lost ones attested by archival evidence, are listed by McCabe.¹¹ In reviewing both extant and lost Jesuit plays, one can see that they tend to fall into two distinct categories. The first is the “martyr play.”¹² Since martyrdom was a very real prospect for its members, both those who returned to England in disguise and those engaged in missionary work in far-flung places, it is understandable that the Jesuit Order had an institutional need to celebrate, even to glamorize, martyrdom; therefore such plays were routine dramatic fare. The other consists of history plays set during the late Roman Empire after Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, the Byzantine Empire, or in various periods of English history. Perhaps the most interesting are the ones that deal with problems concerning the relation of church and state, a major point of contention between Catholicism and English Protestantism that greatly exercised some contemporary Jesuit theologians.¹³ The point of these plays was to indoctrinate spectators with the orthodox Catholic theory of what this relationship ought to be. Its essence, of course, was that spiritual concerns must always trump secular ones, so that church authority should prevail over the requirements of the secular state whenever these interests came into conflict; history plays were especially useful for illustrating this point and discrediting any rival Protestant view. At least in St. Omers plays, a third category of plays is also visible, ones that cater to an understandable curiosity about faraway lands that had become objects of the Jesuit missionary enterprise: Japan in the 1624 Paulus Iaponensis, Africa in the 1642 Gonsalvus Sylveira (these are lost plays, their quondam existence is attested by archival records), and America in Montezuma.

It is also striking that, although Catholics were capable of writing vitriolic anti-Anglican satire,¹⁴ little of this rough handling found its way into their dramatic literature, and what small amount we do find is limited to plays produced at the English College at Rome.¹⁵ There is simply no Jesuit equivalent of some of the sectarian polemics one finds in English university plays, notably John Hackett’s 1623 Cambridge comedy Loiola, the vile and dreary anonymous Cambridge comedy Risus Anglicanus, and the second Prologue of George Ruggle’s extraordinarily popular 1615 Cambridge comedy Ignoramus.¹⁶ By and large, it was probably thought that such scurrilous stuff was incompatible with the seriousness and dignity of the Jesuit educational enterprise.