ABSTRACT
The Jesuits of Cluj based their curriculum and extracurricular activities on the guidelines set down in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599. In this foundational document the production of school plays is not mandated, but great emphasis is placed on public speaking, on the demonstration of linguistic competence, and on the value of competition in a public or semi-public setting.2 In the decades following the creation of the Society, Jesuit educators, constructing an educational program in the richly theatrical culture of the late Renaissance, quickly seized upon the idea of using school dramas as means of teaching public-speaking skills and morality. These plays also served as a way of advertising the Jesuit schools themselves, thereby generating not only a long list of original plays but also an extensive literature on the topic.3 Within the Habsburg lands, Jesuit school drama, developing alongside other forms of public performance such as recitations and academic defenses, played a significant cultural role in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.4 Within Hungarian-speaking lands, Jesuit drama helped shape both the development of literary Magyar as well as the perpetuation of Baroque Latin as a living language in a nation that continued to use Latin as the language of its government well into the nineteenth century. In particular, Jesuit school dramas, through their sheer numbers, exercised an enormous influence on the development of theatre in Hungary down to the present. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is estimated that roughly 7,800 different plays were staged in schools in Hungary (including Transylvania). Of these, an
1 A shorter version of this chapter was published as “Patriotism, Catholicity and the Jesuit plays of Kolozsvár” in the CD-ROM Proceedings of the international conference “Iskola és Színház” (School and Theatre) Miskolc, Hungary, September 7-9, 2002.
