Thematic and Generic Medievalism in the Polish Neo-Latin Drama of the Renaissance and Baroque

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Thematic and Generic Medievalism in the Polish Neo-Latin Drama of the Renaissance andBaroqueAuthor(s): Kevin CroxenSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 265-298Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309546 .

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THEMATIC AND GENERIC MEDIEVALISM IN THE POLISH NEO-LATIN DRAMA OF THE RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE

Kevin Croxen, Harvard College Library

Introduction This paper discusses the persistence of certain common features, which

we collectively designate as "medieval," in the dramas composed by Polish authors in the version of Latin referred to as "neo-Latin" from the begin- nings of composition in this post-Medieval variant of the language through at least the first quarter of the 17th century. Manuscript transmission was not kind to this material: the complete texts of only perhaps 28 Polish neo- Latin stage plays were still extant at the beginning of the 19th century, of which eleven have survived to the present.2 From this collection, seven plays will constitute the primary focus of this paper. They are: the Bole- slaus Secundus Furens (composed before 1588; discovered only after the Second World War) by the obscure Joannes Joncre; the Castus Joseph (1587) and the Penthesilea (1618) of Szymon Szymonowic (Simon Simo- nides) (1558?-1625); the Tragoedia Faelicitas (1596), the Philopater seu Pietas (1596), and the Eutropius (1604) of Gregorius Cnapius (1564-1639); and the Drama comicum Odostratocles (after 1597). Some reference will also be made to the anonymous and in certain respects exceptional Trag- oedia Mauritius (1614) and Tragoedia Belisarius (1605).3

Operating on Western European models and assumptions, "Medieval- ism" in neo-Latin composition designates a loose collection of linguistic, formal, stylistic, and thematic features common to Latin literary composition in the Middle Ages which collectively fell into disfavor with the gradual rediscovery and rehabilitation of the classical Roman linguistic and compositional norms that began under the influence of the early 14th- century Italian Humanists.4 Compositional features may therefore be referred to as medieval if they denote aspects of a work which can be shown not to be in accordance with ancient norms, as those norms were understood during the Renaissance and Baroque, but which are in accordance with the practice of the medieval period.

SEEJ, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1999): p. 265-p. 298 265



266 Slavic and East European Journal

Adapting successfully to the newly reconstructed compositional norms of antiquity was a laborious and gradual process that commenced later in Western European territories further removed culturally and liguistically from Italy. Nevertheless, medieval elements are conventionally assumed to have been purged from neo-Latin literature by roughly 1500 or soon thereafter.5 As regards neo-Latin drama, this supposes a drama composed along Aristotelian lines of tragedy and comedy, as the former was practiced in Latin by the 1st century Roman writer Seneca, and the latter in the Latin comedies of Terence and Plautus. Though frequently of a very high order of linguistic purity and demonstrating an admirable command of ancient rhetoric, Polish neo-Latin drama through at least the 17th century generally failed to adhere to many reconstructed classical norms in several key respects while in their place continued to exploit features which had been customary for medieval drama both in Latin and in the vernaculars.6

Briefly enumerated here, such medieval features include: 1) immense length of the texts intended for performance, up to several times the size of their ancient antecedents; 2) a structure and function of choral odes bearing no relation whatever to ancient Roman practice; 3) a general disregard of Aristotelian precepts for the dipolar generic catagorization of dramatic composition into "tragic" and "comic," in favor of the complex medieval system of genres that had evolved in conjunction with the church-sponsored Cycle and Mystery plays of the Middle Ages. Moreover, the Jesuit poet and scholar Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Mathias Casimir Sarbievius) (1595-1640), whose treatise "De tragoedia et comedia, sive, Seneca et Terentius" has generally been thought to be the description and theoretical justification of 16th and 17th century Polish neo-Latin dramatic composition, in fact cannot be demonstrated to have had any particular concern for contemporary Latin dramatic composition. His primary interest was the recovery of Seneca and Terence for meaningful performance under contemporary 17th-century staging conditions and theatric conventions. 4) Without Aristotelian precept or Senecan praxis to help provide their dramas with internal structural and thematic coherence, Polish neo- Latin dramatists continued to rely instead on the same dynamic organizing principle that had been pivotal to most medieval religious drama: sacramental psychology, to which principle mun- dane considerations of historical accuracy, dramatic structure, characterization, dramatic tension, and even Aristotelian notions of "the tragic" were consistently subordinated. Whether it is even possible to have tragedy at all in a Christian context is a question very much in evidence in most of the plays of this period as their authors struggle and generally fail to forge a modern synthesis of ancient theory with medieval praxis in a shape that could still both entertain and instruct.

The period under investigation here happens to be generally synchro- nous with what is conventionally periodized as the "Renaissance" and "Ba-



Thematic and Generic Medievalism 267

roque" eras of vernacular Polish literature, but these terms, whatever demons they may conjure for the various European vernacular literatures, are largely inoperative for the European Latin-language literary tradition to which Polish authors were only one group of regional contributors out of a large assembly. For this European Latin literature the periodization is simply "Modern," as opposed to "Medieval."7 The 17th century nevertheless forms an appropriate terminus for this study for several reasons. By the end of the 17th century the unifying influences of the Church's system of Latin- language religious and cultural education, in which intricacies an educated person became proficient even if only to polemicize against them effectively in their own terms, had been largely shattered by the events of the 30-Years War and its aftermath.8 The decay and fragmentation of the cohesive cultural foundation for literary production in Latin was matched by the developing maturity of several of the younger vernacular literatures during the course of the 17th century. While earlier authors in these vernaculars may generally have begun their careers writing in Latin, either simply to learn the craft of artistic composition or to assure the longevity and wide dissemination of their efforts, and only later turned to attempting equivalent artistry in their local vernaculars, subsequent generations of authors now simply skipped the Latin phase altogether, and learned their craft directly from earlier exempla in the local vernaculars.9 So whereas one may frequently speak of neo-Latin literature for the earlier period as a European phenomenon with regional or local variations, at least for the areas adhering to some form of Western-rite Christianity, by the close of the 17th century such a notion has ceased to be operative except perhaps as an abstraction. At that point one becomes able to speak only of vernacular literatures, generally national, which also exhibit some secondary output of an occasional nature in neo-Latin written by a relative handful of scattered authors. With regard to Polish neo-Latin drama, the tradition becomes discontinuous by the second quarter of the 17th century. 10

I Polish neo-Latin drama of the 16th and 17th centuries has generally been

simply dismissed by critics.11 On the other hand, its few, almost exclusively Polish admirers have often done it an equal disservice by overemphasizing the Aristotelian and Senecan facets of this literature at the expense of its other, perhaps more remarkable qualities.12

Slavic neo-Latin drama through at least the first stage of the Slavic Ba- roque, including Polish neo-Latin, is derived from two primary sources.13 The first of these is, ultimately, the praxis of the 1st century Roman author Seneca.14 The overall compositional and scenic structures of the plays, the meters, the language, the tendency toward prolix rhetorical soliloquy, the system of imagery and metaphor - all are borrowed from or developed from




exempla found in the eight surviving Senecan tragedies (if the Hercules Oetaeus is in fact by Seneca), the fragmentary Phoenissae, and the anonymous Octavia.15 An exceptionally well-educated and Hellenistically disposed author like Szymonowic could and did draw directly on material from the Classical Greek drama, but this was highly unusual, and the Greek was used by Szymonowic to supplement and refine, not supplant, the underlying Senecan structure of his plays.

With the possible exception of the three "Humanist" plays -Joncre's Boleslaus Furens (before 1588) and the two dramas (1587, 1618) of Szymonowic, concerning which no performance information exists, all Pol- ish Latin dramas through the end of the Baroque were composed for stage performance just as their Senecan models were believed to have been.16 As this drama (excepting Joncre and Szymonowic) was entirely Jesuit Ordens- drama and performed at schools and collegia, it was overtly didactic, linguis- tically and morally, and was composed ad hoc for specific occasions.17

The second, and in several respects more influential source for Polish neo- Latin drama consisted of the medieval tradition of religious and secular drama.18 Indeed, if the veneer of classicizing Senecan neo-Latin surface form is removed from the Polish Latin Baroque plays, the resulting entities become strikingly similar to their medieval dramatic predecessors. The medieval component is not absent from Western European neo-Latin literature, of course, but in the neo-Latin literatures of Italy, France, Germany, and England the medieval component is most evident in works composed before around 1500. The effects of telescoping in the transmission of the Latin literary tradition to Eastern Europe postponed the onset of the normal purgation of medieval elements from Slavic neo-Latin literature until the 17th to mid-18th centuries, varying with region and nationality. The medieval world-view is immediately visible in the immense length of the plays - a legacy of the medieval performance tradition - but also can be seen to determine much about the plays' contents, characterization, and dramatic form. Personified Christian moral qualities as characters are a staple of these tragedies, even in as self-consciously Senecan a product as the early Boleslaus Secundus Furens.19

With regard to structure, the plays under consideration all observe the five-act Senecan format, itself of Hellenistic origin and "canonized" by Horace in Ars poeticae, 89-90.20 Serious distinctions occur, however, in the presence and handling of the choruses. Individual acts are divided by choruses in the Polish Humanist and Jesuit plays (including the comic Odostra- tocles). The exception is the late Mauritius (1614), which employs Latin astrophic choral lyric only to separate acts IV and V, while the occasional Senecan technique of chorus-as-actor helps to divide acts II and 111.21 The reluctance of the Mauritius to employ choral lyric for act division appears to be ultimately of German origin, and is paralleled in Czech neo-Latin




tragedy, e.g. the contemporary Bretislaus (1614) of Jan Campanus (1572- 1622).22 Choruses are in Latin in the Humanist plays, but are generally in the vernacular in the Jesuit. To be sure, Cnapius fitted his Eutropius with elaborate non-strophic Latin choruses, but these were intended for a single performance in 1604 and an audience of one: the Cardinal Bernardus Macieiovius (Maciejowski) (1548-1608), to whom the author dedicated the play.23 For potential student performance, Cnapius also thoughtfully provided a full set of replacement vernacular choruses.

The choruses and overall dramatic structure of the two plays of the Hellenophile Szymonowic display a peculiar hybridization as a result of his conscious but not entirely successful imitation of Greek tragic practice in preference to Roman.24 Despite his knowledge of the 5th century Attic tragedians, Szymonowic nevertheless continued to employ, as did all Slavic neo-Latin tragedians, Seneca's regularized five act structure and did not attempt to naturalize the much more flexible Classical Greek system, where the epeisodia (acts) simply indicated the division between stasima (choral songs) and could number from as few as three to as many as six.25 But Szymonowic divided his acts with Latin odes built on the Classical Greek tripartite structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode (maintaining the syllabic correspondence between the lines of the strophe and antistrophe) in as precise an imitation of Pindaric prosody as he could man- age. The Greek system of choral composition is entirely absent in Seneca, whether a particular Senecan ode was strophic or not; when strophic, Sen- eca adhered to Horatian lyric meters.26 On the other hand, Szymonowic did not employ any of the 'other, more flexible Greek solutions to the problem of act division, i.e., astrophic choral lyric, chanted anapests, lyric dialogue between actor and chorus, or simple exit and entry. Imprisoned within a rigid Senecan act structure, therefore, Szymonowic's Hellenized choruses perform dramatic and philosophical functions more similar to their Senecan predecessors than to any Attic models. In fact, Szymonowic was nearly as restrictive in his practice as Seneca himself, who still sporadi- cally employed the chorus as an actor, e.g., Thyestes, 623-788, and more so than his own Italian contemporary, Bernardino Stefonio, who employs the chorus consistently in this capacity in the Flavia and the Crispus.27

Mention must be made at this point of the structure of the Dramma comicum Odostratocles. The comedy is also divided into 5 acts, as Roman comedy originally was not, though the author could have been following the model of those overzealous Renaissance editors who imposed the five- act structure on the surviving Plautine corpus (CHCL 95). But in the Odostratocles these five acts are divided by Polish vernacular odes, each of which has a tripartite pseudo-Pindaric strophic structure. The very presence of the odes is alien not only to Roman comedy proper, but also to neo- Latin comic practice. The model for this neo-Latin comic practice is the




one neo-Latin comic poet whose work had gained a Europe-wide currency considerably prior to the presumed 1627 (or slightly earlier) composition date of the Odostratocles, a poet whose plays continued to be primary models for such scholastic composition until the 1800s: the so-called "Terentius Christianus," the Dutchman Cornelius Schoneaus (1540-1611), whose four Comoediae sacrae appeared in 1592.28 Schoneaus, though employing a wide variety of meters in his dialogue (each meter labelled in the margins of the first published edition of his plays), nonetheless limited his extra-dramatic material in the comedies to a preceding prologue and argument, and a concluding peroration. Schoneaus has carefully adapted his devotio moderna content to a relatively pure Terentian structure29.

The Odostratocles, on the other hand, despite Winniczuk's attempts to connect it with the Terentio-Plautine tradition, and admitting the play's copious verbal borrowings from Plautus, still displays its author's complete lack of understanding of the compositional and structural norms and original social function of the Roman comic tradition.30 Its author obviously joined the play's non-tragic plot to the only structural model with which he was familiar and comfortable: the Polish Jesuit reflex (with vernacular choruses and prologue) of the Senecan model of tragic composition. Fur- ther, the emphatically tripartite structure of the Odostratocles's vernacular choral odes, a feature neither customary to Polish-language Jesuit practice, nor appearing in Kochanowski, implies that the author was acquainted with Szymonowic's Pindaric "hypercorrection" to Senecan praxis in at least the Castus Joseph and perhaps the Penthesilea, too, and that he attempted somewhat ineptly to incorporate this feature in the structure in his play. Ineptly, for the tripartite Polish choruses in the Odostratocles show no hint of attempting to duplicate Szymonowic's Pindaric syllabic correspondence in the "strophe" and "antistrophe," but rather employ the Polish reflexes of some of the simpler Horatian meters, e.g., Sapphics, naturalized into Pol- ish by Kochanowski in the previous century. A meter and stanzaic shape are repeated without change throughout a single ode. Structurally, the Odostratocles is closer to Seneca than to Plautus.

The vernacular Polish choruses of the Jesuit neo-Latin Ordensdrama constituted a structural device most similar to and adopted for the same reason as the device of inserting vernacular passages in the Western Euro- pean transitional liturgical and secular plays intended for popular performance before general audiences from the 14th and 15th centuries (Cham- bers 87-91). Indeed, Polish Jesuit performances from the very beginning had had a large percentage of vernacular in them. The plays of the Kodeks Pultuski were evenly divided (according to genres) into 18 Polish and 18 Latin texts; while of the surviving Jesuit performance programs from the 17th century, 34 percent of them, according to Okoni, are in Polish (24).

For neo-Latin drama composed in the Renaissance and Baroque, such




structural deviations on the part of Polish dramatic authors required at least an illusion of adherence to Roman precedent. This illusion was theo- retically effected by exploiting the imprecision of the match between the partially reconstructed system of Roman genres (in the inaccurate way the Renaissance and Baroque understood the ancient system) and the very different, directly inherited and therefore more vital medieval system of dramatic genres. The solution adopted by the Polish neo-Latin playwright was to recast essentially medieval compositions that adhered to medieval thematic norms and modes of thought, and to wedge these compositions into the alien mold of this newly recreated Roman generic and structural model. The language, in the usual neo-Latin fashion, was consciously classicizing, cribbing as much lexical and stylistic material as possible from a play's nominal Roman prototype, within the limits posed by the linguistic mastery of the individual playwright and the essentially medieval thought this classicizing language was being called upon to express.

The Slavic Renaissance and Baroque's reconstructed Roman system consisted essentially of two dramatic genres: "tragedy" (Seneca) and "comedy" (Terence and Plautus).31 On the other hand, the fundamentally medieval system of dramatic genres that the Polish neo-Latin playwrights attempted to Romanize by force during the Renaissance and Baroque had been tai- lored for the educational and polemical needs of the Church and of the religious orders that were the nearly exclusive source of this type of Latin composition. Winniczuk, following Kindermann and Windakiewicz, among others, divides Jesuit dramatic composition, Latin and vernacular, generically into five categories (without, however, considering either their immediate antecedents or how they relate to the system of classical genres allegedly in force at this time): 1) drama aimed at the correcting of improper conduct and the improving of one's manner of life (genus morale) 2) drama whose argument is drawn from historical events (genus historicum) 3) drama whose argument consists of the life and deeds of martyrs (genus martyrologicum) 4) drama in which demons and devils are introduced who exact punishment from sinners (genus daemonium) and 5) drama in which questions tending toward religion and conscience are treated (genus polemicum).32

Winniczuk and her peers fail to consider the ramifications in the Renais- sance and Baroque of this naturalized group of five medieval dramatic genres being compressed into the newly restored, but still alien, dipolar Roman Latin-language scheme of "tragedy" and "comedy." The imprecise match allowed considerable leeway to the individual author regarding which medieval Christian themes and their related material were appropriate for being repackaged as a particular Roman genre. Jan Okoni, the primary Polish scholar of Ordensdrama, is all too aware of classical theoretical norms, but claims the consistent failure of the drama to meet them to be attributable to the "practical" aims of the playwrights, rather than to their




theoretical aims and restrictions (222-23). Though he notes the tendency in this literature toward the mixing of genres, referring not only to such "typically Baroque" entities as "tragicomedy" and "comitragedy," but also to the 17th-century expansion of the notion "drama" to include religio- philosophical dialogue, he nevertheless asserts that the root theoretical notion of "tragedy" for the Baroque neo-Latin (Polish) dramatist remained essentially Aristotle's. Okon pins his trust in the fundamentally classical and Aristotelian contours of the Slavic Baroque theoretical notion of "tragedy" in neo-Latin literature largely on the strength of the recapitulation of the Aristotelian system in the primary Baroque neo-Latin theoretical treatise dealing with the subject of drama. This is the Polish Jesuit scholar and lyric poet Maciej Sarbiewski's "De tragoedia et comedia, sive, Seneca et Terentius," forming the ninth book of his massive De perfecta poesi.33

But Okoi's trust in Sarbiewski is misplaced. In his treatise Sarbiewski first reproves Pontanus for his inaccurate notion that tragedy is the "poesia illustrium virorum" (poetry of illustrious men) - since tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, "non est imitatio personarum, sed actionum" (is not the imitation of persons, but of actions) -and then proceeds to reiterate Aristotle's description of tragedy in a condensed and modified form, his modifications intended for no other purpose than to fit Aristotelian dramatic theory to the Roman subjects of his essay: Seneca and Terence (Sarbiewski 228ff). Sarbiewski adapts Aristotle on two distinct levels: on the level of stagecraft, and on the level of the drama itself. The chapters dealing with stagecraft are fashioned to reflect contemporary Jesuit staging practices, as may be seen from Chapter 3, "De lumina artificiali," and a description (with illustrations) of a theater corresponding to the standard late-16th century Italian frame stage, in Chapter 4, "De structura ipsius theatri et apparatu." But Sarbiewski's description of contemporary 16th century Jesuit stagecraft apparently lulled Okoni into assuming that Sarbiewski's chapters dealing with dramatic theory also describe contemporary 16th century Jesuit practice. This simply is not the case. As the very title "De tragoedia et comoedia, sive, Seneca et Terentius" indicates, Sarbiewski's intent was to provide a theoretical bridge, by means of which the ancient Roman drama could be performed successfully on the 16th century stage with a measure of understanding on the part of the 16th century performers and audience. While referring repeatedly therefore to the theoretical strictures of Aris- totle and Horace, and polemecizing against those of Pontanus and Scal- inger (both of whom, it must be recalled, like Sarbiewski himself were attempting no more than theoretical descriptions of the ancient Roman drama for their own contemporaries), at no point does Sarbiewski cite from contemporary Jesuit Latin dramatic composition. He directly alludes to such composition only once, and then dismissively from the standpoint of tragedy, saying:




Illud animadvertendum est diligentissime, si sequi velimus Aristotelem, non posse nos pro tragoedia assumere argumentum aliquem s. martyrem vel probum eximie virum, et maxime supernaturaliter sanctum et fortem.... Ex parte etiam ipsius martyris vix oriri potest commiseratio, cum et multi probi viri idem sibi optent et illum ipsum gaudere de cruciatu intellegant. It should be very carefully observed, if we wish to follow Aristotle, that for tragedy we can not appropriate as our subject some holy martyr or extraordinarily virtuous man, and one especially pious and courageous. . . . On the part of the martyr himself there can scarcely arise any appeal to compassion, since many virtuous men would choose the same thing for themselves and would perceive this same martyr as rejoicing at his torment. (Sarbiewski 230)

In just a few strokes of the pen Sarbiewski has eliminated most of the 16th and 17th century Polish Latin plays that were considered to be "tragedies" by their authors. Where Sarbiewski proceeds to theorize is in the manner which ancient Roman practice may most appropriately fit into an Aristotelian scheme. Of these formulations of the differences between tragedy and comedy, the most curious is no. VIII, "Exitu plerumque contrario diversae sunt." By polemicizing against the "vulgus grammaticorum," Sarbiewski may also perhaps be acknowledging a tendency of contemporary Jesuit Latin composition:

Tragoedia enim est infelix in magna fortuna, comoedia est felix in parva. Falso tamen vulgus grammaticorum putat hanc esse essentialem differentiam, quia interdum, ut insinuat Aris- toteles et docet Pontanus, potest esse tragoediae felix exitus, sed cum timore, et comoediae infelix, sed cum festivitate

Certainly tragedy is unhappy in a high position, while comedy is happy in lowly one. Yet the common mass of literary people suppose this falsely to be the essential difference, since, as Aristotle insinuates and Pontanus demonstrates, it is possible for a tragedy to have a happy ending, but with fear, and for a comedy an unhappy one, but with cheerfulness. (Sarbiewski 229)

Though by citing Aristotle Sarbiewski's obvious referent is the classical Greek tragic corpus, and by extension, the Greek-illiterate "vulgus grammaticorum" who can not read this corpus, from a Latin standpoint he must have had such current Jesuit generically mixed "tragic" compositions in mind as Cnapius's Philopater, where the "felix exitus sed cum timore" is strongly displayed. By contrast a "felix exitus" with or without "timor" is noticeably absent from the Senecan corpus itself.34

Sarbiewski's discussion of tragic and comic structure is the standard mis- application of Seneca to Roman comedy via Horace already discussed, with nothing new added, e.g., "Actus utraque habet quinque" (both have five acts), etc. (234-236). Again, his only cited illustrations are from Sen- eca (Hercules Furens and Troas).

Thus the work generally considered the primary theoretical treatise on Baroque Latin drama turns out to be nothing of the sort. It is rather the primary Baroque theoretical treatise on the ancient Roman drama, and




how this drama is to be handled under contemporary 16th century staging conditions. Sarbiewski's "De tragoedia et comoedia" was not intended to be nor is it a description of the generic principles guiding contemporary Slavic Latin dramatic composition, of which he apparently had no high regard, nor is there the slightest evidence of "De tragoedia et comoedia" ever being used as a manual for such composition during the Baroque.

II If the Aristotelian theoretical norms of Greek and Roman antiquity are

to be rejected as the fundamental organizing principle for the Polish Latin drama of the Renaissance and Baroque, what was the concrete manifesta- tion of medievalism in the Slavic territories that could function as such an organizing principle for this drama? 0. B. Hardison, in attempting to come to terms with the Western European transition from medieval to Renais- sance drama, offers a formulation which telescoping renders valid for 17th century Eastern Europe:

recognition of ritual form inherited from the Mass and the liturgy may provide a way of coming to terms with the variety of views [on the transition from medieval to Renaissance drama] now current. This form is, after all, the dominant form for medieval drama. As such, it both fulfilled the expectations of audiences conditioned by their experience of Christian worship and educated them in what to expect from representational drama. (Hardison 288)

Of paramount importance for the transition from medieval to Renais- sance drama, according to Hardison, was the late medieval emergence of non-cyclic religious plays (Hardison 288). The two earliest forms to detach themselves from cyclic composition while still retaining the structure of medieval religious ritual, were the saint's play and the morality play.

The tenets of the medieval morality play are central to much of Slavic Renaissance and Baroque Latin drama. Hardison defines the morality drama as fiction based on fidelity to moral doctrine, which automatically renders the morality play a psychological drama.

The characters do not act in such and such a way because history says they did, but because sacramental psychology requires them to do so. Since the characters in the play are personified motives, the form is also psychological in a literal sense: it takes place within the mind of the central character, who appears in the action as a personification of the soul.(Hardison 289)

The martyr play, on the other hand, developed in the 13th century transition period, when the liturgical drama began to outgrow the physical capacity of a church's interior to stage it. At this period the Easter cycle, presented in better weather than the Christmas cycle, became the primary of the two cycles, and presentations of the Passion itself became a standard and increasingly well-elaborated feature (Chambers 75-78). As the presentations became larger and more complex and the stagings were removed from the confines of the church, production and acting were partially taken




over by the laity under clerical supervision. (Chambers 96-97). The resulting relaxation of the bonds connecting the representatio with religious ritual gradually allowed for the non-cyclic dramatization of the hagiographic leg- ends, providing material for martyr plays and miracle plays (Chambers 97). The earliest such plays were about St Nicholas and St. Catharine, which had liturgical prototypes. But the repertoire was rapidly expanded, particularly in France, with plays appearing on Saints Theophilus, Dorothy, Mar- tial, and Agnes, as well as a large series on the Miracles of the Virgin.

The salient thematic characteristics of the martyr play, as Sarbiewski noted above while rejecting such compositions as tragic, are that the martyr has natural sanctity and moral strength, and that the sufferings of martyrdom are frequently chosen by the martyr himself and are believed to be a subject for rejoicing. When considered against Hardison's formulation of the characteristics of the late medieval non-cyclic morality play, most of the otherwise inexplicably un-Senecan and non-classical features of even the most emphatically Senecan of the Polish Renaissance and Baroque Latin dramas suddenly fall into a recognizable pattern.

Consider the Boleslaus Furens. Despite the relatively pure Senecan language, the motivation for Boleslaus to pursue his unrelenting path of evil is not attributed by Joncre to divine intervention (in the form of Juno's wrath), as it is in Joncre's nominal model, the Senecan Hercules Furens (75-124). Nor is it the result of simple predisposition, as is the case in the anonymous 1st century Octavia with the character of Nero, whose very first words in that play are an order to murder two opponents, and who successfully takes up the evil side of the morality argument in his own right against the play's dramatized figure of Seneca as moral spokesman (438-592). In Joncre's play Boleslaus is portrayed as an essentially neutral character, who reaches a decision to pursue his course of evil after listening to and partici- pating in a debate between two other, so-called "tag" characters - Castitas ("Purity") and Cupido ("Desire"). The debate in its pure form occupies lines 65-139. Thereafter (140-332) Boleslaus's own participation in the debate is matched by that of a "senex," whose equivalence to the Seneca character in the Octavia is underscored by the large number of "Senecan" lines Joncre places verbatim or nearly so in the senex's speech.

The four-cornered moral debate that occupies lines 140-332 is unlike anything occurring in Roman drama. The first part, lines 140-201, consists of the senex's admonishments to Boleslaus, which leave him unresolved, but fearful. The senex is joined by Castitas (210-233), who urges moral continence, but Boleslaus remains unpersuaded because of the difficulty of the proposed course (211), and because it promises no earthly advantages beyond what are already his by virtue being a king (221). At this juncture Cupido reenters the debate, and his counsel is eagerly accepted, since "doceo quae cunctis placent" (I teach what pleases everyone) (240).




Indeed, so persuasive is Cupido's argument, that not even a memento mori delivered by the suddenly appearing character of Mors itself (lines 275-281) can derail it. The apparition of Mors is redefined by Cupido as an aspect of Boleslaus's own psychology and then dismissed by him, i.e.:

Bol: Heu moriar ergo? Quis sonus mentem quatit? Cup: Ne terreare, fictus est tuus timor -

Imago somni . ..

Bol: Alas, must I therefore die? What words are these that cause my mind to tremble? Cup: Do not be afraid, your fear is false -

An image of sleep ... (282-284)

At this point Cupido has won the debate against Castitas, who protests "Miseranda vocem, Castitas, preme et sile./Non est ad astra molle de terris iter" (lines 298-99). But here both Castitas and Cupido fall silent, leaving the remainder of the scene a largely stichomythic debate between the senex and the now decidedly Neronian Boleslaus (lines 300-324), after which his final speech of the scene shows Boleslaus to have become the one- dimensional figure of evil that he remains throughout the play:

Si terra debet perpeti ultimam diem Coelumque labi, summa iungique inferis - Non acquiescam donec effectus dabit, Quod animus urget. Quo magis veto, magis Erumpit et me quasi vulnerat fragor. Persequitur ardor atque inhaerentes mihi Absumit artus; in me sanguis aestuat, Pretium doloris facere me salus iubet

If earth must endure the final day And heaven fall, and the heights be joined to the lower world - I will not rest until until the result yields What my heart urges. The more I deny it, the more It bursts forth and the crash seemingly wounds me. Ardor follows constantly and clinging to me Consumes my limbs; the blood seethes in me, Safety bids me pay the price to ease this pain. (325-332)

Thus the critical two scenes establishing Boleslaus' psychology are divisi- ble into "Senecan" and "non-Senecan" portions. The "Senecan" portion, paralleling the Nero/Seneca dialogue of Octavia 438-592, is by far the smaller of the two, consisting only of lines 300-324, where the senex vainly attempts to counsel a by now resolute Boleslaus. The section comprising lines 65-299, on the other hand, with its Castitas/Cupido debate and the four cornered discussion including the irresolute Boleslaus, is unparalleded in Seneca but is completely in accordance with the dynamics of the medieval




morality play. The early, unresolved debate between Castitas and Cupido produce the irresolute and fearful Boleslaus of 140ff., while the individual points scored by the three discussants in lines 140-274 find immediate reflec- tion in Boleslaus' reactions. When Cupido scores the final victory, both sides fall silent and Boleslaus becomes the resolute Neronian portrait of evil of 300ff. The end result of evil determined by "sacramental psychology" is identical to Senecan despotic evil. It is the portrayal of the dialectic and the psychological development leading to such one-dimensional evil that are uniquely medieval and developed according to the traditions of the morality play.

The necessity of resorting to the personification of abstract psychological states as visible markers of motivation in the post-Roman drama, a nearly inevitable outgrowth of the monotheistic religious didacticism, constituted the inescapable background for even the most diligently classicizing Jesuit playwright, for whom the various pagan gods as external psychological motivators ceased to be available.35 The Christian world-view dictates the persistence of such medieval features as the abstract characters Cupido and Castitas in a drama like the Boleslaus that is usually held to be a thorough- going return to the Senecan model.36

If the self-consciously Senecan and seemingly humanist Boleslaus Furens is so closely tied to the medieval morality play tradition, one could hardly expect less from the Jesuit Ordensdrama. Of Cnapius's three plays, the Philopater provides a moral debate most similar to the Boleslaus model. Here, however, there are two protagonists: a "good" brother, Philopater, who is unwilling to defile his father's corpse to secure the throne, and an "evil" brother Telegonus, who has no such compunction. That the psycholo- gies of these two brothers are to function as a sacramental battleground according the terms of the medieval morality play is established in the opening scene of the drama, which consists of a debate between two "tag" characters, "Philarchia" ("Power-loving") and the doubly named "Storge seu Pietas" ("Piety"). Each of these characters receives a single set-speech (though that of Storge/Pietas is favored by both being in final position and being longer - 66 lines as opposed to Philarchia's 37) (1-103). This debate is followed without transition by a scene consisting of a 36-line monologue by Telegonus, who begins by flatly declaring his true views to the audience and tacitly identifying himself with Philarchia:

Iam quod per omnes iugiter vitae dies Desideravi quodque votis omnibus Superos rogavi, cessit e vivis senex Invisus, in urna quem putrescere iam decem Annos decebat, cessit et tarde licet Tamen reliquit filiis regnum suis




Now has happened what I have unceasingly desired all the days of my life And what with all my prayers I have entreated of the gods above, the old man is no longer among the living, Hated; he ought to have been rotting in an urn ten years already, he is gone and although tardily, Nevertheless he has left the kingdom to his sons. (104-109)

Philopater upon his subsequent entry (140) is identified with Storge/ Pietas, a quality that Cnapius has already underlined by use of the tag- name "Philopater," since the audience has already learned from the argument that the plot will turn on which brother is willing to shoot arrows into the father's corpse to gain the throne ("Argumentum" 9-17). Throughout the remainder of the initial two acts the brothers are counselled by a range of advisors, character-types familiar from from Roman drama, who each receive a tag-name, but not an abstract feminine noun indicating a personified psychological state. Philopater's advisor is, of course, his old teacher Eubulus ("Good-counsel"), while Telegonus makes do with counselling from the aptly-named slaves Chrysophilus ("Gold-lover"), Neophorus ("New-gain"), and Eutychus ("Good-fortune"), all of whom abandon him in the final calamity.

The personifications Storge/Pietas and Philarchia absent themseves until the drama's central debate scene, which occupies all of act III (997-1914). When the characters reappear, their function has expanded to an amplified version of the role of the personified abstract qualities in the Boleslaus debate scene discussed above. Here, the plot of the scene revolves upon the revelation that the method the late king wished employed to determine a successor is an archery contest with his own corpse as target. The difference in function between the abstract characters here and in the Boleslaus stems from the existence of the two brothers, who have already been tagged as "good" and "evil." The abstract characters debate in the presence of each of the brothers and the "appropriate" argument prevails in each case. More importantly the abstract characters function as visible markers for the audience of the arguments that are congenial or are anath- ema to each of the two brothers in their deliberations with the 12 senators (whose collective opinion is always expressed by "Senator 1"), in a situation where the brothers' beliefs are presented as a mystery not only to the collected senators, but also to Philopater himself, who only becomes aware late in the scene of his brother's evil intentions.

The technique adopted with regard to the "marker" function is to have each abstract character successfully counsel the "appropriate" brother at critical junctures of the deliberation, but unsuccessfully counsel the "wrong" brother, so that the overall effect on Senator 1 may be maximized. This technique is seen from Storge's initial reappearance:




Sen.l: Nos id viderimus: vos parete dummodo, Aut, si renuitis, ite quo mens fert statim; Erit, qui iussa nostra capessat sceptraque.

Tele: Ne vivam, si non isti per fraudem malam Cadavere patris nos absterrere statuunt A sceptris patriis, dolus ast inveniet dolum. Mihi fixum iam est hinc nisi regem non egredi.

Philo: Telegone, abimus. Tele: Si placet ito, mox ego. Stor: Telis obiectum linquis heu, fili, patrem? Philo: Manebo, ne quid indignum patri accidat. Sen.l: Videte, ne post poenitudo torequeat

Sen. 1: We would see this thing: let you obey now, Or, if you refuse, go at once wherever your mind takes you, It shall be that whoever heeds our orders also gets the scepter.

Tele: May I not live, if these people have not decided through an evil trick With the dead body of our father to frighten us away From our ancestral dominions; but deceit will meet with deceit. For I am resolved not to leave from here except as king.

Philo: Telegonus, let's go. Tele: If it pleases you, go, I'll be along presently. Stor: So, son, you're leaving your father exposed to the arrows? Philo: I shall remain so that nothing disgraceful happens to my father. Sen. 1: Careful, lest afterward some punishment torment you. (1145-55)

Storge's admonishing remark not only prevents Philopater from leaving the scene of the contest and surrendering the regime by default to the sacramentally incorrect view, but also indicates to Senator 1 (not to mention the audience) the rationale prompting Philopater to take the action, apparently identical to his brother's, of remaining at the scene of the debate. Philarchia, on the other hand, pleads his case to Senator 1 directly (thereby preserving Senator l's ignorance of Telegonus's true motives) with a 38 line speech (1164-1202), that convinces Senator 1 to be especially resistant to Philopater's pious point of view regarding the shooting of the corpse:

While neither brother can be moved by the abstract character of opposing viewpoint, Senator 1, who is neutral, may be swayed by either, with the result that the contest is staged with Philopater as protesting witness, but not a participant (1558-1560). As Telegonus begins to have second thoughts about the actual performance of the deed, his indecision is reflected by the new debate between Storge and Philarchia that flares up around him, e.g., Philar: "Excutito vanos trepidos metus" (Shake off these vain, trembling fears) (1598); Stor: "Sceleste, non te tot mala movent omina?" (Wretch, you're not moved by so many evil omens?) (1602). Naturally, Philarchia has the final and decisive speech, and Telegonus shoots, but with misgivings: "O quam nefanda ducit ad regnum via" (Oh, what an abominable road leads to




the throne!) (1641). After a lengthy lament on the part of Storge (1652- 1692), the debate between the two abstract characters begins again around Philopater: Philar. "Contende, fratre ne sis inferior tuo" (Try hard not to be worse than your brother) (1696), with Storge's response, "Ne flecte, iuvenis, falsis mentem vocibus,/Patris memento" (Don't be swayed by falsehoods, lad,/Remember your father) (1701-2). Of course Storge's final speech is successful, and Philopater declines to participate (1707-1717), despite further urging from Senator 1: "Age tela, Philopater, cape, regna te manent" (Go ahead, Philopater, take the arrows, the kingdom awaits you) (1728). But this tempation is resisted as well by Philopater, whereupon, much to his astonishment he is given the scepter anyway (1838-1840). The unexpected turn of affairs is explained to the now suddenly abandoned Telegonus as being the result of the old king's true instructions:

Ut utrius esset indoles magis proba Pietasque mortuum quoque reverens patrem, Is sceptra caperet. qui ferro impie Violaret patrem regnandi cupidine, Is parracida cederet regno procul So that whoever had the better character And the devotion to revere a dead father He would get the kingdom; whoever would irreverently Violate his father with steel through the desire to rule He as a parricide would be banished far from the kingdom. (2129-2134)

Telegonus's crushed spirit is expressed not only in his own lament (2141- 2257), but is also reflected by one more rueful speech by Storge in his function as psychological marker. This speech is not balanced by any further appearance by Philarchia, so the audience may conclude that Tele- gonus internal debate has been resolved, but too late, in favor of Storge/ Pietas's point of view.

The Philopater thus consists of two separate studies in sacramental psychology, with the brothers representing the extreme opposite poles possible in the resolution of this particular moral dialectic. As qualities present in every soul, regardless of that soul's inherent tendencies, Philarchia and Storge could counsel both brothers, but with markedly unequal effective- ness. Nevertheless, despite the differing tendencies of the two souls, the critical decision each brother arrives at is presented by the playwright as clearly the result of free choice. The Philopater is therefore a morality play in its purest form.

Quite a different situation exists with regard to Cnapius's Faelicitas, whose main protagonist is herself a personified abstraction. As an abstraction, Faelicitas undergoes no internal debate, while as the primary protagonist for the Christian viewpoint in this play, she has been placed in direct




confrontation with the character of the emperor Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138-161), here unhistorically presented as an implacable proponent of Roman paganism, in a play incorporating many of the elements of the genus polemicum. 37

Cnapius appears to have focused on a rescript of Antoninus which was designed to stop the spread of magic and astrology, but which was also occasionally applied against Christians in the provinces.38 Cnapius takes this type of persecution confined to the provincial hinterlands during the historical period described and transfers it to the center of the empire. Since the historical Rome of the period of Antoninus was free of this sort of persecution, Cnapius has fabricated both the plot and his protagonists. The historical fact of Antoninus's rescript against magic and cults is translated into a conscious policy of Christian persecution in the capital, e.g., "Praet: Te Christiana sacra complexam audio./ Fael. Hoc crimen est? Praet. Et maximum!" (Praetor: I hear you have embraced Christian rites./ Faelicitas. Is this a crime? Praetor. The very greatest!) (808-809). Barbaric hatred of Christians is presented by Cnapius as being omnipresent in Rome: "Festi- vitates Roma agere suas solet:/Litare oportet Christiano sanguine" (Rome is used to running her own amusements:/it behooves her to sacrifice Chris- tian blood) (44-45). Nevertheless, the chief architect of this hatred is presented as Antoninus himself, whose proposed solution to the Christian question is even more draconian than that proposed by his pontifices, since

. .. Haud lenibus poenis sciunt Ingenia ferrea Christiana cedere; Extrema tentare est necesse remedia Vita auferenda est, queis nequit sententia

They know that iron Christian temperaments Scarcely yield to mild punishments, There is need to resort to extreme measures For those whose beliefs can't be removed, their lives can be. (540-543)

This punishment, the execution of Faelicitas's sons, is to be administered even though the fictional family is portrayed as of the honestiores, in a line directly descended from the ancient Roman king Numa, a fact Antoninus himself concedes (525). In the medieval fashion described by Hardison, Cnapius has produced a fictional plot and distorted both historical character and historical setting to produce a work illustrating correct sacramental psychology for the purpose of instructing his audience. The play combines elements from the genres of genus polemicum and genus martyrologicum- the battle of doctrine and conscience between Protus and Faelicitas on one side and Antoninus and his pontifices on the other becomes a simple martyr play on the level of Faelicitas's sons, each of whom is offered the choice between celebrating the traditional pagan rituals or dying:




[Praetor] . .. e duobus eligas utrum placet: Aut hodie amicus esse debes Caesaris, Damnatus impietatis aut dire mori

[Praetor] . . choose whichever of the two you please: Today you must either be a friend of Caesar, Or, convicted of impiety, die horribly. (1134-1136)

Each brother, of course, chooses martyrdom, portrayed as the source of a better existence and as a reason for rejoicing. That martyrdom is a happy outcome is made explicit to the audience by the attendant angels present at the death of each brother, e.g. for the eldest son Ianuarius:

Primus ad primam propera coronam, Vita te primum tenuit caduca, Vita te primum teneat beata, Praeveni fratres ad utramque cunctos, Prima fac primi precium doloris

Gaudia nostri

The first [son] hastens to the first crown, Transitory life held you first, Let blessed life hold you first, And precede the other brothers to it, Make our first delights the reward for your first anguish. (2124-2129)

Sarbiewski is correct: from the ancient viewpoint there can be nothing tragic about this kind of outcome. Cnapius may have come to sense this as well-in his final historical drama Eutropius he provides at least a nomi- nally tragic outcome to the extent that the title character undergoes a loss of power and suffers exile. Cnapius, however, has already tipped his hand in the argumentum by labelling Eutropius a "servile eunuch and a man of blighted conduct." But even this, as Cnapius's intended Latin-literate audience must have been aware, is mild indeed compared to the invective hurled at the historical Eutropius by the late imperial Christian poet Clau- dian in the two books of his poem In Eutropium (A.D. 399). This poem is apparently Cnapius's only source for his play, and was a work presumably familiar in some degree to every Latin reader of Cnapius's time, since Claudian was intensely studied as one of the principal auctores throughout the medieval period both for content and later for poetic style.39

The downfall of the title character operates as a simplification of the process found in the Boleslaus. Instead of undergoing a crisis of sacramental indecision, resolved finally in accordance with the character's worse tendencies, as is the case with Boleslaus, Eutropius is presented from the very beginning as a character who is simply evil. While the obligatory moral debate occurs with Eutropius's first appearance onstage, he is already com-




pletely formed psychologically, and fully capable of holding the "evil" side of the moral debate against the play's positive character, Ioannes Christo- stomus (259-473). Though this might seem to be a return on Cnapius' part to the Neronian model of evil found in the Octavia, there is one crucial difference: in the Octavia, Nero is the evil antagonist defining the tragic outcome for the title protagonist, while in the Eutropius the evil character is the title protagonist.

Cnapius fails to understand that a tragedy employing an evil protagonist on the model of a Macbeth or a Marlovian Faustus succeeds as tragedy by virtue of the audience witnessing the protagonist sink from a lofty moral status to a degraded one through the exploitation of the protagonist's often minor weaknesses of character. The final fates of Faustus and Macbeth are tragic because this moral descent has been shown to the audience, while the Boleslaus is a more primitive example of the same species. But in the Eutropius, with no descent being shown, the audience can feel nothing but pleasure and relief when the protagonist receives his just punishment. The result of this tedious play, while sacramentally correct, is again not tragic.

The two anonymous historical tragedies Mauritius and Belisarius should be briefly mentioned here among the Ordensdrama. Both plays evidently are derived from the same historical source, the Annales Ecclesiastici (1597-1609) of Cesare Baronio (1538-1607).40 These would have been available to the author(s) of the two historical tragedies in a Dutch or possibly German edition (Antwerp, 1597-1609; or Cologne, 1609-1613). The Mauritius in particular is exceptional among the Polish neo-Latin Ordensdrama of the Kodeks Poznanski I. In the Mauritius, the restricted use of choral lyric for act division has already been commented upon. Neither does the play allow for the use of abstract characters for the motiva- tional dialectic of sacramental psychology. After the opening scene, where expositional duties are handled by the ghosts of six soldiers killed by one of the principal characters, and which scene exploits considerable traditional pagan underworld imagery, the remainder of the play is stripped clean of almost all pagan mythological allusion so common to plays derived from the Italian humanist tradition. Though the ending of the play appears to be wanting, nevertheless Mauritius's imminent death appears unrelieved by any serious possibility of redemption in the afterlife. This combination of structural and thematic features causes the Mauritius to strongly resemble the heavily Dutch and German-influenced technique of Czech neo-Latin dramatic composition. Though beyond the scope of this study the Mauritius would seem to merit a closer examination into the depth and extent of its indebtedness to German and Dutch Latin antecedents, either directly or filtered through the prism of the Czech Latin tradition.

The Belisarius, on the other hand is a considerably more traditional Polish neo-Latin tragic composition. Its use of vernacular Polish odes as




plot summarizing act divisions is completely standard. The play's limited tolerance for personified abstraction as character (Livor), for deified abstractions (Discordia) and even pagan divinities (Tisiphone), providing these characters operate absolutely independent of the action of the drama proper and do not interact with ordinary characters, has already been noted, and is unusual for a Polish neo-Latin tragedy. But the conclusion of the Belisarius is in complete accordance with the usual dictates of sacramental psychology. In the final scene of the play, the blinded Belisarius (to say nothing of the audience) is brought to an understanding of the cause of and remedy for his current misery by means of an 82-line dialogue with an angel. When the at last aware and penitent Belisarius has confessed and prayed for redemption, the angel is able to tidy up and summarize the doctrinal basis for Belisarius's eventual redemption in the hereafter and his reward for suffering:

Misertus ille, scelera qui clemens sua Pietate vincit; punit idem, ut corrigat. Quem vindicare tardat, aeternum luet. Tu cautus aevi reliquum id exigas; dabit Praemia gementi celitum Rector potens. lam sequere custodem ante, nunc etiam ducem.

He is compassionate, who, gentle, subdues sins with his own piety; he punishes in order to reform. Whomever he is slow in punishing, will suffer for eternity. Let you, being circumspect, so live out the remainder of your life; The mighty Ruler of the heavenly hosts will give reward for your groans. Now follow [me], once your guardian, now your guide. (3223-3228)

Belisarius's redemption and eventual reward after suffering is thus made explicit by the angel's last speech. Belisarius agrees to the bargain with his final lines (3231-3232): "Durave patiar pro scelere quodvis malum -/ Aeterna, clemens, supplicia tu dimove" (Let me suffer whatever evil you wish for my sin -I Being compassionate, dismiss eternal torment). As Cnapius does in the Faelicitas, the author of the Belisarius, by the manner in which he has composed this final scene, has undercut the tragic dimen- sion of his plot by directly intruding a character who is able to demystify and render tangible Belisarius's eventual release from suffering and the final rewards awaiting him upon his redemption in the afterlife.

Even the extreme Polish Hellenist Szymonowic is unable to completely expurgate the deadening effect of medieval Christian sacramental psychology from his learned attempts at classicizing tragic composition. He tries to recreate classical tragedy by setting his plays outside the Christian historical period, dramatizing instead the tale of Joseph from Genesis 39 in the Castus Joseph, and, in his Penthesilea, the tale of the Amazon Penthesilea




borrowed from the late version in the epical narrative found in Quintus Smyrnaeus. Although the aim of the two plays-classical tragedy-is the same, the methods by which Szymonowic seeks to achieve this aim in them are different.41 While the Penthesilea is the more overtly classical of the two by virtue of its Trojan War setting, even the biblical Castus Joseph is approached via classical rather than Judeo-Christian antecedents: the play consists of a Hippolytus narrative concealed under the Old Testament surface structure.

Winniczuk, without demonstration, flatly asserts that Szymonowic's source is the Euripidean Hippolytos.42 Winniczuk's statement, even when not taking into account Ziomek's remark on Senecan thematics, or the expansive and Senecan characteristics of Seneca's ornate Latin dialogue, is still only partially accurate. It describes most of Szymonowic's drama, but only until line 1422, when Szymonowic sharply breaks with Euripides for the remaining 335 lines of the play.

In the earlier portions of the Castus Joseph, the play's characters, the orders of their appearances and dialogues, and the scenic structure and action all correspond nearly exactly to the situation in Euripides's Hip- polytos, but hardly at all with the Senecan Hippolytus. Szymonowic's malyi demon prologue equates to Aphrodite's prologue. Joseph with his famuli (lines 94-236) is matched by Hippolytos with his therapontes (88-120).43 Jempsar with her nutrix exactly parallels Phaedra with her trophos, and so forth. In Szymonowic's first choral ode (lines 237-292) and Euripides's first choral ode (121-175) the verbal correspondence begins to approach translation, despite metrical recasting. The two odes are nearly identical in length (54 lines to 55), content, and mythological allusions, with Szymonowic's ode being localized to his particular play only by the addition of the names "Jempsar" and "Faetifer" at the appropriate points in the ode's narration.

Similarly the positioning of characters' entrances, the order of their speeches, and the contents of those speeches all remain roughly parallel until Faetifer's entrance at line 1422, equivalent to Theseus' entrance at line 836. At this point Szymonowic has replaced the Euripidean version, where Theseus arrives to discover that his wife has already committed suicide, with a compressed rendering of the Senecan version where Faetifer confronts Jempsar much the same way Seneca's Theseus confronts Phae- dra. The overt reason for Szymonowic's abrupt about face is of course the demands of his surface plot: Potiphar's wife does not die in Genesis 39.

On the other hand, neither does the concluding portion of the Castus Joseph represent a straightforward adaptation of Seneca'a tragedy, as the legendary source material for the Hippolytos and Joseph tales differ on one other, essential point. In both versions of the Hippolytos, the title character dies a horrible death as a result of his hubris in refusing proper homage to Aphrodite/Venus. Although Joseph suffers imprisonment and other difficul-




ties, he does not die as a result of his being sold into slavery and being entangled with Potiphar's wife. Instead, as the Genesis narrative continues, Joseph eventually perseveres to receive both great temporal power in Egypt and great spiritual influence upon his descendants. Nor does his misfortunes derive from hubris, but rather from correct and pious behavior. The Hippolytos tales show a tragic figure whose reversal of fortune is swift and absolute. Szymonowic presents a Joseph whose reversal of fortune the audience well knows to be neither irreversible nor absolute, but rather will be eventually transformed to triumph beyond the boundaries of Szymonowic's drama.

Therefore despite Szymonowic's hellenistic leanings, his attempt to avoid the medieval Christian sacramental obstacle in composing a play that can be called "tragic" has instead landed him squarely in the center of the problem. The Castus Joseph is a morality play that shows suffering as a result of piety, but implying eventual reward, while both Hippolyti show final punishment as a result of hubris or improper piety before a divinity. The two Hippolyti are tragedies, while Szymonowic's play, despite all its classical trappings, differs from the traditional medieval genus morale only in that the triumph and reward for morally correct behavior, which the audience knows will occur, have been postponed beyond the scope of the action.

If Szymonowic is unable to cast off the burden of medievalism from his Old Testament drama, he is markedly more successful in the Penthesilea. The Penthesilea avoids sacramental pitfalls by virtue of Szymonowic's choice to dramatize material entirely outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. The narrative is allowed to proceed largely according to the pagan belief structure of its archaic Greek setting, and in the absence of overt interfer- ence from medieval Christian notions of the afterlife, a result not entirely unlike that of classical tragedy ensues.

Neither of Szymonowic's plays are verbose by neo-Latin standards. The Castus Joseph itself measures a nicely Senecan 1757 lines, while the Penthesilea is trimmed to a svelte 1585 lines, or roughly the normal length for a classical Greek tragedy. Though Szymonowic bases his play loosely on the events of Quintus Smyrneus's late Greek epic usually referred to as the Posthomericus, this source narrative is actually quite sketchy regarding Penthesilea, with the exceptions of her death scene and the lengthy post- mortem praise of her beauty (I.535-674).44 Szymonowic accordingly sifts and selects from other Homeric sources as suits him, e.g., the character Taltibius, absent in Quintus, is in name at least derived from Agamemnon's herald Talthibios mentioned in Iliad 1.320 and passim, but here placed on the Trojan side. Nor does Szymonowic rely on Quintus for the Nuntius's speech relating Penthesilea's death (lines 1415-1513): the final scene, like the remainder of the play, is Szymonowic's own original composition virtually in its entirety.

Szymonowic carefully adheres to what he believes are the conventions of




the ancient Greek theater. No scene has more than two speaking players. Interaction more complex than dialogue is avoided. All action in the play occurs offstage and is related to onstage characters and the audience by messengers.

These particular classicizing features of Szymonowic's play lead to some of the problems that the author as dramatist was unable to solve. Penthesilea dominates the stage for the first 404 lines of the tragedy. Thereafter she disappears, never to be seen again by the audience. All further news of her is conveyed by the Nuntius in dialogue with Aeneas, who is introduced into the play for the sole purpose of being the receptacle of the Nuntius' information in the two separate scenes where he appears (lines 758-838; lines 1300- 1539). Szymonowic provides numerous thematic links to tie his play to- gether. The central portion of the play, concerned largely with the aftermath of Hector's death, and with the evils of war, provides the moral center for the composition, while choral odes and monologues on the evils of warfare by three milites saucii link this center thematically with the tragedy of Penthesilea herself. But Szymonowic has failed to provide any dramatic links from one portion of his play to the next. There is no particular catharsis for the audience when the Nuntius finally announces the death of the (by now) long-absent Penthesilea at the hands of Achilles (line 1415), nor does the Amazon's great antagonist ever appear on stage.

In short, Szymonowic's attempt to produce truly classical tragedy by reworking legendary narrative material on his own in imitation of ancient practice, rather than simply recasting Euripides and Seneca, whatever its verbal and poetic strengths fails utterly as drama. In the absence of production information, it is difficult to imagine this particular tragedy ever having been performed. The play's primary dramatic virtue is the degree to which Szymonowic has been able to purge the ultimately optimistic medieval view of death and hence of tragedy from his Penthesilea, and in this one particular feature alone the play represents an advance over the Castus Joseph.

Optimism in the face of death is an attitude Szymonowic needed to suppress in the play, which reads in part as a paean to peace and a warning against excessive ambition. Both messages are firmly rooted in the historical present of the tragedy's composition and must have struck a responsive chord in 1618, after Poland's failed Moscow expedition of 1609-1612 and the ongoing military difficulties with Turkey, e.g.:

(Miles saucius) O gloriola, O vitae aucupium vanissimum Fraude tua haec in retia veni ... O bellum, o pernities maxima. Quisquis te prior humanum in genus Introduxit, nae ille leonum Cor gessit, vel dirius etiam




(Injured soldier)

O bit of glory, O life's vainest hunt Through your deceit I have come into these nets . . . O war, o greatest ruin. Whoever first introduced you to humankind That one truly gave birth to a lion's heart, or to something more horrible still. (lines 1093-5, 1105-8)

But as Ziomek notes, the main worth of the Penthesilea is as a dramatic frame for some superior Latin lyric poetry (Ziomek 430). This poetry is produced largely by the chorus, both in the odes that function as act divisions and in other lyrics, particularly the elegy and prayer to Athena that precisely marks the midpoint of the play (lines 714-43), and the fine monostrophica (lines 1056-88) comparing the political ingenium of a city to a great sea being stirred up by the winds. If the Penthesilea largely fails as a tragedy, it is because Szymonowic's talents are lyric rather than dramatic. In his later play he has come more closely to share the non-medieval psychological viewpoint required for the composition of classical tragedy, but unlike Kochanowski in the Odprawa posi6w greckich, Szymonowic is incapable of molding this viewpoint and his narrative material into a satisfactory dramatic shape without relying on precise classical templates to copy.

In summary, then, Polish neo-Latin drama to the end of the Baroque remained a profoundly medieval phenomenon with regard to length, content, characterization, and choral structure. The medievalism of Polish Latin drama places it up to two centuries behind IJsewijn's timetable for the purgation of medieval elements from Western European neo-Latin literature. The classical bipolar notions of "tragedy" and "comedy" went unassimilated by most Polish playwrights, who could not reconcile these notions with the medieval sacramental psychology inherited more directly from the medieval Christian liturgy and liturgical drama. Hence "tragic" and "comic" became for these playwrights sets of compositional, structural, and lexical norms, with which the old medieval genres were to be outfitted and refurbished, chief among them being the genus morale. The Polish Latin playwrights persistently and unsuccessfully struggled with the difficulties of portraying a conclusion that was truly tragic in a Christian context. The humanist Szymonowic succeeded in escaping this context to a limited degree by dramatizing material from outside the Christian period, but ultimately failed first by allowing the medieval mindset to permeate his Old Testament Castus Joseph, and then by running up against the limits of his personal talent as a dramatic poet in the Penthesilea. The problem of composing satisfactory tragedy in a Christian context remained unsolved in Slavic Latin literature until well into the Enlightenment.




NOTES

1 The beginning of neo-Latin composition in Poland is credited by Ziomek to the expatriate Italian poet Filip Buonaccorsi (Callimachus) for the 60 elegies and epigrams he produced in 1470-1471 (Ziomek 82). But a more solid beginning date may be Wawrrzyniec Rabe's (Laurentius Corvinus) publication of the first treatise in Poland on the principles of neo- Latin versification, the Carminum structura (Cracow, 1496). Non-Polish neo-Latin scholars regularly exclude Conrad Celtis (1459-1508) from the ranks of Polish neo-Latinists and assign him to the German branch of the literature, despite his first book of Amores having been produced while at the University of Cracow (IJsewijn 37; see also Spitz, Conrad Celtis, the German Arch-Humanist).

2 Original neo-Latin drama in Poland begins with the late humanist Boleslaus Secundus Furens (composed before 1588 but not discovered until after the Second World War) of Joannes Joncre, and the Castus Joseph (1587) of Szymon Szymonowic (his other tragedy, the nearly perfectly humanist Penthelsilea did not appear until 1618).

The first Jesuit school in Poland was founded in 1564 at Braniewo, and much contemporary and ancient dramatic material was imported from Rome and staged in accordance with contemporary Italian theatric technique through at least the appearance of the Ratio Studiorum of 1596 (Kruczyiiski 412-480). As Kruczynski points out (422), three codices containing Jesuit dramatic material (most of it titles and performance dates) survive from the late 16th and early 17th centuries: the Kodeks Kaspra Petkowskiego (Ossolineum, sygn. 1137), the Kodeks Poznanski I (Uppsala, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, sygn. R. 380), and the Kodeks Kaliski (Ossolineum, sygn. Pawlikowskich 204). A fourth, the Kodeks puituski, older than the aforementioned three and containing, as is known from content summaries, 36 plays (perhaps 18 in Latin, including a second redaction of Cnapius's Philopater) from the years 1571-1623, was lost during the 19th century (Kruczyiiski, 416). The Kodeks Kaspra Petkowskiego and the Kodeks Kaliski contain mostly dialogues from the 16th and early 17th centuries. The Kodeks Poznatnski I has some dialogues, but also includes 8 five-act plays from the years 1597-1625 with choruses and interludes under the title "Tragodiae Sacrae". With the loss of the dramatic wealth of the Kodeks puttuski, the plays of the Kodeks Poznaiiski I constitute our only surviving intact texts from the heyday of the Jesuit neo-Latin drama of Poland. The other plays in addition to the four discussed here are the feeble Franciscus Valsingaminus, and the so-called Antithemius (1618-1624) attributed to Mateusz Bembus (1567-1645), rector of the Poznan collegium.

3 Boleslaus is accessible in Tragoedia Boleslaus Secundus Furens, edited by Jerzy Axer. The three tragedies of Cnapius are to be found in the edition Tragoediae: Philopater; Faelicitas; Eutropius, edited by Lidia Winniczuk. Odostratocles has also been edited by Winniczuk: Dramma comicum Odostratocles (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akad. Nauk, 1969), while the Mauritius and Belisarius have been edited by her student Zdzislaw Piszczek in Tragoediae Mauritius, Belisarius. The plays of Szymonowic are cited from the old edition Simonis Simonidae ... opera omnia . ., edited by A. M. Durini (War- szawa: In typographia Mitzleriana, 1772).

4 Beginning in the Renaissance the diachrony of the Latin "authorities" (which during the medieval period had tended to be viewed as a single undifferentiated synchronic mass comprised of all the "best" authors spanning the entire period from Republican Rome to nearly contemporary praxis; see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages) came under reconsideration by the Humanists. The result was that, in regard to poetics, nearly the entire Latin poetic praxis of the Medieval period was eventually rejected in favor of a strict return to the ancient models of composition. Concetta Green- field traces the beginning of this trend to early 14th century Italy and the ascension of the




Humanists to University positions -the trend's final elaboration being Fontius's Poetics in the 15th century; in Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250-1500 (Greenfield 19, 283- 304). This sentiment echoes that of Paul Otto Kristeller, who considers Humanism to have been primarily a cultural and educational program that developed and cultivated a certain limited area of studies, i.e., grammar, history, poetry, and moral philosophy (Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains p. 10). In turn, Paul Klopsch, in his book Einfihrung in die Dichtungslehre des Lateinischen Mittelalters (164), emphasizes the source of the dispute between the Scholastics and the Humanists regarding poetry as being the Scholastics' rejection of poetry as an element of higher education. The real originator of the return to classical poetics is considered to be the Paduan judge Lovato Lovati (1241-1309), who provided much of the inspiration along this vein to Petrarch. Jozef IJsewijn considers the watershed mark to have been Lovati's metrical epistolary "manifesto" of poetics (Companion to Neo-Latin Studies 16-17) (Text of this epistle may be found in C. Foligno's "Epistle inedite di Lovato de'Lovati e d'altri a lui.") However, Roberto Weiss, in The Dawn of Humanism in Italy: An Inaugural Lecture, emphasizes the more wide-spread and lasting influence of Lovati's analysis of the then completely obscure metrics of Seneca's tragedies, which analysis was the first post- antiquity exposition of classical Latin metrics (7).

5 IJsewijn frames the transition from medieval to neo-Latin compositional norms as rang- ing from 1300 in northern Italy to well into the 16th century in Scandinavia in Companion to Neo-Latin Studies (16). The often unwitting persistence of medieval traits in early neo- Latin composition in Western Europe is a phenomenon not to be confused with the much later and deliberate "medieval revival" of the 18th century, which affected the Latin composition mostly of student songs and church hymns (Companion to Neo-Latin Stud- ies, 2nd ed. 12-13).

6 Poland missed most of the first wave of Humanist neo-Latin tragedy, but in the 16th century the educated public became acquainted with ancient tragedy directly, Seneca's Troades, Thyestes (both 1513) and Hercules Furens (1534) were all published in Cracow; Latin translations of Euripides's Hecuba and Iphigenia Aulidensis in 1543. Ancient comedy was introduced with publication in Wrociaw of Plautus's Amphitryon (1530), Mercator (1531) and Casina (1543); several editions of Terence (beginning in 1480); and such humanist comedies as the Comedia Poliscene (1518) of Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444) (Ziomek 97). The German branch of humanist Latin comedy gained a courtly and aca- demic Polish audience with the publication of such works as Krzysztof Hegendorfin's De Duobus Adolescentibus and De Sene Amatore (both 1525), and Wilhelm Gnaphaeus's Morosophus in Cracow (Lewa'nski 298-304).

7 The term "Baroque" has vexed scholars for well over a century, defeating the efforts even of Rene Wellek to formulate it absolutely on a stylistic level or as a combination of stylistic and ideological criteria (Wellek 102, 113). To avoid becoming completely en- meshed in such a thankless debate in the brief compass of this article, I follow the lead of Frank Warnke and employ "Baroque" as a simple period term, used only because its wide currency outweighs regional variants like "metaphysical", "preciosite", etc. (Warnke 1).

8 The ability to combat the Catholic Church on its own cultural and linguistic ground was recognized as pedagogically essential already by Luther. In stressing the importance of this notion for the nascence of neo-Latin drama in Bohemia, Oscar Teuber cites Luther's "Tischreden", where the reformer advises: "Komodien zu spielen, solle man den Schulern nicht wehren, sondern gestatten; erstlich, daB sie sich iben in der lateinischen Sprache; andern, daB in der Komodie fein kiinstlich erdichtet, abgemalet und furgestellet werden solche Personen, dadurch die Leute unterrichtet und ein jeglicher seines Amtes und Standes errinert und vermahnet werde, was einem Knecht, Herrn, jungen Gesellen und Alten gebiihre, wohl anstehe und was er thun soll," (Teuber 7).




9 This trend from bilingualism to the exclusive use of the vernacular in late- 16th-17th century Poland parallels developments in Italy a century earlier away from bilingualism toward the exclusive use of vernacular Italian (IJsewijn, 45).

10 As the 17th century wore on, the occasional, imitative, and utilitarian dimensions of the Polish Jesuit drama tended increasingly to emphasize the drama's reliance on spectacle and de-emphasize its reliance on the literary qualities of the text, particularly with literate and literary polemic becoming less necessary in the aftermath of the completely trium- phant counterreformation. Moreover, the necessity for addressing a larger audience than the Latin-literate members of the collegium itself tended to enhance reliance on the vernacular at the expense of Latin. As the 18th century commences the Polish Jesuit drama abandons the Humanist-derived antiquarian, literate, and Latin approach to dramatic composition in favor of the composition of pieces which, as Hernas delicately expresses it, "belong more to the history of theater than to the history of literature" (Hernas 317).

11 Examples from a few standard old literary chestnuts could include Ingnacy Chrzanowski's Historia Literatury Niepodlegfej Polski (299) where in beginning a twelve page analysis of Szymonowic, the author's complete output except the Sielanki (1614) is disposed of in a single sentence. Quite harsh is Julian Kryzanowski's A History of Polish Literature (82) in which both of Szymonowic's plays are dismissed as "only ambitious attempts at play writing." His other Latin works are ignored, while Sarbiewski, despite his stature in European literature, is taken to task for writing in Latin, as it demonstrates his being "behind the contemporary literary trends" (116). Worst offender of all evidently is Cnapius, whose tragic compositions Kry'zanowski simply sweeps aside by claiming Cnapius is "the first Polish scholar to waste time and effort on things beyond his real abilities" (149). Manfred Kridl is aware of only one of Szymonowic's two plays, though at least he doesn't disparage it, and for him Cnapius is only the dictionary writer (Kridl 101, 98). Karel Krei'ci likewise is only aware of the Castus Jospeph among Szymonowic's Latin output, and summarily dismisses it as a reworking "in the usual manner" of Euripides (Krei'ci 86).

12 So Jan Okon, Dramat i teatr szkolny i sceny jezuickie XVII wieku (222-22). Although he notes the difficulties of the appropriate generic assignment of the Ordensdrama of this period according to the Aristotelian framework, he simply attributes it to a "Baroque" tendency to mix Aristotelian genres, resulting in "tragicomedy" and "cometragedy" and the like. Lidia Winniczuk, in "Jesuit Schooldrama in Poland" (721-726), can describe the tragedies as "modelled" on Seneca (723), but then complains of "too much talk" yielding performance lengths not in accordance with Aristotelian precepts, notes the preponder- ance of character-abstractions, and describes the structure of the dramas' choruses, all without comment on the fundamental unclassicism of their use or offering any cogent alternative model. In another article, she analyzes at some length Cnapius's copious verbal and rhetorical borrowings from Seneca, but without commenting on the singularly non-Senecan world-view that the author was constructing from this Senecan building material ("De Gregorio Cnapio L. Annaei Senecae Imitatore" 368-382).

13 Before the 18th century, "Slavic neo-Latin drama" refers to drama composed by Polish or Czech authors. Croatian evidence for the period is absent. Veljko Gortan and Vladimir Vratovic assert that this absence is simply the result of the failure to preserve the neo- Latin dramatic texts that must have been composed at the time (Hrvatski 30). I believe instead that the intense pressure from the vernacular Italian performance tradition (to a limited extent from commedia dell'arte, but more profoundly from commedia erudita) in the Croatian territories of the Regimen Latinorum that had commenced already in the early 1400's suppressed the creation of any sort of substantial neo-Latin dramatic tradition in the Croatian territories prior to or during the period in question (See Dunja




Falisevac, on the pervasive influence of the commedia erudita). No Croatian Latin dramtic evidence from the period is attested, probably because virtually nothing was written.

The end of the 17th century marks the approximate end of the first stage of the Slavic Baroque, according to Chizhevskij's periodization, which I accept (Chizhevskij 91). That is to say, it marks the end of the literary Baroque in the vernacular literatures in those Slavic countries which, by virtue of their cultural and geographical proximity to Western Europe and above all to Italy, had imported the shared European cultural and literary norms of the period, and the neo-Latin language that was their international vessel, directly from Italy and Western Europe without additional Slavic intermediation. These Slavic literatures were Polish, Czech, and the Croatian literature of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and environs. Speaking of Slavic neo-Latin literature of the first-stage Slavic Baroque is therefore not a stylistic or compositional categorization, but is a highly convenient period shorthand to describe neo-Latin literature produced by Slavic authors-Polish, Czech, and Croatian, who operated under the direct influence of and were full participants in the European neo-Latin literary tradition while this tradition was still alive and near its peak. It excludes, among others, Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Russian authors, who received this tradition only at second or further remove and only after the fundamental dissolution of a coherent European latinity was substantially complete. To continue the simplified thumbnail of Chizhevskij's scheme, the second stage of the Slavic Baroque consisted of the Ukrainians and Belorussians adopting Baroque models according to Polish practice, while the third stage consisted of the Russians accepting Baroque compositional models in turn from the Belorussians and Ukrainians, and in limited degree also from the Poles.

14 It may be argued that the one surviving Polish Latin comedy, the Odostratocles, much of whose vocabulary is taken from Plautus, also appears to bear some generic similarities to Terentian comedy. The chief cause of the apparent connection to Terence is the similarity of much of Seneca's own dramatic structure to what may be found in Terence. Seneca's tragedies show signs of being the endpoint of a lengthy developmental tradition in ancient tragedy from the Attic Greek period to the 1st century A.D. The intermediate stages of this tragic tradition are not attested through complete surviving plays, but the development of tragedy is theorized to have closely paralleled the development of the better-attested Greek New Comedy, and to have paralleled, therefore, Greek-derivative Roman comedy as well, including Terence (Tarrant 16-17). The Odostratocles would be better described as a fusion of vernacular Polish farce and medieval Latin genus morale composition. This hybrid mixture has been forcibly cast into the only dramatic Latin compositional mold the play's anonymous Polish Jesuit author understood: the the-current neo-Latin reflex of Senecan tragic structure. To this patchwork, some Plautine verbal material was added for good measure. This supposition receives further support by the Odostratocles's employ- ment of strophic choruses in the vernacular to divide the 5 acts, a practice identical to that of Jesuit Polish Latin tragedy, but not paralleled at all in Roman comedy.

15 Metrical exceptions among the Slavic verse dramas are the Czech Jan Campanus's neo- Latin Bretislaus (1614), which closely imitates Terence, and the Odostratocles, which distantly echos Plautine verse in addition to heavily cribbing from his language.

The arguments against Senecan authorship of the Octavia may be found summarized by C.J. Herington in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (530-532). For arguments against the much more "Senecan" Hercules Oetaeus, see W. H. Friedrich (51-84); and Bertl Axelson.

16 The arguments against the Senecan tragedies having originally been composed for the stage are treated by Otto Zwierlein in his Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas (13-124). Whatever the actual fact of the ancient performance of Seneca, the tragedies were regularly assumed to be stage plays until the early 19th century (CHCL 2: 519).




17 The term Ordensdrama refers simply to drama, Latin or vernacular, written by members of the religious orders for specific performances at the schools and collegia. Many lists of performance dates, often including titles, survive, even where the performed material does not. For the complete surviving list of Polish performance dates, see Okoni, 360-379.

18 Neo-Latinists sometimes underestimate the influence of medieval Latin and vernacular traditions on neo-Latin production in Eastern Europe. See IJsewijn, 3-4, 262-266. IJsewijn's periodization of this influence as lasting to the 15th century, while accurate for Western Europe, is two centuries and more off for the Slavic lands, where the medieval traditions retained much of their vitality well into the 17th century (and in East Slavic countries into the 18th).

19 The play's source, nevertheless, is, according to the standard view, the medieval hagiographical Vita S' Stanislai of Diugosz). (IJsewijn to 244).

Even the great length of the Boleslaus, 3114 lines, or roughly three times the Senecan norm and half again longer than the Oetaeus, does not argue against its having been performed. The "average" Baroque Slavic Latin tragedy runs to somewhat over 2500 lines, while the contemporary performance tradition, derived from liturgical drama and descended from the medieval period, was that of nearly interminable performances frequently spread over consecutive days (Chambers 86ff.).

20 See Tarrant (16-17). 21 Winniczuk's claim that the Mauritius is undivided is therefore not completely correct

("Jesuit Schooldrama in Poland" 723), but she presumably had in mind the more usual Polish vernacular choral plot summaries. The author of the Mauritius also allows his chorus to reappear as actor once more for two lines in a structurally non significant position in Act V sc. 3. Here we actually have one of the classical functions of the chorus as the proponent of the moral and ethical viewpoints generally accepted in contemporary society, in an outburst where where a Senecan first line is fused with a second from Ecclesiastes 1.2, i.e., "O dura fata, saevaque o necessitas/O vanitatum vanitas vanis- sima!" (1787-1788).

22 The structural variant of neo-Latin tragedy lacking odes has its prototype in the German Thomas Naogeorgus's enormously influential anti-papist play Pammachus (1538), which the author dedicated to Martin Luther. The play employs simple transitions between acts, but otherwise adheres to the basic Senecan pattern throughout its bloated 3395 lines. (The play is most easily to be found as vol. 2 of Thomas Naogeorgus's Simtliche Werke, ed. Hans Gert Roloff). Naogeorgus himself dispensed with this variant in such later anti- papist plays as Mercator (1540) and Incendia (1541), reintroducing choral odes as act divisions and composing these odes in strict Horatian meters and stanzaic forms. The Pammachus is the first and evidently only West European neo-Latin example of this structural aberration which becomes standard in Czech neo-Latin tragedy.

23 Consistent with neo-Latin scholarly practice, this author is here referred to as Gregorius Cnapius. This is the form of his name repeatedly established by the author himself, and the only form of the name actually attested by him or near contemporaries, and in such of his works as were published during his lifetime e.g., the Thesaurus Polonolatinograecus (1621-1626). The variants "Knapski" and "Knapiusz" are scholars' vernacularizations dating two centuries or more after the author's death. There is no evidence for the author preferring either of them, nor the more likely variant, "Knap".

24 Winniczuk notes that in addition to the advantages of his intensive early education, the fundamental difference between Szymonowic and other bilingual Polish poets of the period is that by disposition he approached classical literature primarily as a philologist, not as a poet ("Die lateinische Dichtung des Simon Simonides (1558-1629)" 139-148; 140. She claims that his unpublished manuscripts show his involvement with a variety of textual-criticism and translation projects from ancient Greek literature. His Greek philo-




logical work and interests provided the fuel for his Hellenistically-disposed Latin experi- mentation in his two dramas.

25 Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge and Donald William Lucas in The Oxford Classical Dictionary The structural framework of Attic tragedy has been somewhat neglected by scholarship, as Oliver Taplin points out in his consideration of this problem in his Greek Tragedy in Action (19-20).

26 For a discussion of Senecan choral metrics, see Tarrant 31-33. 27 With regard to both tone and dramatic structure, Kochanowski's Polish vernacular

Odprawa posfow greckich (1578) is a much smoother "Hellenization" of the Senecan pattern than Szymonowic was able to achieve (Text of the Odprawa from Jan Kochanow- ski 89-115). For though Kochanowski does in fact employ the canonical 5 epeisodia, and 5 appearances of the chorus, the assymetry of the epeisodia and the choral odes gives the illusion of a close adherence to classical Greek tragic structure. Indeed, two of the five appearances of Kochanowski's chorus are sufficiently brief (379-82 and 557-8) that Milosz overlooks them altogether (Milosz 70). Milosz is so taken in by Kochanowski's deft simulation of Greek tragedy while remaining within the strict norms of the Senecan structure that he allows himself to wax eloquent about Kochanowski "duplicating the qualities of Greek verse" in the "syllabotonic" "third chorus [sic]" (actually the fourth, 424-464).

In reality, Kochanowski's ode has nearly nothing to do directly with Greek tragic choral lyric, where the musical pitch accent was not manipulated for rythmical purposes, even in astrophic composition. Kochanowski's ode is, however, a magnificent and virtually unparalleled recreation of a Senecan Latin astrophic choral lyric. The recreation is rendered possible by the similar characteristics of the non-phonemic stress accentuation of the two languages, the accent in both languages being positioned by the syllabic structure of the word and being a phonetic feature to be reckoned with in every quantita- tive or syllabically organized verse line. By evoking the Greek tradition through this Senecan prism, Kochanowski's ode is perhaps all the more to be admired.

28 Dating of the Odostratocles as per A. Stender-Petersen (29-30). 29 The devotio moderna branch of humanism, which was particularly strong in German

and Dutch areas, and the Slavic territories in close contact with them, was intimately connected with Erasmianism and differed significantly in outlook and technique from the southern and Italian branch of humanism. One significant feature affecting dramatic composition was devotio moderna's strong element of anti-paganism; the classical pagan imagery so central to Italian humanist inspired composition is omitted wherever possible in dramatic composition inspired by northern humanism. See Borowski 240ff. for a more detailed discussion of the influence of devotio moderna on Polish thought and literature.

30 Lidia Winniczuk, "Praefatio" to the Odostratocles, 9-11. 31 Renaissance understanding of the structure of Roman comedy in particular was defective

in two points that would affect Polish drama: "comedy", which was supposed to lack choral odes (the Odostratocles in fact has them, and intermedii to boot), was nevertheless to be divided into 5 acts (through a mis-application of Horace Ars poetica, 89f.), and "comedy", following an erroneous extrapolation from the early editions of Plautus that did not heed the line divisions, could be written in prose. A. S. Chatwick, CHCL 2: 95 points out this omission and its significance for Italian and English Renaissance vernacular comedy. The Renaissance editors of Plautus did not, of course, have access to the 4th century Ambrosian palimpsest, first published in 1815. They had recourse only to the three so-called "Palatine mss.", from the 10th-llth centuries, all of which derive from a single 8th or 9th century lost French archetype in two volumes, generally referred to as the "Palatinus" (Plautus, 57-8).




32 "Praefatio." Gregorii Cnapii Tragoediae: Philopater; Faelicitas; Eutropius (Wratislavae: Zaktad Narodowy im. Ossolinskikh, 1965). 10.

33 See Sarbiewski. 34 The inability to comprehend the ancient notion of the "tragic" is a peculiarly medieval

trait according to O. B. Hardison, who claims that the medieval view of the world expressed itself in drama with a tripartite structure consisting of "pathos," "peripety," and "theophany" to portray the transition from tristium to gaudia that was the essence of the Passion for medieval theology (285).

35 Examples of direct divine intervention of this sort, while more common in Greek tragedy, are also to be found in Seneca. It is the method of resolution of Aeschylus's Oresteia, the source of the plot in Euripides's Hippolytos, and particularly in his Bacchae, to name the most prominent Greek examples. Seneca exploits the technique only once, in the portrayal of Juno's wrath that launches the Hercules Furens. His version of the Hippolytos, while leaving no doubt that the chief motivator of the calamity is Venus (through Phae- dra's speech, 124-128), nevertheless refrains from Euripides's technique of actually portraying the goddess on stage. The technique of portraying antagonism between a character and an off-stage divinity whose influence is nevertheless clearly present, such as the antagonism existing between Oedipus and Apollo in Sophocles's Oedipos tyrannos, is Seneca's preferred method not only in his Hippolytus, but also in his own Oedipus, and while Deianira may pray to Juno in Hercules Oetaeus 256-275, the role of this goddess in Hercules's death is kept indirect. In the play describing very recent events, the Octavia, where no divine conflict or intervention may be portrayed, the Nero character undergoes no psychological change whatever. He is monolithically evil throughout, the only question being how well this evil may be externally restrained as circumstances develop.

Obviously, polytheistic human/divine interactions of this sort, involving specific psychological traits, are impossible in explicitly Christian drama. With no individual dieties responsible for complex and contradictory psychological states, representations of these states on stage take the form of externalizations of internal psychological discord rather than internalizations of celestial discord. One- dimensional mortal characters now represent opposing sides of internal conflict, rather than one-dimensional divine characters imposing their conflicting points of view upon a monolithic human psychology.

36 On the surface, the anonymous historical drama Belisarius appears to furnish a small exception to this notion, as its author does allow two minor pagan "funereal goddesses" (ferales deae) Discordia and Tysiphone [sic] (this latter traditionally one of the Furies in charge of blood vengeance) to appear in the opening scene of Act I. But their function is to act as interlocutors for the Ghost of Amalasuntha, the gothic queen and ally of Emperor Justinian of Constantinople, which queen's murder at the hands of her crony, king Theodatus, provides an excuse for Justinian to send Belisarius to invade the Gothic kingdom, launching the events of our play's plot. The opening scene with its ghost and goddesses is designed simply to provide an exposition of the prehistory of the events of the play proper, and the pagan dieties do not operate on the psychology of the main characters, nor appear in the main action. When the author of the Belisarius has need of an abstract character, he has recourse to Livor ("spite"), who nevertheless only appears once Act IV, sc. 2, to deliver himself of a soliloquy and disappears, not to be seen again, nor actually to interact with any character in the play. Livor's function, too, is exposition.

37 Antoninus's reign was only moderately more conservative than Hadrian's had been with regard to the interpretation of the Hadrianic rescript concerning the prosecution of Christians for crimes against the state, as now the designation "Christian" was sufficient to be considered such a crime, but the burden of proof rested with the accuser, not the accused (Sordi 68). The text of Hadrian's Latin rescript is preserved in Greek translation




by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History, 4.9. Nor was there an upsurge in true persecution in Antoninus' reign, as there certainly was under Marcus Aurelius (Sordi 72).

38 Sordi 68-69. Antoninus's problem seems to have been his provincial governors' failing to conform to his regulations, as in the trial of Polycarp at Smyrna. (Sordi 69).

39 Curtius 50-51. 40 Piszczek 7. 41 Szymonowic, by page, with supplemental line numbers added. 42 Winniczuk, "Die lateinische Dichtung des Simon Simonides," 140. Ziomek follows

Winniczuk's line, but hedges by claiming that the character of Jempsar may be somewhat indebted to Seneca's Phaedra, while Szymonowic also shows clear stoic aims in the play (Ziomek 427-428).

43 Euripides, Hippolytos, ed. W.S. Barrett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). However, Joseph's final lengthy speech in this scene (185-236) is modelled more closely on Seneca's opening monologue by Phaedra herself (85ff), as Joseph's situation of being sold into slavery (20; 194ff) matches quite well the Senecan Phaedra's protestations of being given hostage into an enemy's house (89ff).

44 See Quintus Smyrneus.

WORKS CITED

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Documents

Thematic and Generic Medievalism in the Polish Neo-Latin Drama of the Renaissance and Baroque