Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Didactics and entertainment on eighteenth century Hungarian stage.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Professional stage in Hungary was established in 1790. The four decades leading to 1790 meant fast, radical and manyfold change of school theatres. Didactics belonging closely to school theatre had to be kept but was evidently in change. The present survey investigates how the change of didactics, the purpose of entertainment shifted Hungarian school drama closer and closer to the professional stage. A definite change occured in historical plays, as well as in the number and atmosphere of Catholic comedies and parodies. Calvinist school stage was strongly didactic but untouched by classicism. Franciscan devotional genres belong to a very old medieval didactic tradition. The changing function of love themes and female roles drove school dramas directly towards the professional theatre.

**********

The professional stage in Hungary was established in 1790. Earlier, there was practically no professional theatre, since the rare experiments here and there could not develop any tradition, and the only form of theatre was that of the schools. For centuries schools staged dramas as a part of their educational jobs. Before the mid-eighteenth century, school-performances were merely parts of teachers' jobs, their pedagogical routine, with the traditional purpose of teaching language, speech, proper behaviour, argument technics, mythology and history to the pupils. However, the four decades leading to 1790 saw school theatres functioning more and more as real, almost professional theatre. This process meant a fast, radical and manyfold change, both for the performers and for the audience. From about the mid-eighteenth century, the main purpose of school theatre, even if undeclared, became pure entertainment, parallel with the teacher's claim of being an author, a playwright. More and more school dramas were published as a work of art, with the author's name, i.e., the teacher, identified as a playwright. The growing claim for entertainment quickly changed the language, the themes, and the genre of school dramas. More and more comedies and profane dramas were played in the vernacular.

In our present survey, we investigate how the purpose of entertainment brought Hungarian school drama closer and closer to the professional stage. Didactics belonging closely to school theatre had to be kept but was evidently in change. We are going to examine the process how in and what way the didactic function of school stages was changed.

I. A moral lesson

I.1. Historic plays

History, being a frequent and typical Baroque theme of school dramas, especially for the Jesuits, was used for centuries to give examples of the works of Providence marking the right choice of man between his frail...