Neolatin Jesuit Theatre in Portugal
(THESPIS database)
Within the Thespis database, the Neo-Latin Jesuit Theatre in Portugal section aims to gather information on neo-Latin theatre production in Portugal between 1550 and 1745, including:
- author,
- title,
- dramatic genre,
- date/occasion,
- performance venue(s),
- source(s), Manuscripts, and/or bibliographic references,
- (whenever possible) a brief summary of each work.
It is one of the most important and best-preserved neo-Latin drama collections in all of Europe, though most of its texts remain inaccessible. The identification of the whole literary corpus will be the first step, followed by a study on their historical and artistic value.
From the perspective of their content and enactment, these plays are a part of not only European Humanism, but also Portuguese Culture (which supported and endorsed this kind of theatre), particularly in the fields of education, rhetoric, poetic and musical production, politics, customs, and religion.
The Codexes of the Society of Jesus in Coimbra, Évora, and Lisbon contain tragedies, tragicomedies, comedies, and simple dramatic dialogues written in Latin and enacted in academic spaces before the whole city or even the nobility in spectacles considered to be on par with the largest European courts.
Inspired by the plays of Ancient Greece, these performances even developed their own musical genre, the Choruses for tragedies, a few decades before the first humanist theatre choruses we know today.
An essential starting point for identifying the corpus is the work of Claude Henri Frèches, Le Theatre Neo-Latin au Portugal. Paris, Nizet-Lisbonne, Bertrand, 1964. It pays close attention to the golden era of Jesuit theatre (1551-1640). Six decades after its publication, the data it compiled – now with the possibility of being displayed in a more intuitive format – requires an update, not only with more recent research findings (on authors, plays, and Manuscripts), but also with fragmented information retrieved from the vast collections of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu.