Creating Spaces for Wonder

Dramaturgies of Revelation in Early Modern Jesuit Theatre

Abstract

The article examines early modern Jesuit theatre as a dynamic practice of spatial and symbolic transformation extending beyond the physical stage, rather than as dramatic representation confined to it. Its aim is to demonstrate how Jesuit performances in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth created spaces of wonder and revelation through the continual reshaping of bodies, objects, architecture, landscapes, and systems of signs. The study argues that transformation constituted a fundamental principle of Jesuit dramaturgy: concealment generated uncertainty, transformation produced wonder, wonder led to recognition, and recognition opened the possibility of moral and spiritual understanding. The analysis draws primarily on selected Jesuit playbills, production accounts, college chronicles, and related theatrical documents from the Jesuit provinces of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These sources are examined alongside theoretical approaches to early modern theatricality, especially Henry S. Turner’s concept of the “New Theatricality,” Tiffany Stern’s understanding of theatre as an ecology of performance materials, and studies of Jesuit visual and ceremonial culture. The article also draws upon Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s treatise De acuto et arguto (c. 1619) as an important intellectual framework for understanding Jesuit aesthetics of surprise, paradox, and revelation. Methodologically, the article employs emblematic sampling to identify broader patterns of transformation within selected theatrical episodes. The case studies examine different modes through which Jesuit theatre produced and transformed space: the reconfiguration of the performing body through costume and music in Władysław Jagiełło król Polski (1663); triumphal arches as ceremonial and civic spatial devices in Brama Grzymała Pandana (1696); the mapping of classical narratives onto the cultural landscape of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in Exul vates (1715); the sudden transformation of the stage into an eschatological space in which mortality is made visible in Orgia Bacchi (1738); and the sea voyage as a mutable moral landscape of instability, temptation, and salvation in Regni fames non regia (1714). The article concludes that Jesuit theatre did not use spectacle merely for visual pleasure. Theatrical transformation functioned as a pedagogical and spiritual instrument through which spectators were invited to reconsider their faith as well as their perceptions of history and the Christian world.