engleski

Croatian school Neo-Latin drama construction of database and reconstruction of a genre

This paper discusses the school drama as a part of educational programme in Croatian Jesuit schools. The school drama appears with the foundation of Jesuit schools (from 1607) and is being performed even after the dissolution of the Jesuit order and its colleges in 1773. The school drama was written mostly in Latin, which makes it an important constituent of the body of Croatian Neo-Latin literature, but also a part of a widespread European tradition [1]. Unfortunately, its texts have not survived, and the genre was perceived as somehow secondary in the Croatian literary history. We learn about the genre mostly from testimony: from Jesuit school annals and the periochae, brief descriptions of contents printed for each drama performance. We have gathered the surviving testimonies into a digital database to reconstruct and analyse the history of Croatian school drama. The development started with a seminal bibliographic description of theatrical performances throughout Croatia up to 1840 [2], verifying the data in Fancev [3] [4]. Also, we have used additional information from Staud’s monumental work [5]. Before bringing the available data into a digital format, the structure of information had to be defined. Every performance was annotated according to authorship, title, genre, theme, place and year of performance, directors and performers, occasion of performance, type of public, brief description and references. Once all data was transferred into the structure, we were able to analyse it. We were able to establish the total number of school drama performances and to explore their distribution over a total of ten locations. We have also investigated the time span, and determined that the first performance was in 1525. The school drama in Latin turned out to have been performed after the dissolution of the Jesuit order. Looking closer at authorship, we identified only three names ; the rest of the plays remain anonymous. Thematically, the school drama falls into several distinct groups, ranging from classical mythology (predominantly Greek), over the Bible and Christianity, to history and allegory. Further scrutiny of the Christian themes, for example, showed that the school drama concentrates on only three motives from the New Testament (the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the rich man and Lazarus), but also that many plays depict exotic saints and martyrs. A structured digital system allowed us to gather and analyse information from various sources, overcoming the limitations of print, and in this way to reconstruct dynamics of a genre without surviving texts. By querying the data we have been able to isolate similarities and particularities, verifying our hypotheses quantitatively. We dare to assume that the same could be done with other similar cultural phenomena in Croatia.

školska drama ; isusovačke škole ; neolatinizam ; digitalna baza podataka ; digitalno pretraživanje

Hrvatska školska drama na latinskom – konstrukcija baze podataka i rekonstrukcija žanra