School Dramas, or Schoolbooks in Dialogues?: Schola Ludus by Comenius and the Hungarian Calvinist School Dramas in the 18th Century

• Autores: Júlia Nagy
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2002 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Books and education: 500 years of reading and learning), págs. 251-264
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • �Schola Ludus� by Comenius has always been at the periphery of research. It has never been so important as the other works and the pedagogic and philosophic system of Comenius, because it is just a school drama collection. When Protestant school dramas are studied, �Schola Ludus� is considered to be only a textbook in dialogues, so it was only an item in the data base of the Protestant school dramas. Most experts think these dramas very important in the national drama tradition, but nobody has compared the dramas of �Schola Ludus� to the Hungarian or Czech Protestant school dramas. School performances were banned in Calvinist schools in the 17th century, so Calvinist school theatre flourished only around and after the mid 18 th century. The aims of these dramas were the same as those of �Schola Ludus�: educating and teaching; the sources were the same, too: the schoolbooks. This paper shows some examples how the textbooks were used by playwrights from �Schola Ludus� up to the end of Hungarian Calvinist school drama tradition, i. e. up to the 18th century.

    There are five types of Calvinist dramas in Hungary: 1. Dramas about school life; 2. �Certamens� of different trades; 3. Themes from the Bible; 4. �Danse macabres� and other dramas about Death; 5. Themes from Greek and Latin mythology. The first and the second type can be found in �Schola Ludus�, too, but Comenius's opinion was disapproving of types 3., 4. and 5. According to him the aims of these dramas are only the entertainment and they only waste the pupils� and audiences� time. But there are a lot of direct and indirect contacts between these texts and Comenius's pedagogy, too. Comenius wanted to show the whole World in his dramas -but not for the audience, because his theatre was for the pupils. In the 18 th century authors realised that dramas were not only for the students, they are for the audience, too, so one can see some changes in these 18 th century dramas, e.g. new, comic figures and scenes appeared in them.

    Drama was not apart of poetry in the 17-18 th century, like lyric and epic, it was just a mode of messages (most schoolbooks were written in dialogue form in this period). From this point of view �Schola Ludus� and 18th century dramas are only textbooks in dialogues. The difference is the performance between textbook and drama, so we can say that �Schola Ludus� and the 18th century texts are dramas! Many Hungarian and European literary-historians seem to forget, that school dramas were acted by students in schools, so we cannot study these dramas without the pedagogic background, school dramas are an unexploited source of educational research. This article gives some useful data for this aspect