The Biblical History Play: Turning Seventeenth-Century Joseph Plays into Political Drama

1 Extension and Hybridity in Joseph Drama

The Joseph story was popular dramatic material, in Latin drama by humanists and Jesuits as well as in other languages, mainly German, Dutch and Spanish.^[1] Jean Lebeau distinguished two phases in the sixteenth-century development of German and Latin drama about Joseph.^[2] The first phase extends from 1533 to 1571, from the publication date of a comedy by Sixt Birck/Xystus Betuleius to that of a play by the Lutheran pastor Bartholomeus Leschke. The publication of a comedy by Christian Zyrl marks the beginning of the second phase in 1572 and that of three tragedies by Theodorus Rhodius in 1625 marks its end. Lebeau characterises the first phase as one of creative energy in the service of religious fervour, first in the humanist drama from the Low Countries and then in the earliest drama produced by the Reformers in the German-speaking regions of the Holy Roman Empire.^[3] In contrast to this first phase, he sees the second phase as one of “degeneration, a setback.”^[4] Lebeau mentions three aspects of this degenerating state of drama. The first is that half of his corpus in the second period consists of translations, compilations, and plagiarisms. The second aspect is the tendency to add new material to the biblical story: long subplots, generic comic scenes, and novelistic plot elements. Third, Lebeau finds a difference in religious fervour between the two phases. He regrets that the second phase trades in the “missionary zeal” and the “combative ardour” of the first phase for dry sermonizing.^[5]

What Lebeau appreciates in the first phase is the effort of playwrights to stay close to one model. He prefers the plays by the Dutch humanists Cornelius Crocus and Georgius Macropedius, who follow the classical model of comedy not only in language and style but also in their shaping of the content. These two Joseph plays excerpt the part of the story where Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, which results in a comedy of intrigue. Lebeau calls the other plays from the first period “epic drama,” because they contain the whole storyline with its various changes of place and time, but he appreciates the effort of these plays to restrict themselves to the biblical story. In contrast, he is negative about the “contamination” of the plot with new elements and subplots that are not in scripture, both in German and in Latin plays, starting in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

If we look at this phenomenon from a European point of view, we might turn Lebeau’s “dégénerescence” into a more positive appraisal. The extension, complication, and contamination of plots that Lebeau describes in his corpus are generally the characteristics of developing new genres throughout Europe. One thinks, for instance, of Louise Clubb’s concept of the “theatergram,” or the mobile unit of theatre that travels from one period, region, or genre to another.^[6] Clubb describes the development of the Italian commedia erudita of the sixteenth-century (comedy in a classical style but depicting contemporary society) in the following terms:

Constant as a principle from the time of Ariosto on was construction by contamination, the meditated and usually explicit combination of pre-texts. But in addition to the mere fusion of borrowed plots, this demanded the interchange and transformation of units, figures, relationships, actions, topoi, and framing patterns, gradually building a combinatory of theatergrams […].^[7]

“Construction by contamination” started with plot but was soon extended to genre, creating for instance the pastoral tragicomedy. The second principle that Clubb identified in the commedia erudita, closely linked to that of contamination, is the principle of complication.^[8] The trend in comedy and tragicomedy was for multiple parallel intrigues, multiple concealments, and multiple revelations at the end.

The contamination between biblical play and history play that I will discuss here is only one manifestation of a variety of generic crossovers in seventeenth-century Joseph drama. For instance, the humanist plays are themselves combinations of contemporary performance traditions of biblical drama in the vernacular and both comic and tragic models of drama from Antiquity. However, this earlier generic hybridity does not have the same repercussions for the plot. In most cases, the plot adheres to the biblical story. Some humanist playwrights, such as Cornelius Crocus, excerpt parts of the story, but even then, the story receives more depth, not extra plotlines. An exception is Georgius Macropedius, whom Lebeau sees in this respect as a precursor to the later trend. Macropedius adds a plotline in which Joseph, as a prefiguration of Christ, teaches and converts part of Potiphar’s household.

During the seventeenth century, although some Joseph plays still faithfully retell the biblical story, new material is added, and generic intermixing produces subplots, new plotlines, and new emphases in the story. This happens in a variety of different ways. For instance, the German corpus that Lebeau studied introduces elements from Jewish exegesis and from extra-biblical material such as the Testament of the Twelve Prophets and the romance story of Joseph and Aseneth that these plays took from Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale.^[9] Spanish drama about Joseph from the seventeenth century focuses heavily on this romance plot and adds material from Jewish and Islamic traditions.^[10] During the whole period, authors occasionally turned the story into a classical tragedy, which for two authors (the Polish Simon Simonides writing in Latin, 1587, and the Dutch Joost van den Vondel writing in Dutch, 1640) meant moving the focus to the character of the wife of Potiphar, whom they rendered as a second Phaedra. Lastly, the hybridity of Jesuit drama produced subplots with farmers, neighbours, and courtiers, allegorical tableaux, and scenes with song and dance.^[11]

2 From Biblical to Political History in Jesuit Drama

I now turn to the changing dominance from biblical to political history in Jesuit drama. I will present a few chronologies drawn by scholars, with the caveat that they all studied the Jesuit drama of the Holy Roman Empire. Johannes Müller in 1930 discerned a Renaissance phase, a transition period, an early and a high baroque period.^[12] In the early phase, that of the Renaissance, Jesuits took much material from northern humanist school drama – mainly biblical drama, comedies about school life, and morality plays. In the transition period (1570–1600), Jesuit school theatre became a mass event, with a thematic focus on the collective, many actors, ingenious decors, and special effects. Starting around 1585, saints, legendary Christian heroes and characters from local history entered the scene. Müller characterised the early baroque phase (1600–1620) as one of realism, mainly based on Bidermann’s work. In the second baroque phase, during the Thirty Years War, biblical material largely disappeared from Jesuit drama, and the theatre turned to “lurid effects, executions, martyrdoms, blood effects, grave and corpse romanticism, visions of death and apparitions.”^[13]

Elida Maria Szarota designed a timeline of Jesuit drama by focusing on subject material.^[14] She, too, grafts her timeline on the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment periods. Following the Renaissance period, in which Jesuit drama adopted the sacred and moral drama of the humanist schools, she notices that in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, historical subjects from post-biblical and even recent history were introduced.^[15] In this first baroque period, until 1622, these historical plays put the spotlight on the figure of the heroic individual. During the Thirty Years War, however, the structure changed to the depiction of a conflict between two antagonists instead of the glorious journey of the hero. These two antagonists are, for instance, the Christian martyr and the heretical emperor. The antagonists stand for opposing parties, principles, or ideologies. An important stimulus for this shift were the Tragoediae Sacrae by the French Nicolas Caussin, which appeared during the 1620s and were themselves the product of the French religious wars. A new kind of religious tragedy was born, one that was at the same time political drama. The court plays a prominent and especially maligned role in Jesuit drama: it is a place of intriguing nobles, lies, and defamation.^[16] Only late in the seventeenth century, from 1672, did families and Roman history appear on the Jesuit stages.

Stefan Tilg designed a timeline specifically for the college at Innsbruck.^[17] The humanist phase, in which plays from the Low Countries, such as Livinus Brechtanus’ Euripus, were adopted and adapted, lasted from 1563 to 1595. Starting in 1574, the Innsbruck Jesuits produced their own original plays about martyrs, saints, and biblical figures. From 1622, these were joined by figures such as princes, military commanders, and courtiers. From 1684, the college also staged contemporary history (the Austrian war against the Turks) and Roman history.

In sum, during the baroque period in Jesuit drama, subjects of drama shifted from biblical history to sacred history to secular history. Political drama entered sacred drama and transformed it. However, this article will argue that this shift is not just a matter of different topics, historical periods, and figures. I will show how drama about the patriarch Joseph, which persists throughout the period, undergoes these changes too. In baroque Joseph drama, political intrigue and court life form the setting for the story. Biblical history in Jesuit drama sometimes (but not always) acquired the characteristics of a secular history play.

3 History and the History Play

The term history play or, in German, Geschichtsdrama is a designation used by modern scholars and was not in use during the early modern period. Although historical material clearly became an important part of European drama at the end of the sixteenth century, it is less clear whether it is useful to see these historical dramas as a distinct genre. Scholars have applied the term mainly to the Elizabethan, and specifically Shakespearian, history play in English drama, and in German drama to the Sturm und Drang dramatists who admired Shakespeare, beginning with Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen.^[18] Paulina Kewes and Dirk Niefanger have argued against teleological and ideologically motivated definitions of the history play.^[19] Whereas Niefanger does identify a category of historical drama but extends it to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, Paulina Kewes has rejected the use of the category.

Kewes distinguishes three scholarly definitions of the genre of the history play, based on subject matter, form, and ideology. The problem with definitions based on subject matter is that the English history play is defined as being about English history in particular, which is not a convincing criterion. Similarly, while dramas about history do share some dramatic techniques corresponding to their thematic concerns (e.g., battle-scenes and crowd-scenes), this only sets them apart as thematic groupings, not as a dramatic genre. The last criterion, ideology, is the most promising. This is the idea that history plays represent didactically the “purposes of history.”^[20] However, Kewes counters this argument by saying that there was no consensual understanding of history and no ideological uniformity.

Dirk Niefanger, two years later, agreed that the history play does not exist and that several varieties can be distinguished.^[21] However, he does identify a link between the increased use of a variety of historical materials in drama and new approaches in Renaissance historiography, namely antiquarianism and political historiography.^[22] The history play reflects certain changes in thinking about history. Therefore, Niefanger does group some plays together based on five characteristics that follow from their focus on not just any fictional story but on a historical event.^[23] (1) The first of these is the suggestion of historical authenticity, for instance by referring to specific times or places. (2) This historical authenticity goes hand in hand with an effort to mark the historicity of the play, for instance by means of archaic speech or historical props. (3) However, the historical events represented in a history play are not only significant in the past but also for the present; they are historically significant in light of what comes after. (4) This importance is stressed by means of a historiographical use of, for instance, citations and documents, or the reference to biographies and chronologies. (5) The last characteristic, which hangs together with the historical importance of the represented events, is that most of the action plays out in political public spaces.

These characteristics thus indicate the attempt at constructing a historical horizon in a play predicated on the idea of historical authenticity and alterity, focused on historical specificity and converging with models of political historiography. I contend that these characteristics are also present in some seventeenth-century biblical plays about the patriarch Joseph, thus turning biblical into political drama and sometimes more specifically into martyr drama. This reflects the fact that biblical exegesis was also impacted by antiquarianism and new models of political history.

4 Bernardino Stefonio, Crispus (1597)

I begin my analysis with a play that is not a Joseph play but which, I suggest, had an influence on the political turn in Jesuit Joseph plays because of the similar theme, namely Bernardino Stefonio’s Crispus. The play was performed at the Collegio Romano in 1597 and printed in Rome in 1601.^[24] Crispus offers a new version of the plot best known in drama from Euripides’ Hippolytos and Seneca’s Phaedra. Like these classical plays, it tells the story of a son falsely accused of rape by his stepmother, but instead of being set in mythological Greece, the story is situated in Christian history, at the court of Emperor Constantine. Crispus is the son of Constantine, beloved by his father and successful in war. His stepmother Fausta tries to seduce him and accuses him of attempted rape when he rejects her. His father orders his execution and learns of his innocence only when it is too late. I bring up this play because of its enormous impact on Jesuit drama, and because it shares its basic plot with the part of Joseph’s story where the wife of Potiphar falsely accuses him of attempted rape.

The Baroque dramas about Phaedra and Hippolytos, about Joseph, and about Crispus share the prototypical plot element of the stepmother who falsely accuses her stepson of (attempted) rape.^[25] The mythological Phaedra is explicitly present in Crispus. Not only does Phaedra’s ghost visit and incite Fausta in the first scene, other characters in the play also constantly make the comparison between them. In Joseph plays, Potiphar’s wife is often implicitly modeled on Phaedra. Sometimes when authors made the Joseph story into a tragedy, they used the models of Euripides and Seneca.^[26] This accounts for new elements in the plot: in some Joseph dramas, for instance, Potiphar’s wife commits suicide, like Phaedra.

This shared plot underlies my suggestion that the transplantation of the Phaedra myth to a political drama might have inspired some Jesuit Joseph dramas. Crispus was translated and adapted numerous times in Italy, France, and the Low Countries, and was seen as the model for a Christian tragedy.^[27] It seems to me that Crispus not only imitated the tragedies by Euripides and Seneca but also took certain plot elements from humanist Joseph plays and in turn bequeathed some of its own elements to later Joseph plays. With regard to the transfer from Joseph drama to Crispus, I mention the scene where Crispus flees from Fausta, after she has indicated her desire for him. Stefonio does not show the confrontation between Fausta and Crispus. This is a much-used modus operandi in Jesuit Joseph plays, which leave out the character of Potiphar’s wife and therefore only refer to the seduction scene by means of Joseph’s monologue during his flight. Moreover, Fausta brings her husband the sword and mantle that Crispus left behind when he fled from her room. They are used in the tribunal as evidence. In the Joseph story, Potiphar’s wife grabs his mantle as he runs away and uses it against him.

With regard to the transfer from Crispus to later Joseph plays, I want to point out that Stefonio devotes some attention to the plotting of Fausta’s son against his half-brother Crispus. In Joseph plays, the envy of his brothers is of course a major theme. In later plays, this envy is often doubled by that of the Pharaoh’s sons or Egyptian courtiers. This element is first introduced in the comedy Joseph Aegypti Prorex (1615) by the German Jesuit Jakob Bidermann, who taught in Munich at the time. The son of the Pharaoh, Porphyrius, is angry that his father promoted a former slave to the highest power in Egypt after himself and fears that his inheritance might be at stake. His hate is a reflection of the envy of Joseph’s brothers, who also feared that their younger brother might come to play lord over them.

More in general, both in the story of Crispus and Fausta as it is told by Stefonio and in the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife as it is told in many early modern plays, the central figure is not the stepmother, as is the case in the classical tragedies. At stake is not the fate of one family but that of a whole people. Joseph must become viceroy of Egypt in order to bring his family to Egypt, where they will grow to become the Jewish people. Similarly, Stefonio’s Crispus gives the stepmother-plot a major political dimension. Crispus’ main accuser is not Fausta but his half-brother, who is driven by a desire to revenge his mother but also by personal ambition. Crispus has just returned triumphant from the war in Germania: he is the favourite of the people, the senate, and the army. When Fausta and his half-brother want to accuse him, they must take into account the risk of a civil war. There is a scene where Crispus’ army does indeed offer to fight for him against his father the emperor. Crispus refuses, however, and sends the army away, while realising that this act might mean his death. Crispus became a widely imitated model for the new historical martyr drama, one that all Jesuit playwrights would have known. I suggest that the obvious links with the Joseph story inspired the introduction of a political scene and the oppositional model of martyr drama into Joseph plays, as I will discuss next.

5 Leone Santi, Somniator Sive Ioseph Tragoedia (1648)

Leone Santi or Leo Sanctus taught mathematics, philosophy, and theology at the Collegio Romano and the Collegio Germanico in Rome. The generation of playwrights succeeding that of Bernardino Stefonio in Rome had concentrated their efforts on the theoretical formulation of Christian martyr tragedy in the vein of Crispus. Santi follows these theoretical precepts but presents himself as an innovator for taking up biblical matter again.^[28] Santi produced two biblical plays for the Roman stage: Il Gigante in Italian (1632, republished in 1637 as David), and Somniator sive Ioseph tragoedia in Latin (1648).

Somniator sive Ioseph tragoedia is unlike every other Joseph play. Instead of introducing Joseph to court life in Egypt, Santi moves the political stage to Canaan. Prefixed to the play is the part of the story with which the Genesis story ends, namely the prophecies of Jacob regarding his sons and the tribes that will grow from their descendants. Santi explains that he bases his characterisations of Joseph’s brothers on these oracles.^[29] In fact, he projects the characteristics of the tribes onto the characters of the brothers, making them larger-than-life. All of the brothers are already leaders of groups of people at the time of the story. For instance, Ruben, as the firstborn, becomes in the play the “princeps sacrorum” (“leader of the priests”). Juda is the “princeps exercituum” (“leader of the armies”) and has a general (“dux”) under his command named Martius. Dan is the leader of spies, and Issachar the leader of shepherds. Asser is called “rex conviviorum” (“leader of the feast table”), and he has a dux called Vitellus Magister, whereas Nephtali is the leader of the hunters, with a dux called Actaeon. Simeon and Levi, who are characterised in Jacob’s prophecy with the words “vasa iniquitatis bellantia” (“their swords are weapons of violence”), are viewed as the forefathers of the Pharisees who wanted Christ dead. Therefore, in the play it is they who try to kill Joseph. Simeon is made into the leader of a group of assassins, and Levi is made “princeps rabularum lucrionum,” the leader of corrupt lawyers or officials. As the typological and genealogical identification of Simeon and Levi with the Pharisees shows, the characterization of the brothers also serves the strong typological and emblematic programme of the play.^[30] Joseph’s suffering is typologically linked to his grandfather Isaac’s near-sacrifice as well as to Christ’s future sacrifice. These sacrifices mirror each other through salvation history.

The aggression of the brothers against Joseph is explained not as the result of envy and tensions in the family, as in the Bible, but as the effect of a political intrigue by a neighbouring king. The play draws on various other biblical elements to construct this narrative, but also adds much that is not in Scripture. The king of Canaan wants to revenge the people of Sichem, who were exterminated by Joseph’s brothers in revenge for the rape of their sister, as told in Genesis 34. He therefore sends a demon of envy to Jacob’s sons. The king’s intrigue rests on another leg, too: the infiltrator Rufus is a survivor of Sichem and has ingratiated himself with Jacob by pretending to be a religious convert. Rufus persuades Jacob to give Joseph the multi-coloured mantle that will make his brothers jealous. He reveals in a monologue that the mantle, mentioned without further detail in Genesis 37, was woven by a woman from Sichem. Meanwhile, the brothers and their armies also wage a war against the king of Canaan for the possession of the piece of land that Jacob bought from the Sichemites when he settled in Canaan. This transaction is mentioned in Genesis 33. I cannot go into all the intrigues that Rufus devises to stoke the envy of the brothers, but this piece of land is a crucial element. The brothers are fighting to retrieve it, without knowing that Jacob bought the land for Joseph.^[31] Right after they have reconquered it, Juda unmasks Rufus as a traitor, and while searching him Juda’s soldiers find the contract of purchase, which mentions that the land will belong to Joseph. Ruben and Juda had previously been the ones defending Joseph against their brothers, but now Juda is so enraged by the thought that all the time he was fighting for Joseph’s sake that he turns against him as well.

There is some similarity between this account and the battles described by the Sefer HaYashar, a text of medieval Hebrew Midrash that was first printed in 1625 in Venice.^[32] The Sefer HaYashar seeks to fill in a few lacunae in the biblical story. For instance, it explains Jacob’s words that he fought for the piece of land he gives to Joseph “with sword and bow,” although the account in Genesis states earlier that he bought it from the Sichemites. The Sefer HaYashar therefore tells what happened when Jacob returned to Sichem, years after the genocide and his flight to Bethel. Seven Canaanite cities send their armies against Jacob’s family, but all in turn are defeated by Jacob, his sons and “one hundred and two of their servants.” The Midrash text describes these battles in epic detail.

Santi does not introduce battles scenes in his play, but he does adopt the contraction of all these separate details in the biblical account into one story, as well as the characterisation of Joseph’s brothers as warriors and political leaders. The brothers are aware of their role on the political stage. For instance, when Juda tries to talk Simeon out of wanting to kill Joseph, his argument is not only that killing is a wrongful act, but also that they must consider the good reputation of their people, because a leader derives his power from the trust that others have in them. They could not do their enemies a bigger favour than committing such an atrocious act: “Fabulam aeternam damus scenis, theatris, pulpitisque barbaris.”^[33] The irony of this metatheatrical statement will not be lost on the Christian audiences to whom their story provided an eternal example.

In three of the six acts, Joseph is on the road to visit his brothers. But he is not unaccompanied, as in the biblical story: his trusted teacher Acates and a young musician named Harmonillus travel with him. Acates warns Joseph for Rufus but is lured away from Joseph’s side by an intrigue from the latter. Harmonillus advises Joseph not to wear his multi-coloured mantle, but when Joseph does not listen, he is unable to save his friend from his brothers. Thus, the Jesuit playwright holds before his students the story of a young noble boy assisted by his teacher and friend but threatened by the intrigues and violence of politics.

This is reminiscent of what Elida Szarota says about the depiction of the court in Jesuit drama. She notes that Jesuit drama lacks “die Figuration eines Hofes,” the depiction of court life in its entirety. Although many Jesuit dramas are situated at a court, the court is represented by individuals and the head of the court is often absent.^[34] Also, the court appears in a negative light as a breeding ground for intrigue, lies, and slander.^[35] “Most of the scheming courtiers are taken straight from hell or make their way up from there of their own accord. And it is the nobility who are made the bearers of court intrigues and perfidy everywhere.”^[36] Szarota points to the contrast with the Protestant school drama by Christian Weise. And indeed, if we compare Christian Weise’s two Joseph dramas to that of Santi, the contrast in the depiction of political life is clear. Christian Weise was headmaster of the Protestant grammar school in Zittau. He was a proponent of the historico-political drama that arose in the Empire after the Thirty Years War, which typifies his biblical plays as well. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly has noted that “he uses the biblical story as much to depict the diplomatic manoeuvrings and ceremonial usages common among princes as to point a moral.”^[37]

Weise’s comedy Der Keusche Joseph (1690) focuses on the episode with Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. This play does contain a complete “Figuration eines Hofes.” As is typical for Weise’s plays, the court is divided into two factions. After Joseph lands in prison and starts converting not only his fellow prisoners but also the Moorish envoys who visit him there, he incurs the hostility of the Egyptian priests. Also part of this faction against Joseph are Sesostris, the brother of Seres (the name of Potiphar’s wife in this play), some Egyptian courtiers and citizens, and a couple of visiting Arabian princes who are in love with Seres and Asnath, Joseph’s future wife.^[38] Even after Joseph is promoted to Pharaoh’s second-in-command, they plot to kill him, but the conspiracy is revealed in time and Pharaoh enforces oaths of loyalty, even if some of these oaths are not honest. The court setting in this play is a complete miniature of court life: there is a king, a queen, her sister, young princes and princesses and their teacher, Egyptian princes, courtiers, and citizens, visiting Arabian princes and envoys from other African regions, and priests with their own hierarchy. Every participant in this court life has an influence on Joseph’s story. Although there is intrigue, murder plots, lies, and defamation, there is also a good party at court, and the king is a powerful presence who is able to impose peace.

The plays by Santi and Weise are very different in character. Weise focuses on the part of the story that is most suited to a romance plot and has many female characters, whereas the Jesuit play features no female characters at all. Santi rather focuses on the first part of Joseph’s story and the envy between brothers to turn it into a history play, with inimical armies, battles, intrigues, infiltrators, and questions of inheritance. Both, however, depict Joseph in a political milieu and thus set the biblical play against a background that is typical of the history play. Earlier Joseph dramas did paint him as a capable ruler of Egypt during the famine, and as an example of leadership to be imitated, but they did not place the biblical character in a court setting, as Weise does, or in a political setting, as Santi does.

Santi’s drama is remarkable for the liberty it takes with the biblical story. Most playwrights followed the rules made explicit by Gerard Vossius in his Poeticarum Institutionum: “what Holy Scripture says should be said here; what is contrary to it may not be said; what Scripture neither says nor denies should be said with moderation, that is, only what is probable should be set forth.”^[39] Santi, however, adds so much to the story that it becomes highly improbable that the Bible would not have mentioned it. I suggest that Santi is not just adding fictional details, however, but that he changes the biblical play into a political history play. The play has all the characteristics that Niefanger lists. First, although the play deviates from the biblical story, it does put a lot of stress on the historical context of that story in the Bible. For instance, it tries to get the chronology right of when Jacob bought his piece of land at Sichem and what happened to it later. It also ties together Joseph’s story with the preceding and the following chapters, in particular everything that has to do with the land at Sichem. I have suggested that Santi might have looked to a source of Jewish Midrash for inspiration, thus leaning heavily on the historical exegesis of Scripture. The historicity of the play is stressed by the reference to the contract of purchase, which is mentioned in the Bible a few times, just not in this part of the story. By prefacing the play with Jacob’s Testament and representing everything in this light, Santi stresses the historical significance of Joseph and his brothers as not just a story about envy between brothers, but that of the Jewish people and ancestors of Christ. Small details such as Joseph’s mantle are tied to larger political events. Lastly, these events of historical significance play out mostly in the public space of politics and warfare. It is strange that Santi chooses this part of the story to make into a history play. It would be much more logical to tell about Joseph’s life at the Egyptian court, as the other plays that I will discuss do. However, Santi transforms Canaan into a political scene with wars, battles, and intrigue.

6 Le Jay, Josephus Fratres Agnoscens (1695)

The tendency to complicate the storyline and to introduce political antagonists and court intrigue perseveres in the three neoclassical tragedies about Joseph by Gabriel-François Le Jay. Le Jay spent most of his years as a professor at the Jesuit Collège Louis-Le-Grand: there he taught eloquence and rhetoric between 1692 and 1711. Among other works, he produced a number of dramatic works. He was particularly fond of the Joseph story. He published three tragedies about different parts of the Bible story: Josephus fratres agnoscens (1695), Josephus venditus (1698), and Josephus Ægypto præfectus (1699), all three of which he translated to French as well, and he wrote a “heroical drama” titled Benjamin captif (1709).

Like Santi half a century before, Le Jay defends his choice for a biblical subject in the prologue to J. fratres agnoscens.^[40] He speaks out against the common opinion that a good tragedy employs either mythology or secular history and focuses on an ill-fated romance. There are those, he says, who look down on college drama because it contains no love stories and is based on biblical or sacred history. Le Jay opposes this stance by pointing out that good tragedy does not always revolve around love, neither on the ancient Greek and Roman nor on the present French neoclassical stage. He is also of the opinion that love, which makes people weak, is not the best sentiment to evoke the mandatory pity and fear in spectators. In this, he echoes Corneille, who is greatly admired by him. Corneille noted that love is too weak a sentiment to fuel an epic storyline; rather, it should serve as an ornament or as a support of stronger and more virile passions. The only subject dignified of tragedy are politics and major questions of state.^[41] Going beyond his great example, Le Jay advocates for a theatre without romantic love. Rather, he describes the ideal protagonist like this: “exhibetur in Scena vir Princeps, quem Patriae caritas, studium Libertatis, Propinquitatis aut Amicitiae jura, Fides, Religio in extremum fortunarum ac capitis discrimen adduxere”.^[42] This is exactly the kind of character that Le Jay finds in Joseph.

Still, when we read his first Joseph drama, we find that Le Jay does have to fill out the political setting of the drama in order to provide the biblical story with enough fuel for such a tragedy. Le Jay first dramatized the last part of the Joseph story, Joseph’s reunion with his brothers. He adheres to the neoclassical precept of the unity of time and place: everything takes place in the Pharaoh’s palace in Memphis over the course of a day or a few days at the most. The drama opens when the brothers have just returned with their youngest sibling Benjamin and ends when Joseph reveals his identity to them. Although this part of the biblical story does offer some strong emotions (Joseph’s desire mixed with fear, his act of forgiveness, the brothers’ shame and repentance), it does not contain much adversity for Joseph. He is the second most powerful man in Egypt and can do as he pleases. Le Jay therefore changes this political situation into a more complex and dangerous one, in order to adhere both to the neoclassical unity of time and place and to the related aim of evoking pity and fear.

In the first scene, Joseph’s friend Ramesses (the cupbearer who was in prison with him) comes up with the plan to test Joseph’s brothers by accusing Benjamin of theft and threatening to throw him in prison. When he asks what is keeping Joseph back from executing the plan, Joseph answers:

Quae tenuit usque: lubricus Regis favor:

Invidia Procerum: suspicax populi metus:

Exosa Memphis exteros, ex quo undique

Jam saevientem sola non sentit famem. ^[43]

In this version of the story, Joseph’s power is still unstable. In the second act, the palatii magister Amasis tries to discredit Joseph with the Pharaoh, by pointing out that Joseph, who refuses to name his origins, is suspiciously familiar with the newcomers from Canaan. The rumour worries Joseph, because he has just given the order to charge his brothers with a theft and he is afraid that if he does not punish them, not only will he be suspected of treason but his brothers will be punished by someone else for something they did not do. In the fifth act, international politics come into the mix. Amasis reminds the Pharaoh that the Syrians (the Arameans) are threatening the borders of Egypt. In this light, the viceroy’s favour for a group of “Syrians” suspected of being spies is extremely worrying. In the next scene, the Pharaoh speaks to a group of soldiers who have heard the rumours and refuse to obey Joseph any longer. Joseph has no other choice but to reveal his identity and that of his brothers to the Pharaoh, reassuring him that his family are not loyal to the Syrians but are of a different faith. By telling his whole life story to the Pharaoh, he exposes his brothers to a new danger: now the Pharaoh no longer wants to punish them for espionage but for their crime against Joseph, and it costs Joseph quite some effort to avert this fate.

Earlier efforts to model Joseph drama on classical exemplars involved both excerpting and compressing the story or focusing on the wife of Potiphar as a biblical Phaedra. What Le Jay does is different: instead of leaving things out, he adds elements. What he does is in line with the Jesuit martyr drama: he creates political antagonists and sets the story against the background of international politics.

I want to adduce Hugo Grotius’ Sophompaneas (1635) to highlight a contrast with Le Jay’s play. Sophompaneas also renders the Joseph story as a neoclassical tragedy and depicts Joseph as a political leader. Both plays treat the same episode. For Grotius, however, Joseph’s struggle with his feelings towards his brothers suffices to create tension in the play. Joseph’s power is unrestrained. He has the backing of the Pharaoh and presumably of the court, although the court is not depicted in the play. The contrast becomes clear in the third act, where Joseph is informed of an uprising of people driven by famine. The people have marched to the city of Coptos, plundered and burned it, and sold the nobles as slaves. The cause of the citizens’ anger was the refusal of their magistrates to abide by Joseph’s orders and distribute corn at a low price. Joseph deals with the uprising as a wise ruler: he orders that the city must be brought back under control, but the looters should not be punished too harshly. We saw that Le Jay has a similar subplot with an uprising at the border, but here the army distrusts and disobeys Joseph.

Many Joseph plays and commentaries depict Joseph as the example of a good ruler.^[44] Grotius takes this element the farthest. But Santi and Le Jay do something different: they place the biblical Joseph within the political context of popular martyr plays. Even though Joseph is not a martyr but a character who reaches glory and power and dies peacefully in his bed surrounded by his family, they create the same sort of tension that characterises Jesuit history plays, where a righteous character is up against the intrigues and power of the mighty.

7 Conclusions

The baroque phase in Jesuit drama is characterised by a shift in subject matter from biblical to political sacred drama, and eventually to secular drama starting at the end of the seventeenth century. I have shown how this shift also enters some of the biblical dramas that were still written. The biblical story of Joseph, both its first part in Canaan and its last part in Egypt, is transplanted to a context of international politics, war and peace, includes partial figurations of a court, and introduces the structure of setting the hero against a political antagonist (the sons of the Pharaoh, an enemy faction at court, or the complicated double antagonism of Joseph’s brothers and a neighbouring king in Santi’s drama).

Part of the effort to broaden the story to include more ancient history and to give a depiction of the Egyptian court seems due to the typical baroque fascination with multiple antiquities.^[45] The Joseph stories offer writers the opportunity to depict the ancient societies of the Middle East, especially ancient Egypt. There is also a link with historical exegesis of the Bible. In earlier Joseph drama, the story hardly has any background, whereas in the dramas I have discussed, the Joseph story plays out against a detailed historical background. For instance, when the intriguer Amasis in Le Jay’s drama warns the Pharaoh for the Syrian king, he names a list of territories the Syrians have conquered.^[46] Santi, in turn, might have used rabbinic commentaries on the Bible to create a fuller background to the story.

The historicising and political character of these plays also fits the tendency of composition by contamination and the intermixing of genres. Just as Spanish plays adapt the Joseph story into a romance play, full of love intrigues and with a marriage at the end, some of the Jesuit playwrights mix the biblical story with elements from their favourite martyr dramas. As we have seen, the protestant school author Weise creates a mix of all three elements. The contamination of the biblical story with other genres plays out differently in different regions and language clusters, but there is the common element of deviating from the biblical story by adding new elements, plotlines, subplots, and characters, many of these the result of intergeneric mixing. I have shown how this mixing also created a hybrid between the biblical play, that had lost much of its popularity, and the new political drama or history play.