Children and childhood in the school drama of the Reformation

The article provides a rationale for setting the research objective: to observe the change in the semiotic parameters of the image of childhood based on a comparison of school drama of the Reformation era and illustrative material accompanying these texts. The material was the dramas of Sixtus Birck, Paul Rebhun, Joachim Greff, Theodor de Beza, Georg Rollenhagen, Melchior Neukirch, and Hermann Haberer. In the article, this material is presented in a table, which reflects two circumstances. Firstly, the table was intended to clearly express the volume of the studied material, on the basis of which the observation was conducted. The inaccessibility of these sources is obvious, which has an independent significance for the assessment of the observation results. Of interest is the style of the full titles of the sources. From these full titles, the composition of the plots (including repeated plots) intended for school productions is clear, and, consequently, the direction of the confessional edification is clear. Secondly, the table plays the role of a guide to the space of the material, since when analyzing its specific fragments, references to its content are given, which explains the arrangement of the authors listed in it in the sequence of the Russian alphabet, and not in the chronology of the sources, which would be more consistent with historical research. During the analysis, the author makes a number of observations. Firstly, she shows that the image of a loving family was typical for visual didactics of the Reformation era. A frequent motif is the stages of children’s growing up and the role of parents in raising and caring for children. Secondly, having examined the stage images of children in the context of school theatrical practice, conclusions were made about which students took part in the productions. Graduates of the second stage of education (Latin gymnasiums) played the roles of the main characters, youth and adults, i.e. mature people. For secondary roles, younger students were involved, including primary school boys and girls. They also played the roles of children, and the observation establishes that children’s characters were presented at different ages. From this, a conclusion was made that the goal of educators of the Reformation era was to involve the maximum number of children in theatrical practices and give students feasible age-related tasks. Thirdly, episodes with the participation of children were considered in the context of children’s didactic literature. While agreeing on the general messages of the instruction addressed to children, the authors of biblical dramas were very limited by the source material, but tried to point out the consequences of certain actions in their instruction. Of the entire corpus of analyzed texts, the episode about the conflict between two boys from the drama Abraham by Hermann Haberer stands out. This work overcomes the dry didacticism characteristic of the didactic literature of that time, which makes it possible to compare Haberer’s text with the texts of children’s literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. The results of the observations were (1) semantic elements of children’s images; (2) components of syntax in children’s imagery; (3) the pragmatic component of the image of children that is subordinated to the content of edifications and instructions, which concerned the actions being performed and their consequences that occur for a person in their earthly future. When discussing the results of the observations, the author established that the representation of childhood in the school dramas of the Reformation era was associated with a change in the image of the future, which began to symbolize the near future. This brought closer the onset of the consequences of the actions being performed, which became the content of the instruction in the texts of school dramas. The author suggests that the study presented in this article will serve as material for clarifying the relationship between images of the future and images of childhood by semiotic means. In general, the conducted analysis, based on a comparison of textual and visual sources, allows seeing the multifaceted nature of children’s discourse in the era of the Reformation, observing the emergence of the need for a warm and caring attitude towards children as a moral norm, discerning the formation of pedagogical thought and age-related pedagogy and, finally, evaluating the artistic quality of works for children’s reading.

school theatre, evangelical dramaturgy, identity, family, city, child, Cain, Abel, Isaac, Joseph, Susanna, Daniel