Article: Trent Revisited

Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2002

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In 1579 Borromeo issued an edict prohibiting tournaments on all Sundays as well as those special feasts of the year when the divine office was celebrated in the metropolitan church. The penalty for all those who presented spectacles, those who knowingly cooperated with their production, and those who attended them, was automatic excommunication (latae sententiae) and interdict, the absolution of which was reserved to the archbishop alone. Respect for sacred, liturgical time was crucial in Borromeo's post-Tridentine understanding of life in a Christian city. Liturgical feasts were not being observed with proper devotion; popular celebratory entertainments, like plays and banquets, did not correspond with the dignified and solemn [page 131] ceremonies staged by the church in marking sacred time (e.g., public processions, the Forty Hours devotion to the Eucharist, continual preaching in church).(31)

Carlo Borromeo insisted that the theatre sabotaged the project of "Christianizing" society; at his most extreme, he invested the opposition between commedia and church with cosmic significance. On the seventh Sunday after Pentecost in 1583 (17 July), Borromeo preached on the two blind men of Jericho. In this homily he likens these scriptural characters to his Milanese flock, blind people whose reason is increasingly occluded by corrupt professional actors. He plays on the traditional images of the nets and fish, noting sadly that Milan is "a famous school of libidinousness and impudence where comedies are frequently performed and actors, more indecent than any type of person...catch in the nets of the devil great numbers of unwary youths."(32) In the end, Borromeo urges his church to acknowledge the cosmic competition between church and comedy, between Christ and the Devil:

Christ lives in churches and oratories, in hospitals and schools of Christian doctrine. The demon lives in impudent places, in taverns, on stages, in spectacles. Both are calling servants; both want to be followed, but which rightly?...Both send their ambassadors to you: the mime and the actor with placards affixed to walls inviting you to that devilish return they call comedy. Comedy they call it, but believe me, for you it is always tragedy...(33)

Carlo Borromeo recognized that the professional theatre, like professional religion, had the power to change the face of the social and cultural scene. The professional theatre [page 132] represented a philosophy of life very different from Borromeo's, a philosophy of life that admitted the human need for play and diversion. For Borromeo, though, play and diversion signaled the wasting of precious time, time ordered by the sacred rhythms of the liturgical calendar. As a prelate imbued with the reform ideals of Trent, Borromeo saw his social and religious role as insuring the sanctification of the Milanese by insisting on the explicit Christianization of ordinary life. The sanctification of time in official church liturgies, devotional programs, and sermons provided the most expedient means of schooling the religious imagination and inserting Christian realities into everyday living. Theatrical play, then, set itself in competition with liturgical celebration causing what Borromeo saw as a potentially fatal arrhythmia in the heart of Milan.

Some Conclusions

In the mid-sixteenth century, just as the church began negotiating the shifts in the social scene, the professional theatre made its entrance onto the cultural stage. Though considered a base component of culture, the professional theatre and its related entertainments became popular in public and private venues, thus earning the attention of other vendors in the marketplace. From the perspective of the institutional church, the professional theatre embodied a way of being in the world that undermined its own evolving understanding of the nature and aims of modern Christian society. Here the disciplinary and pastoral concerns of early modern Catholicism clashed with the modes of theatrical organization and professional practice. Whereas the religious hierarchy—especially in someone like Carlo Borromeo--championed ecclesiastical and social order as the most expedient means by which to assure the salvation of souls, theatrical professionals exemplified itinerancy and sexual integration, crossing a variety of literal and figurative boundaries in the plying of their trade. Naturally, the existence of such an obvious countersign to religious order opened up possibilities for antitheatrical critique.

Further, the efforts at evangelizing society and the attempts of ordinary men and women to achieve some measure of religious integration involved both church and laity in the education of imagination.(34) Printed catechisms, devotional literature and confessional books kept religious matters alive in the minds of the literate public. Public preaching, revivalist [page 133] missions, spectacular processions and elaborately staged devotions were designed to move hearts to piety and hands to action. The cult of the saints held in imaginative tension the agenda of official religion and the projection of popular needs.

The professional theatre addressed this same faculty of imagination. By the end of the sixteenth century theatrical books fixed ideal performances in print, allowing the theatre to transcend the confines of this piazza or that stanza and find an audience in any literate person. Scenarii, lazzi, tipi fissi, costumes, innovative stage machinery sought to entertain and divert audiences (thus removing them from "useful" occupations and encouraging "idleness") even while, in some cases at least, they attempted to move and teach. The saints became objects of theatrical exploration and the subjects of theatrical performance. Clearly, religion and theatre moved in the same circles. In the practice of their respective crafts, religious and theatrical professionals engaged similar parts of the same clientele.

Revisiting Trent—and by extension the religious world that it helped shape—helps us understand the ways Roman Catholicism began adapting to a radically changing world. Revisiting Trent also provides us with a way of seeing how the commedia italiana was beginning to intersect with early modern culture. Religion's engaging the theatre—even negatively, even as an unworthy competitor—gives the emerging professional theatre a "vote of confidence" at a critical time of social reorganization. That a powerful proprietor of cultural life like the Roman Catholic Church would address the reality of theatrical professionals, draws the commedia onto an even more public stage and gives comici the opportunity to articulate and defend their arte.

Endnotes

Pertinent bibliographical sources recently published that treat early modern religious history within its cultural context include: William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640, Yale Intellectual History of the West, eds. J.W. Burrow, et. al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel, eds., Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honor of John W. O'Malley, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester, eds., From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550-1650, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions, vol. 14 (Boston: Brill, 2002); Michael Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (New York: Routledge, 1999); R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770, New Approaches to European History, eds. William Beik and T.C.W. Blanning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
The success of the Protestant Reformation and the internal demands for Roman reform made the calling of a council imperative for Catholicism. Political disputes and papal intransigence, however, had long postponed the inevitable. Eventually, Pope Paul III resolved to convene a universal council of the church and, after several false starts over a period of eight years, finally succeeded in opening the ecumenical Council of Trent on 13 December 1545. Spanning the reigns of four popes (Paul III, Julius III, Paul IV, Pius V), Trent was regularly interrupted by political and religious conflicts. The council took place in three periods over the course of eighteen years: 1545-1547, 1551-1552, 1562-1563. It considered dogma as well as discipline and, for a time, attempted to address the concerns of Protestant reformers. Pope Pius IV confirmed the decrees of the council in January 1564. At its beginning the council was composed of a small clerical assembly that included papal legates, bishops and some heads of religious orders. The membership grew to include more clergy, theologians, and even Protestant representatives (during the second period). For an overview of the scholarship on the Council of Trent and the issues involved in its various sessions see Giuseppe Alberigo, "The Council of Trent" in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, ed. John O'Malley, Reformation Guides to Research, vol. 2 (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1987), 211-226. Alberigo is especially good in making clear how the Council cannot be seen as monolithic (cf. 217-218).
See John W. O'Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also John O'Malley, "Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to look at Early Modern Catholicism," The Catholic Historical Review 77 2 (April 1991): 177-193. Following O'Malley's lead, I use the attribution "early modern Catholicism" in reference to sixteenth and seventeenth century Roman Catholic religious history. This particular designation consciously avoids two more common titles for the period: "Counter-Reformation" and "Catholic Reformation." "What's in a name?" For O'Malley, a great deal. "Counter-Reformation" implies that the religious history of the period remains primarily a function of Catholicism's feverish efforts to counter the effects of Protestantism. "Catholic Reformation" suggests that the period is essentially concerned with the canonical renovation of Church offices and conceives the construction of Catholicism as predominantly the work of church hierarchy. O'Malley seeks to add "early modern Catholicism" to the list of interpretive terms applied to this period because, though it implicitly includes the elements of Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation, it allows for the period's complexity to emerge without an a priori judging of the evidence. O'Malley's reflection that "there's much in a name" reminds us that both theatre professionals and their critics moved in a religious environment defined by many different issues. To situate these dramatis personae in the "Counter-Reformation" (or even in the "Catholic Reformation") means confirming longstanding, and perhaps misleading, prejudices about the period: that it was consistently and systematically repressive, that theatrical success demanded pandering to church authorities, that theatrical authors of religious plays essentially curried the favor of the religious establishment to make their lives easier, etc. Using the attribution "Early modern Catholicism" represents an attempt to clear the stage so as to revisit more effectively the intercourse between the professional theatre and the Roman Catholic Church during the later 16th and early 17th centuries.
For a brief overview of the struggles surrounding interpretation and reception of the council see Alberigo, "The Council of Trent," 219-223. See also Eric Cochrane, Italy: 1530-1630, ed. Julius Kirschner, Longman History of Italy, ed. Denys Hay (New York: Longman, 1988), 184-201. For a more detailed discussion of the council and its reception see chapters 1 and 2 in Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: a new view of the Counter-Reformation, trans. Jeremy Moiser with an introduction by John Bossy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977). See also Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Dom Ernest Graf, O.S.B., 2 vols., (New York: Thomas Nelso and Sons, Ltd., 1961). For a more focused sense of the various religious and political obstacles in implementing the council see also John B. Tomaro, "San Carlo Borromeo and the Implementation of the Council of Trent" and Agostino Borromeo, "Archbishop Carlo Borromeo and the Ecclesiastical Policy of Philip II in the State of Milan" in San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, ed. John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988).
See Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della commedia dell'arte: La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII, XVIII sec., 2nd ed., (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1986; reprint, 1992), pp 183-186.
The beginnings of the professional theatre in Italy, known variously by contemporaries as the commedia italiana, commedia all'improvviso, or commedia degli zanni, can be located in the mid-sixteenth century. Though the gestation of particular character types (tipi fissi), the use of regional dialects, the development of rustic popular plots, etc. had begun earlier in the sixteenth century among amateur and semi-professional performers like the Venetians Angelo Beolco (1502-1554) and Andrea Calmo (c. 1510-1571), the first extant evidence of a professional troupe appears in a Paduan performance contract dated 1545. The company of "Ser. Maphio called Zanini from Padua" agreed to work together for one year sharing all earnings and resources. Likely, as Kenneth and Laura Richards observe, this contract was not the first of its kind, though it provides a convenient terminus a quo for the formation of Italy's professional companies. The major troupes like the Gelosi, the Confidenti, the Desiosi, etc. formed in the later 1560s, 1570s and 1580s at which time the activity of the professional troupes began dominating the Italian peninsula. For a discussion of the antecedents of the Italian commedia and for an overview of the emergence of the professional companies, see Kenneth and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell'Arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Shakespeare Head Press, 1990), 11-31, 32-54.
Delumeau, Catholicism, 15-16. I follow Delumeau's lead in seeing the reformation of religious offices as deriving from the need to preach the gospel.
The quotation is taken from the Sixth Session of the council quoted by Delumeau, Catholicism, 16.
Delumeau, Catholicism, 18.
This expanded awareness on the part of reform bishops is especially apparent in the experience of Carlo Borromeo in the see of Milan to be discussed more fully in the next section of the essay.
Delumeau, Catholicism, 18.
This is not to suggest that all prelates were opposed to theatre. In addition to many other examples, consider Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga, a major patron of the actors Giovan Battista Andreini and his wife Virginia Ramponi even before his accession to the Mantuan dukedom, the Cardinal Harrach of Vienna who invited Andreini and their Fedeli troupe to Austria in the late 1620's, and Cardinal Richelieu to whom Andreini dedicated Teatro Celeste, a cycle of poems in praise of actors.
Domenico Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, Longman History of Italy, ed. D. Hay (New York: Longman, 1997), 116.
Delumeau, Catholicism, 20.
Delumeau, Catholicism, 22.
Delumeau, Catholicism, 22. "…the principle that no woman ought to be forced to enter the cloister against her will was spelled out in unmistakeable terms, excommunication was threatened for its violators, and it was ruled that any prospective candidate to the convent must be closely questioned by the bishop or by his deputy in order to ascertain 'whether she is being forced, whether she is being deceived, whether she knows what she is doing' (an coacta, an seducta sit, an sciat quod agat)." Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 119.
Angela Merici's Ursulines taught young girls in the manner of the Jesuits; Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal's Sisters of the Visitation taught and nursed the sick; Louise de Marillac's Sisters of Charity nursed the sick and cared for the poor. For a enlightening overview of women in western Christianity see Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of their Own, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 181-266 passim. Anderson and Zinsser note that "in the seventeenth century...pious Catholic women claimed the right to an unorthodox life in the name of service to the ill and poor...Because of the needs of the time, women were allowed a modified rule and life of service outside the cloister." (Anderson and Zinsser, vol. 1, 239, emphasis mine.) The apostolic focus was generally by way of exception.
On the relationship between religious women and the professional actress, see Michael Zampelli, "The 'Most Honest and Most Devoted of Women': An Early Modern Defense of the Professional Actress," Theatre Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research 42:1 (May 2001), 1-23.
Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700 (Washington: CUA Press, 1999), 98.
See John O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 96-97.
O'Malley, Jesuits, 93.
Manuel Morán and José Andrés Gallago, "The Preacher" in Baroque Personae, ed. Rosario Villari, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 148. "The preachers complained that city-dwellers were so accustomed to evaluating the quality and execution of sermons that a preacher could never rest on his laurels." (145)
When speaking of the 1570 tour of the Gelosi in Paris, Armand Baschet quotes the contemporary Journal of "Le sieur de l'Etoile, bon Parisien" who notes that the Gelosi attracted more of an audience with their performances than did the the four best preachers in Paris with their preaching: "...ou il y avoit tel concours et afluence de peuple que les quatre meilleurs prédicateurs de Paris n'en avoient pas tretous ensemble autant quant il preschoient." L'Etoile quoted in Armand Baschet, Les Comédiens Italiens a la Cour de France sous Charles IX, Henri III, Henri IV et Louis XIII (Paris, 1882; reprint Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 74.
Enciclopedia dello spettacolo (Rome: Casa Editrice Le Maschere, 1954), 549-569. The Gelosi company performed for the first time in Milan in 1572 and again in 1583. Even after 1576, a year marking the visit of the plague and the establishment of several ordinances condemning players and prescribing severe penalties for public productions, many companies made stops in the area and found refuge in the homes and businesses of the Milanese Jews who were immune from the religious prohibitions of the cardinal archbishop.
According to Domenico Sella, "[i]n the late sixteenth and through much of the seventeenth centuries a recurrent theme in government circles was the danger that hordes of beggars, vagrants, 'rogues and vagabonds' posed to the public peace and to personal safety...The view of the poor as socially dangerous was, of course, widespread in Europe at the time and reflected in part the rapid pace of urbanization underway since the sixteenth century" (Sella, 86).
All quotes from Borromeo and the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (Acts of the Church of Milan) are taken from Ferdinando Taviani, La Commedia dell'arte e la società barocca: La Fascinazione del teatro, La Commedia dell'arte: Storia testi documenti, ed. Ferruccio Marrotti, no. 1 (Rome: Mario Bulzoni, 1969). Borromeo, Acta, "De histrionibus, Cingaris, Tabernis meritoriis et aleatoribus" (1565) in Taviani, 11. "De his etiam principes et magistrates commonendos esse duximus. Ut histriones et mimos, coeterosque circulators, et eius generis perditos hominess e suis finibus eiiciant; et in caupones et alios, quicumque eos receperunt, acriter animadvertant. Ut vagum et fallax cingarorum genus arceant; nisi certis sedibus collocati, vitam honesties artibus et in reliquis omnibus, ut christiano hominess decet agree velint." "...omnis nequitiae sentinas..."
Borromeo, Acta, "De gubernatione rei familiaris. Pars secunda" (1566) in Taviani, 12. "Nullus ex familia ne armis certare, nec chartis lusoriis aut talis, aut pila maiori, aut alio eiusmodi indecoro ludi genere ludere, ludentesne spectare, nec choreas exercere, nec personatus incedere, nec venationi, fabulis, comoediis, aliisve histrionum impuris actionibus vacare audeat."
Yet, at the same time that he attempted to maintain a clear separation between religion and worldliness, Borromeo himself pressured political authorities to implement his religious vision through secular power. In a 1571 letter to Monsignor Giambattista Castagna, the archbishop of Rossano and apostolic nuncio in Spain, Borromeo asked that the nuncio petiton Philip II for a civil prohibition of festivals and spectacles, at least on religious feast days.
Borromeo, Acta, "De festorum dierum cultu" (1569) in Taviani, 12. "Ne item comoediae, ludi scenici, vel theatrales, hastiludia, et alia cuiusvis generis spectacular agantur."
Borromeo, Acta, "De festorum dierum cultu" (1569) in Taviani, 12. "Studeat etiam Episcopus, ut quo tempore in Septuagesimae, Sexagesimae et Quinquagesimae hebdomadis Ecclesia mater, et officiorum ritu et hymnis canticisque fidelium mentes ad moestitiam, atque ad poenitentiam excitantibus, et omni denique tum vestimentorum, tum aliarum rerum apparatum populum Dei instruit, ac praeparat tot ante diebus ad sancta recolendam Christi Domini passionem et Crucem; eo postissimum tempore fideles sibi in curam traditor, spectacula, ludos scenicos, et aliaquae gentilitatis speciem prae se ferunt, tunc praesertim morum corruptelis introducta, illa ipsa tanquam a sanctissimis Ecclesiae institutis abhorrentia omnino fugientes, ad pietatis christianae studia, et ad orationem attentiores sint...."
Borromeo, Acta, "Editto per la proibizione di Giostre e spettacoli nelle Domeniche e Feste" (1579) in Taviani, 14-15. It seems that the edict was issued because of the continual interruption of religious rites by "drums, trumpets, carriages, shouts and tumults of tournaments, running, games, masked characters and other similar profane spectacles" ("tamburri, trombe, carozze di concorso, gridi e tumulti di tornei, correrie, giostre, mascherate et altri simili spettacoli profani").
Borromeo, "Dalle Omelie recitate il 17 luglio 1583" in Taviani, 32. "...adeo nempe in hac civitate saevissimam illam libidinum ac impudicitiarum officinam patere, ut frequentes comeoediae recitentur ac in scenis histriones, indignissimi homines, personati in Diaboli reia innumerous huius iuvenes incautos adducant."
Borromeo, "Dalle Omelie recitate il 17 luglio 1583" in Taviani, 32. "In Ecclesiis habitat Christus, in Oratoriis, quae apud vos tam sunt frequentia, in Xenodochiis, in Doctrinae Christianae gymnasiis. Daemon vero in loci impudicis inhabitat, in tabernis, in scenis atque spectaculis. Uterque ad servos advocat; uterque multos cupit asseclas habere. Sed ille iure vos repetit, utpote suos...Ambo oratores suos ad vos mittunt. Mimus atque histrio vos schedules parieti assixis ad Atanicum inventum, quod Comeoediam vocant, invitat; sed mihi credite, trageodia vobis est semper."
For an enlightening discussion on the shifting and sometimes problematic status of the imagination in the early modern period, see Bouwsma, 169-170.