Andreas Friz’s Letter on Tragedies (ca. 1741-1744): An Eighteenth-Century Jesuit contribution to theatre poetics (Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe, 4)

Book info: Andreas Friz’s Letter on Tragedies (ca. 1741-1744): An Eighteenth-Century Jesuit contribution to theatre poetics (Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe, 4) (Hardcover, 308 pages) – Brill, 2014. Language: English.

In Andreas Friz’s Letter on tragedies (ca. 1741-1744) Nienke Tjoelker offers insight into the Jesuit school theatre of the eighteenth century. Commonly ignored by scholars, who assume that by then Jesuit theatre was disappearing and of poor quality, it appears to be very much alive and interacting with contemporary vernacular theatre. Tjoelker places Friz's poetics in its historical and literary context in an extensive introduction and presents an edition with translation. She investigates Friz's focus on the imitation of French classical writers, such as Jean Racine (1639-1699) and Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). Friz criticised his colleagues for their excessive use of multimedia ornaments, which hindered the correct application of the three classical unities and verisimilitude. Editorial Reviews Review “Tjoelker’s book raises the curtain on a vibrant world of late German Jesuit drama, one of increased rather than diminished social importance in the eighteenth century”.
Yasmin Haskell, The University of Western Australia. In: Parergon, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2016), pp. 251-253.
About the Author Nienke Tjoelker, Ph.D. (University College Cork, 2010) is Junior Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck. She has published many articles on Neo-Latin literature.