Did You Know? Hrotsvitha

Last month, I gave a talk about influential theater women at Write On Door County. As I was researching it, I found the “Did You Know?” pieces I wrote for the Theatre Unbound blog many years ago. Over the next few weeks, I’ll re-post them here. Thanks to my fellow WODC residents Annette Langlois Grunseth and Tori Grant Welhouse for encouraging me to share them.

Did You Know?

The first known playwright in Christian Europe was Hrotsvitha, a tenth-century German nun.

Hrotsvitha (c. 935 – c. 1002), whose name means “strong voice” or “mighty shout,” wrote eight narrative poems, six plays, and two historical pieces, all in Latin. She was a canoness (a laywoman living in a religious community) at the Benedictine abbey in Gandersheim, a town in the modern-day German state of Lower Saxony. She had studied and enjoyed the comedies of the Roman playwright Terence (185?-159 BC), and modeled her work on his, with an important difference:

I, the strong voice of Gandersheim, have not hesitated to imitate in my writing a poet whose works are so widely read, my object being to glorify, within the limits of my poor talent, the laudable chastity of Christian virgins in that same form of composition which has been used to describe the shameless acts of licentious women.

(Preface to Hrotsvitha’s Liber Secundus, translated by “Christopher St. John” (Christabel Marshall))

We don’t know for sure whether Hrotsvitha’s plays were staged during her lifetime, or even if she intended for them to be. But since then, they have certainly proved to be stageworthy and entertaining. To list just a few productions: Anatole France saw them performed as marionette shows in Paris in the 1890s. The feminist theatre troupe Pioneer Players performed Calimachus and Paphnutius in London in 1914. Sue-Ellen Case directed three of the plays, under the title “The Virgin, the Whore and the Desperate One” in Seattle in 1982. And Theatre Unbound included Dulcitius in Girl’s Got Pluck, our anthology of work by early women playwrights, in 2005.

Further reading:

Case, Sue-Ellen. “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit” (Theatre Journal, v. 35, no. 4, December 1983).

Hrotsvitha. (translated by “Christopher St. John” (Christabel Marshall)). The Plays of Roswitha. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1923)

Witt, Elizabeth Ann. “Canonizing the Canoness: Anthologizing Hrotsvit” (College Literature v. 28, no. 2, Spring 2001).

Zeydel, Edwin H. “Were Hrotsvitha’s Dramas Performed during Her Lifetime?” (Speculum, v. 20, no. 4, October 1945).