Chapter 22
May 1636
The fighting in Bavaria calmed down enough that the SoTF administration in Bamberg—or, more precisely, the SoTF vice-president, Helene Gundelfinger—gave permission for Duke Albrecht of Bavaria’s sons to return to the Collegium in Amberg and rejoin their tutor, Father Johannes Vervaux, S.J.
Nobody else authorized their return. It wasn’t decided as a matter of high policy. Helene had a ten-year-old daughter from her first marriage and a six-month-old son from her second; she was haunted by the forlorn faces of the two boys.
It wasn’t as if anybody in the SoTF administration in Bamberg had time to pay attention to them. Basically, Ed Piazza’s secretary dropped them into the custody of Wolfgang Ratichius, the Secretary of Education, on the theory that he was a schoolteacher.
Ratichius had been a school teacher, a long time in the past. Right now, he was an overworked, unmarried, crotchety, sixty-year-old, educational bureaucrat, residing in rented rooms and sustaining himself on take-out from the nearest inn while trying to expedite educational reform during a time when everyone else seemed to be focused on either the war in Bavaria or the political maneuvers in Magdeburg.
There was no audience with the emperor for them; for that matter, there was no audience with the governor. There was no visit with pomp to meet Princess Kristina nor expedition with surrounding excitement to see the sights of Grantville. Those were not the kind of things that occurred to Ratichius, who was far more brilliant in developing theory than accomplished at applying it in practice.
“The man reminds me of Robert Reich,” Brick Bozarth wrote to Arnold Bellamy once. “Back when he was Secretary of Labor under Clinton. Absolutely brilliant at diagnosing what a problem was, but he couldn’t have found a solution if it was a butterfly perching on the end of his nose.”
Nor had Wolfgang Radke ever been celebrated for such qualities as charm or bonhomie. He didn’t treat Maximilian and Sigmund poorly, but they spent quite a lot of time sitting in the outer office of the SoTF Department of Education, under the supervisory eye of one of the filing clerks, playing board games and kicking their feet against the bench until she told them to stop. Then kicking their feet against the bench some more until she told them to stop. Then…
They were glad to go back and have lessons again.
Their return was low-key and unpublicized, but the students at the normal school learned about it, since it was the same building. Dee mentioned it to Sebastian who mentioned it to Carlo who included the information in his next letter to the archbishop of Salzburg.
Amberg, Upper Palatinate
May 1636
That letter had scarcely reached its destination when the return became much less low-key. The Jesuits decided to celebrate the return of the young dukes by the performance of a new play by Balde: Jephtha’s Daughter.
“I’ve had the theme in mind for a couple of years,” he told von Dalberg. “The first title was Jephtias, focused almost entirely on the Israelite general, I have reconfigured it somewhat. It lacks the Aristotelian unities, but the five acts are tied together by the central characters and their interactions, in addition to which I have modified the traditional function of the chorus. We were planning to present it in Ingolstadt next year, but under the circumstances, with the current difficulties, that isn’t likely to happen.”
Von Dalberg laughed. “What did one of my old friends from Würzburg write to me? One of the up-timers there is known for saying, so often that it has become a motto, almost, ‘We don’t have problems; we have challenges.’ Getting your play staged this year will be a challenge.”
It was a challenge: not a challenge quite on the level of sending missionaries to China, but, still, a challenge; not, however, an insuperable challenge.
“It won’t be a major production by the general standards of Jesuit drama.” Father Hell paused a minute in his explanation to Muselius. “We should be able to keep any disruption to the normal school classes to a minimum, in spite of the shared building. There just aren’t enough students at the Collegium for a major dramatic production. Even the ‘Israelite army’ will have to be represented by a small company of men with pipes and drums, who will do double duty as musicians. Allegorically, of course, the ‘Israelite army’ represents the milites christiani, serving God with religious zeal. Balde has however—in the interest of discretion, he says—rewritten their opponents as pagans in foreign lands rather than heretics in the United States of Europe. And there definitely will not be a cast of thousands. More on the order of a cast of dozens.”
“If I recall correctly,” Muselius commented, “the Ammonites of the Old Testament were, in fact, foreign pagans. In a pinch, Father Balde can rely on established fact in this matter if criticism from the zealots threatens to rise to too high a crescendo.”
“Balde has hopes of better stagings in the future if the play becomes popular enough to be produced in other cities,” was Father Hell’s response.
Balde recruited Paolo to play Jephtha, on the grounds that he believed, on the basis of the narratives written by travelers to the Holy Land over the centuries, that an Italian from the central or southern part of the peninsula would probably bear a greater physical resemblance to an ancient Israelite than the average German did. “And, additionally, Jephtha should be played by a mature man.”
The oldest student currently enrolled at the Collegium was eighteen.
Paolo’s first answer was a resounding refusal. “I haven’t read Latin, outside of my missal, much less spoken it, since I finished school and joined the army.” He winked. “I did an impressive job with a couple of Erasmus’ Colloquia when I was twelve years old, but there wasn’t much competition for the starring roles. Carlo would make a better job of it; he is far more eloquent. I was to be placed in a commercial apprenticeship, but his uncle had destined him to the Franciscans once he finished school, which would have nicely eliminated any claim by the son of a younger son to part of the family’s assets. His education was more purely academic and the rhetoricians emphasize voice projection when a boy is expected to join one of the mendicant preaching orders.”
“You’ll make a more impressive physical presence on the stage. Your friend is…
“Short and balding.” Paolo thought for a minute. “Don’t be hoping for a Cenodoxus moment.”
“I am not in the least expecting you to experience a dramatic conversion and join the Order the way the lead actor in the Ingolstadt production of Bidermann’s play did twenty years ago.”
“I’m not even likely to impress the local worthies of Amberg to the point that a dozen or so of them decide to undertake the Spiritual Exercises. Nor impress the students enough that a dozen or so of them enter your novitiate. Or…”
“If you impress them enough that the play gets a publisher, perhaps a translation into the vernacular, and a wider circulation, I’ll be quite happy.”
Carlo took on the quasi-jester role, constantly nattering at Jephtha about, “Are you sure that this is what you ought to be doing? Should you really have done that?”
“It’s allegorical, of course.” He put the script down and yawned. “I really hate allegories. How does Balde intend my role? As comic sidekick or a demon tempting the hero? Or am I supposed to flip a coin?”
On the day they started rehearsals, Balde was still planning on a small, indoor, production that would require only limited choreography. The big question was whether or not the city council would let them borrow the big hall in the Rathaus. In a rational world, there should have been no objection. In the real world, there was considerable argumentation among the various contending religious groups on the city council.