All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
To the Catholic playwright, Shakespeare’s famous dictum rings true: all the world’s a stage. Across the centuries and continents, playwrights have found that the agonies and ecstasies of the great sinners and saints of Church History naturally lend themselves to drama. For the latest Lenten season of Global Catholic Literature, All the World’s a Stage: A Global Approach to Catholic Drama, we will explore for the first time in GCL history the rich genre of Catholic drama. Nor shall we cease our exploration with a change of genre, but with multiple changes of scene: from the medieval English martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral to the modern Marian apparition in Rwanda retold by Katori Hall’s Our Lady of Kibeho, from the personalist Polish ruminations of Karol Wojtyla’s The Jeweler’s Shop to the madcap colonial Mexican comedy set in ancient Crete Love Is the Greater Labyrinth by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Love forms the thread tying together medieval England and modern Rwanda, postwar Poland and ancient Crete through a colonial Mexican lens in these four far-flung plays. The blood of St. Thomas Becket, shed out of love in an act of martyrdom, baptizes and blesses the venerable stones of Canterbury Cathedral in T. S. Eliot’s Plantagenet England. Loves of tribe, country, Church, power, fame, Mary, and God compete for supremacy in Katori Hall’s Edenic Kibeho. Karol Wojtyla anticipates the theology of the body he would later teach as Pope St. John Paul II by portraying engaged and married couples illustrating the law of gift in postwar Poland. And Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, with characteristic wit and labyrinthine love plots, teases her audience by repurposing the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur by recasting contemporary colonial courtiers as ancient Athenian aristocrats. Though Aristotelian catharsis, anagnorisis, and peripeteia have their place in these plays, the painful process of kenotic, self-emptying love lies at the heart of Catholic drama. Ultimately, the true Catholic drama takes place not in England, Rwanda, Poland, Mexico, or Crete, but in the human heart.
My love could only weep
As my valor achieved
That greatest of victories:
To triumph over myself.
Dates: Mondays in March (7:00 - 8:30 pm EST), virtual via Zoom
March 2
March 9
March 16
March 23
Registration:
Early Bird Registration: $65 through January 16
Regular Registration: $75 through February 18
To learn more and register, click the button below. Questions? Contact Joe Perez-Benzo (jperezbenzo@collegiuminstitute.org).
Collegium Institute will provide copies of the readings to all participants in the United States. International participants are welcome to join, but please note that we can't guarantee that we will be able to send you a copy of the texts if you live outside of the US.