New play on Ignatius talking to Calvin and Rabelais

Mardi Gras will see the opening of a most unusual play in New York City, Jane Clark Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines (2023). The new play is a verse conversation among St. Ignatius of Loyola, Jean Calvin, and Francois Rabelais. The author came up with the idea while in Paris, where she learned that Calvin and Ignatius studied at University of Paris together under Erasmus, with Rabelais likely in and out of town during those years. Scharl explains, “The idea of all these men in the same place during the early Reformation intrigued me, especially since Calvin wrote letters specifically denouncing Rabelais later in his life. The rancor of these letters is impressive, and I wanted to give an fictional explanation.” Each of the three characters has their own cadence and a particular rhetorical form, and sometimes they enter into highly formalized but funny and rhythmic banter. The playwright as poet determined that “Rabelais speak in rhymed couplets of heroic lines (iambic pentameter); Calvin in blank verse and occasionally metered prose” and “Ignatius speaks in iambic tetra meter, a traditionally martial form, and he alliterates often because he loves order.”

The plot is simple; a woman’s corpse has been found on the street, and the dagger used to murder her earlier belonged to Ignatius. And Rabelais seems to have known the deceased… The play is opening to sold-out houses, presumably theology buffs, but the play does not go in to apologetics, showing instead that each of these very strong personalities has much in common with the other, once you look a little deeper. 

I would call Sonnez Les Matines a neo-baroque theater piece; it is committed to working withing formal restraints, focusses on theological content, and balances on the line between staging and closet drama (or readers theater). You can order the book here.