Charles Parker's 'Monumenta Quaedam Poetica': A New English Jesuit Dramatic Manuscript

In the exceptionally well-researched field of Tudor and Stuart drama, it is unusual for new plays to emerge. So I was thrilled when my husband, Arnold Hunt, drew my attention to two religious dramas which looked as if they might be of English Jesuit provenance, listed in a catalogue issued by the bookseller Christopher Edwards. The Folger Library, I soon learned, had been quick on the draw in acquiring them, and being allowed to see them before they were shipped to the States was a great privilege.

I’ve long hoped to get more people interested in English Jesuit plays, and am working on a study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, of drama inspired by the English Counter-Reformation. English Jesuit plays are under-explored for several reasons. They were mostly written in Latin; they were rarely printed; and their genesis at educational institutions in mainland Europe has rendered them canonically marginal.

The first play, ‘Ovis Perdita’ (The Lost Sheep) exhibits a typical Jesuit preoccupation with moral and religious education, dramatizing a legendary episode associated with the history of the early church: Atticus and Eugenius, two pupils of St John the Evangelist, waver in their commitment to holy poverty, but are brought back to the fold when St John restores a dead man to life and the revived corpse pronounces against their venality. The plot of the second play, ‘Duffus’, is taken from Hector Boece’s Historia Regis Scotorum. The Scottish subject matter and the action, which revolves around the murder of King Duffus by Donald, the governor of Forres Castle, recalls Macbeth; Shakespeare was sometimes drawn upon by playwrights at St Omers.

Both plays are preserved in ‘Monumenta Quaedam Poetica‘ [Certain Poetic Monuments/ Memorials], a manuscript volume from the mid-17th century. Though its last institutional owner was Ampleforth Abbey, a Benedictine foundation, the volume’s original provenance is Jesuit. Both the plays it contains are ascribed to Charles Parker on the title-page, almost certainly the individual of the same name who is credited with part of the co-authored ‘Felix Concordia Fratrum’: a manuscript tragedy depicting the story of the  brother-martyrs John and Paul, performed at the English College at St Omer in 1651. ‘St Omers’ — as it is usually known — was a Jesuit foundation set up in 1593 to educate boys from Catholic families whose educational needs could not be met on English soil at a time when their faith was outlawed. Catering for more junior pupils than the English Catholic seminaries also established on the Continent around that time, the College — like the Jesuit order in general — recognised the usefulness of drama as an educational tool to improve pupils’ literary skills, memories and public speaking. The current volume contains the note ‘Actio in Poësi exhibita’ at the front, indicating that the Poetry class acted at least the first play, and possibly both; boys in this class would usually have been aged 16-17.   

Several dozen St Omers plays survive, testifying to the College’s rich dramatic tradition: a few in print, but most — like the current volume — in manuscript. It was by no means standard for their authors’ names to be given, which makes ‘Monumenta Quaedam Poetica’ an exceptionally valuable addition to the slender body of evidence on identifiable English Jesuit dramatists. ‘Charles Parker’ is, however, an alias: a common precaution for English Catholic boys whose study at Continental educational institutions was frowned upon by the government. Born in 1631 to John and Jane Hawarden of Culcheth Hall in Lancashire, Parker was at St Omers between 1647 and 1652 and was ordained to the priesthood in the final year of his residence; he died in 1667 at Ghent, aged 36, in his tertianship (the final stage of Jesuit formation), when attending plague victims. His name is prefixed by ‘R.P.’ (Reverendus Pater) on the volume’s title-page, indicating that it was put together after his ordination to the priesthood in 1652, though this does not necessarily indicate when the plays were originally written. 

While the dramatic records of St Omers are incomplete for the period when Parker was at the College, it seems the most obvious provenance for this volume. In any case, the two plays it contains are very much in keeping with ‘Felix Concordia Fratrum’, and more broadly with the College’s dramatic traditions. Both are historical tragedies, a genre favoured at St Omers and by Jesuit colleges elsewhere, and in keeping with the prohibitions in the Ratio Studiorum, the curricular guidance issued to all Jesuit colleges, neither play has female characters. One especially interesting and distinctive feature of the volume is its manner of giving stage directions; keyed to the text by number at the start of each scene, these record entrances, exits and stage groupings, and also prescribe the actors’ actions and the emotions they should convey. Future researchers will, I hope, be able to establish whether this system was unique to Parker: one of many areas where this sizeable and fascinating part of England’s dramatic corpus cries out for further study.

For biographical information on Culcheth/ Parker, see the following sources: Geoffrey Holt SJ, St Omers and Bruges Colleges, 1593-1773: A Biographical Dictionary, Catholic Record Society, vol. 69 ([London]: Catholic Record Society, 1979), p.79 (under ‘Culcheth’). Holt summarises the following sources: Henry Foley SJ, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 volumes in 8 (London: Burns & Oates, 1877-83), vol.VI (1880), genealogy bound between pp.690 and 691, and vol.VII:I (1882), p.188. See also vol.5, p.346, where Parker/ Culcheth is recorded as having the first name ‘James’; [John Keynes SJ and Thomas Stapleton SJ], Florus Anglo-Bavaricus (Liège: William Henry Streel, 1685); cited from the reprint, ed. T.A. Birrell (n.p.: Gregg, 1970), p.66. See also Liber Vitæ[:]Necrology, English Province, Society of Jesus, 1 Jan.1561-31 Dec.1937 (Roehampton: Manresa Press, 1938), p.26: Parker / Culcheth’s death date is here given as 23 Dec 1667, with the letters VC (victim of duty or charity) appended against his name. Parker/ Culcheth is not listed under ‘Hawarden’, his parents’ name, in these sources.  

On St Omers drama: see William H. McCabe SJ, An Introduction to the Jesuit Theater (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1983), currently the most extensive account. Pre-1642 St Omers plays are, or will be, catalogued in Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson’s British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, 9 vols (ongoing) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012-). On borrowings from Shakespeare in St Omers drama, see Martin Wiggins, ‘Shakespeare Jesuited: The Plagiarisms of “Pater Clarcus”‘, The Seventeenth Century, 20:1 (2005), pp.1-21. On the First Folio associated with St Omers, see Jan Graffius, ‘A Gift from Poetry: The First Folio and Jesuit Drama in Saint-Omer’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 February 2015, pp.14-15, and Line Cottegnies and Gisèle Venet, ‘More Mysteries about the Saint-Omer Folio: Nevill and other Marks of Ownership’, Études Épistémè, 27 (2015), online at https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.472. 

For information on ‘Felix Concordia Fratrum’: see Dana Sutton’s translation of the play in the Shakespeare Institute’s Philological Museum and Alison Shell, ‘Felix Concordia Fratrum’. The manuscript is now at Stonyhurst College, the institutional successor to St Omers: shelfmark MS B.VII.27, Volume 2, ff.1.15, formerly MS.A.VII.50 (2), pp.1-16.

On the wider cultural phenomenon of Jesuit drama: see the introduction to Neo-Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jan Bloemendal and Howard B. Norland (Leiden: Brill, 2013) which situates it in relation to wider humanist traditions. The ban on female characters was often ignored: see Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, ‘Neo-Latin Theater in Italy’, ch.2 in Bloemendal and Norland (eds), at p.74. 

On college culture at St Omers: see Hubert Chadwick SJ, St Omers to Stonyhurst: A History of Two Centuries (London: Burns & Oates, 1962) and Jan Graffius, ‘“Bullworks Against the Furie of Heresie”: Relics, Material Culture and the Spiritual and Cultural Formation of the Sodality of St Omers English Jesuit College, 1593–1650’, PhD, Aberdeen University, 2018 (information on the age-range in the Poetry class at p.51). 

My thanks to Christopher Edwards, bookseller, who offered this manuscript in his List 94 (April 2025), for allowing me to draw on his catalogue entry, and to him and the Folger Library for granting me early access to the manuscript. My thanks also to Arnold Hunt (Durham University); Jan Graffius (Stonyhurst College Museum and Archives); Thomas M. McCoog SJ; Joseph Reed (Raby Castle); Rebecca Somerset (British Jesuit Archives); and to Heather Wolfe (Folger).