Locating theatricality: the case of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

• Calma, Clarinda E
• Rzegocka, Jolanta

ENThis essay has argued for the enormous power of theatralized elements of early modern public and private life to communicate political and artistic message, to define the city’s cultural topography, to integrate members of the audience, to celebrate order and unity by resolving tensions and putting forward political propositions. By drawing a larger list of these performances whose political significance may have faded unlike their historical and artistic significance, we may view the culture of the Great Duchy of Lithuania in a brighter light and restore the significant theatrical factor of that culture. Placed outside any form of institutionalized theatre that many early theatre historians missed from the culture of Poland-Lithuania, the royal and nobility entries and processions show that theatricality, in fact, „can be abstracted from the theatre itself and then applied to any and all aspects of human life” (Davis, Postlewait 2003: 1). On a larger scale, not only their analysis sheds more light on the communicative power of art, but it also helps to account for aesthetic elements of the performance and the simple pleasure of once again „looking at the entire event” that calls art out of history. [Extract, p. 156]