La storia ungherese in scena a Zagabria: il dramma kajkavo Familija Hunjadijanska

The phrase ‘old Kajkavian drama’ refers to the activity of school theatres in Northern Croatia (particularly in the Zagreb and Varaždin area) between 1606 and 1834. The earliest plays were staged in Jesuit educational institutions; they were usually written in Latin, and rarely in the vernacular, the Kajkavian-Croatian dialect. After the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1772, a school theatre was set up inside the Kaptol seminary in Zagreb, where plays were staged between 1791 and 1834. Part of the theatrical production of the Kaptol seminary is extant. It consists of a corpus of about thirty-five plays written in the local Kajkavian dialect, and is usually referred to as anonimna kajkavska drama. All the plays were borrowed from foreign (mostly German) playwrights, whose works were translated and adapted for the Croatian audience. Most of these texts have survived in manuscript form, only a few having found their way to publication. This paper aims to discuss the drama Familija Hunjadijanska, a historical play which belongs to that corpus. The manuscript is now at the National Library in Zagreb, as part of the Tomaš Mikloušić fund. It is incomplete; furthermore, it gives no useful information about its author/adaptor or about the original foreign text, which was finally traced in 1962 by the Croatian scholar Olga Šojat. A comparison between the Kajkavian-Croatian text and its source is provided in this article, along with some hypotheses concerning the dating of Familija Hunjadijanska and the occasion on which this old Kajkavian play may have been staged at the Kaptol seminary theatre.