Jacob Bidermann

Jacob Bidermann (1578 – 20 August 1639) was born in the Austrian (at that time) village of Ehingen, about 30 miles southwest of Ulm. He was a Jesuit priest and professor of theology, but is remembered mostly for his plays.

He had a talent for writing plays that began comically, with loud talk and clowning around, and then turning the tables on his characters, and switching to totally tragic circumstances. At the age of 22 he wrote his first play Cenodoxus, in Latin, a dramatization of the popular Legend of the Doctor of Paris (the Faust theme). In the play, considered his most notable, a man dies and interrupts his own last rites to announce his own damnation. The play was performed in Augsburg on two consecutive days in July 1602.

Another of Bidermann's notable plays is Philemon Martyr, dealing with the persecution of Christians in early Rome. In this play, a musician named Philemon agrees to substitute himself for a Christian friend, take his name, and pretend to render sacrifice to some pagan idols for him, thereby allowing him to avoid – however technically – the Ten Commandments prohibition of doing honor to idols. However, on approaching the altar, Philemon suddenly surprises everyone by saying that he was so adamant in his faith that he would rather die than do homage to an idol.

Bidermann also wrote a novel Utopia about a hundred years after Thomas More wrote a story by the same name. His theological works include: Theses Theologicae (1620); Sponsalia (1621); and Poenitentiae Sacramentum (1621).