Discovering Paolo Bozi’s Rappresentatione Del Giudicio Vniuersale

It would have been very difficult to stage the play in seventeenth-century Italy. With scenes set in heaven, Jerusalem, and hell, it required a change of scenery that would have tightened the purse strings of any patron foolhardy enough to finance it. To make things worse, the dramatis personae number in the hundreds, ranging from big shots like Jesus Christ and his heavenly posse to the Antichrist and his ungodly mob, but without neglecting the populace caught in the crossfire, the wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, children and grandchildren who had to bear the brunt of history’s curtain call. And no Christian mind would ever conceive of a play on this subject—the trying days before the Last Day, and then the Last Day itself—without the costly apocalyptic bangs and booms, that is, the clash of shields and spears, the dramatic re-fleshing of centuries-old bones, the earth-scorching rain of fire, and the final division between the good and the bad. First published in Venice in 1596, Paolo Bozi’s Rappresentatione del Giudicio Vniuersale (Eng.: Representation of the Last Judgment) had all that and more. Fortunately, the Folger owns a rare second edition of this work, published in 1605.

As the title makes clear enough, Bozi’s play was intended to be performed as a sacra rappresentazione. This theatrical genre was quite popular in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, telling and retelling the odd biblical story with some added theatrical flair. A puff of smoke fills the air, and, as it dissipates, a grinning devil appears to strike the fear of hell into the hearts of some children. Strings begin to play and a rope pulls a winged actor to the heavens, a promise of ascension for the well-behaved in the audience. And unaware of the honor, a newborn gets to play Him, the bambino himself, googly-eyed as some oddly dressed randos fawn all over his cradle. Ostensibly, the goal of all this drama was not the pure enjoyment of storytelling, but some sort of salvific soul-improvement. As Bozi himself explains in his dedication to Marco II Cornaro (1557–1652), the then recently appointed Bishop of Padua, his Last Judgment play would be “a most efficacious medicine […] to keep us from sinning.” His reasoning was simple: if the audience could see and hear how much trouble awaited them if they were not nice and sheepish, they would find it much harder to misbehave. Of course, it would be several centuries before the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Mick Jagger, and Cynthia Erivo made being wicked great again.

But reading through Bozi’s play, one also gets the impression that he was looking for those worldly things that might put him on the wrong side of the eschatological divide that he wrote about. Given what we know about the complex relationship in sixteenth-century Italy between authors, dedicatees, and printed works, the encomium on Cornaro was probably intended to get the bishop to bankroll the big show by digging deep into his diocesan pockets. Born in Verona in 1550 and dying in 1628, Bozi was not only a fellow Venetian but also a fellow clergyman (he began signing as “Don” as early as 1574). As the latter, he was probably used to having to convince others of some project or message. His writing credits speak volumes. By the time his Rappresentatione del Giudicio Vniuersale appeared, he had already published a number of works, including madrigals, tragedies, and pastoral dramas. Bozi also worked behind the editorial scenes, as a 1620 edition of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Eng.: Jerusalem Delivered) bears his name as a copy-editor. This brief biographical information adds up to a picture of Bozi as someone quite familiar with the cutthroat business of Venetian publishing, which was still booming in the late sixteenth century. Thus, it is not unreasonable to suggest that, by seeking to stage a blockbuster performance of the Last Judgment, Bozi was as interested in the spiritual health of the Christians flock as he was in his own material well-being. After all, just like our contemporary authors, most early modern authors had to hustle every day—to misquote Rick Ross.

Cross-historical similarities aside, no play about the end times published in the late sixteenth century can survive the judgment of our own time unscathed, especially since the geoeschatological imagination that animates much of this kind of literature often depicts entire communities as evil, corrupt, or corruptible. In the play, a man named Saulo, who comes from the tribe of Dan, is tempted by the devil to play the role of the apocalyptic enemy out of sheer envy of what God had given to the Christians and denied to his own people. So Bozi repeats an old anti-Semitic accusation that the Antichrist would be Jewish, and has him deliver a grand aria of sheer dissatisfaction with the divinely ordained way things had been going:

And while the Jewish community has to bear the brunt of the blame, there is plenty of it to go around for the Muslim community as well, namely the Ottomans—after all, the Antichrist would need some minions to subjugate and pervert Christendom, or so went the thinking. Thus, we learn in the play that he will conquer Jerusalem with the help of the “King of the Turks.” Much of this rhetoric was centuries old when Bozi wrote his Rappresentatione del Giudicio Vniuersale, having been made extremely popular by the many editions of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, a seventh-century prophetic work written in Syriac in reaction to the rising forces of Islam in the region. Incidentally, the Folger has an illustrated version of this work published in Basel in 1504 under the highly marketable title Methodius primum Olimpiade et postea Tyri ciuitatu[m] ep[iscop]us sub Diocleciano Imperatore in calcide ciuitate q[ue] Nigropontu[m] appellat[ur] vt diuus scribit Hieronymus martyrio coronatur.

In at least one respect, however, Bozi’s work speaks to our more pressing concerns—or at least to the concerns of some of us who still listen to what environmental scholars and activists have to say. Right at the beginning of the play, an allegory of the church is also given an aria of complaint. But instead of griping about how God loves other people best, she (the Church is female in Romance languages) laments the devastation that His judgment will bring:

and so on, until a “voracious flame” will burn the whole world and everything in it. As Michael Stipe would have it, it is no biggie, just the end of the world as we know it.

Tiresome pop culture references aside, these are not easy words to digest in the present. And by the present, I mean this decade in which we have already seen the extinction of twenty-two bird species in the U.S. in 2021, the collapse of the 1200-square-kilometer Conger Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2022, cyclones of unprecedented energy killing hundreds in southern Africa in 2023, Rio de Janeiro heating up to a thermal sensation of 144˚ Fahrenheit in 2024, and entire neighborhoods of Los Angeles burned to ashes in 2025. And by that I mean this crucial decade of ours, a decade that, according to a broad scientific consensus, will determine global survivability for centuries to come—so those who read about the end times in the present must come to terms with the long duration of messianic apocalypticism vis-à-vis the harsh reality of anthropogenic environmental collapse, which is now very much underway.

All citations were translated by the author from Italian into English.