BIDERMANN, Jakob. - Jesuit and German man of letters, the most representative author of the famous "Jesuit theatre," b. at Ehingen (Württemberg) in 1578, d. at Rome on 20 Aug. 1639. He entered the novitiate at Landsberg in 1594, where his teachers included the finest humanists then in the Society in Germany, Giacomo Pontano and especially Mattia Rader, whose influence he strongly felt. He taught at Augsburg, and later, after theological studies at Dillingen (1603-1606), again at Munich; these were the years of his finest literary output, coinciding with the apogee of Jesuit drama in Munich. Professor of philosophy (1615-18) and of theology (1618-26) at Dillingen, he was summoned to Rome in 1626 as general reviser of books, and in this capacity he assisted Fr General Vitelleschi with many opinions and judgments.
His collections of poetry saw many reprints, mainly for use in schools: *Epigrammatum libri III* (Dillingen 1620); *Herodias* (ibid. 1626), on the Holy Innocents; *Heroum epistolae* (Antwerp 1630); *Sylvulae Hendeasyllabarum* (Rome 1634); *Herodium epistolae* (ibid. 1638), etc. He also wrote prose works: *Res a B. Ignatio Loiola... gestate* (Munich 1612, translated from Ribadeneira, several reprints); *Utopia seu sales musici, quibus ludicra mixtum est seria... denarrantur* (Dillingen 1640, a lively Latin novel for students; a German translation, *Bacchusia oder Fastnacht-Land*, appeared in 1677 by C. A. Hörl, without naming the author).
But his greatest merit lay in his work as a dramatist, and he exercised a powerful influence on the evolution of the genre in Germany: he broke away, in fact, from the tradition hitherto dominant.
His most celebrated large-scale composition is *Cenedoxus, der Doktor von Paris* (1602 and, somewhat revised, 1609), though it still retains much of the old mystery plays; the apex of his baroque art is reached in the two other masterpieces, *Belisarius* (1607) and *Ioannes Calybita* (1618). Among his other tragedies are *Cassianus* (1602), *Adrianus* (1603), *Macarius* (1613), *Joseph Aegypti prorex* (1615), *Philemon* (1618), *Josaphat* (1619). A posthumous edition gathered ten plays with interesting introductions: *Ludi theatricales sacri seu opera comica postuma* (2 vols., Munich 1666). *Cenedoxus* has enjoyed a revival in the 20th century. The German translation by Meichel (ibid. 1635) was reprinted in the *Deutsche Literatur* series of the publisher Reclam (Baroque series, vol. Ordensdrama, by Fleming, Leipzig 1930, pp. 47-183). It was staged again, mainly in the German adaptation by H. Rommel, *Cenedoxus, der Doktor von Paris* (Munich 1932).
The characteristics of Bidermann’s art are the acuteness of his analysis and the strong psychological construction of his characters (it is a dramatic transposition of St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises); to this is added a strong realism, which curiously blends the tragic and the comic pushed to the point of burlesque, as in Shakespeare, with whom he has much in common; above all, his skill in drawing irresistible tragic effects from the great baroque and human themes (the opposition between the temporal, fleeting, and the eternal, the frailty of human fortune, etc.).