„A papoc hazassagarol valo comoedia”

A legkorábbi magyar nyelvű (ismert) dráma (1. közlemény)

Absztrakt

The beginnings of Hungarian drama-literature are significantly marked by the comedies of Sztárai Mihály: The Comedy on the Marriage of Priests and The Mirror of True Priesthood. The Comedy on the Marriage of Priests is the earliest known Hungarian comedy; however, until recently we possessed only a few pages from the end of the text, preserved in the fragment discovered by Toldy Ferenc in the 1850s and published in Kolozsvár. Thanks to a comprehensive research project examining the history of the Heltai printing house and compiling a database of surviving copies, a complete edition of the comedy – previously known only from that single fragment – was found in 2025. The newly discovered copy is held by the Royal Library of Denmark. This discovery allows us to expand our knowledge in literary history, printing history, and many other related fields. The present study primarily investigates the historical printing aspects of Sztárai’s comedy: the questions surrounding the creation of the manuscript and the circumstances of its publication. The study devotes particular attention to the presumed sources of Sztárai’s comedy, as well as to elucidating the technical background of its publication.