With a single gesture, Vockerodt had positioned himself as the Jesse Helms of the 17th century, battling the heathen filth seeping from the stages of Germany’s theaters. Musicians and performers around Germany leapt to the theater’s defense, unleashing a blitz of rhetoric against Vockerodt. The point of the scenes was clear: the arts, and above all, the theater, were dangerous, something to be avoided at all costs lest one wander into sin and wantonness. Among them were reenactments of the death of Caligula, killed as he chatted with some actors, and of Nero’s descent into insanity, its paranoid confusion ushered in by his reckless violin-playing and frequent visits to the theater. In 1697, Gottfried Vockerodt, rector of the high school in the southeast German town of Gotha and a self-styled “good Christian,” directed his students in an evening of dramatic scenes from Roman antiquity.
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