On the Continent, the Jesuits made theatre an integral part of their educational system. The order was founded in 1540, and the first play, a tragedy in Latin, was performed in Messina in 1551. From then until the order was suppressed in 1773, by one account one hundred thousand plays were performed in over five hundred school theatres, first in Europe and, with the spread of the Counter-Reformation, in India, Japan, Mexico, and indeed in most of the known world. For among the many educational virtues the Jesuits found in theatre, they found it a most effective method of propaganda-propaganda fidei (the propagation of the faith)-which is what the order was founded to do.
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Jonathan Lévy (1997) studied this question.