BOOK II

THE CONTROL OF THE STAGE

[Greek: Alla ma Di', ephê, ouk epi toutô mega phronô. All' epi tô mên;

Epi nê Dia tois aphrosin. houtoi gar ta ema neuropasta theômenoi

trephousi me.]--Xenophon, _Symposium_.

VIII

HUMANISM AND PURITANISM

[_Bibliographical Note._--Most of the material for the present

chapter, including extracts from a few pre-Elizabethan writers,

is collected in Appendix C; the more official documents in

Appendix D are occasionally drawn upon. The Puritan controversy

has been studied by C. H. Herford, _A Sketch of the History of

the English Drama in its Social Aspects_ (1881), and E. N. S.

Thompson, _The Controversy between the Puritans and the Stage_

(1903), from the academic point of view in F. S. Boas,

_University Drama in the Tudor Age_ (1914), and in relation to

the theory of dramatic criticism by H. S. Symmes, _Les Débuts

de la Critique dramatique en Angleterre jusqu'à la Mort de

Shakespeare_ (1903), and Renaissance criticism in general by J.

E. Spingarn, _History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_

(1899), and G. Saintsbury, _History of Criticism_, vol. ii

(1902). Useful collections of contemporary treatises are G.

Gregory Smith, _Elizabethan Critical Essays_ (1904), and J. E.

Spingarn, _Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century_ (1908).]

The investigations of my opening book have shown clearly enough that in

the Tudor, as in the mediaeval, scheme of things there was ample room

for the stage and its players. The revelling instinct survived, and the

old native love of _mimesis_ and _spectacle_ had been reinforced by a

literary delight in the revival of classical drama and in every form of

the give and take of dialogue. Nor was the appreciation of the folk for

the ruder forms of sensational and farcical entertainment less keen; and

a period of general acceptance of the stage as an element in social life

might have been anticipated, in which it stood greatly to gain by the

more settled and less migratory habits of the royal household and the

possibilities of building up a permanent head-quarters for itself in

London which resulted from the change. Unfortunately, however, events

moved otherwise. A new factor emerged, which militated against anything

like general acceptance; and the period of the greatest literary

vitality in the development of the English drama proved to be also a

period of embittered conflict with widespread ethical and religious

tendencies, which in fact ranged over the whole of social life and was

ultimately destined to shatter, not only the stage, but the Tudor scheme

of things itself. In its main outlines the issue was that which had been

set ever since the decadent theatre of Greece and Rome came face to face

with Semitic asceticism and barbarian indifference. The traditional

dislike and contempt of the moralist for the mime had still to find

their last expression. But it is a noteworthy aspect of this new revival

of the secular struggle, that the attack came less from official

churchmanship than from those extreme champions of reformation

principles, whose zeal against abuses, and in particular against abuses

countenanced by official churchmanship, won them the name of Puritans.

The rise of Puritanism was coincident with the beginnings of the

agitation against the stage, and the growth of Puritanism in London was

the chief feature in a process which stirred the local magistracy, as

represented by the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City, to try its

strength, with the stage as a bone of contention, against the central

authority of the Privy Council. The controversy is so important a one,

from the point of view of the history of the stage and of civilization,

that even at the risk of retraversing ground already trod, it is

desirable to consider at some length the forces that were at work.[759]

The general relation of Reformation sentiment to the drama is a matter

of rather complicated cross-currents. In the first place, there was the

humanist rediscovery of the classics, fanning into flame the enthusiasm

for Terence which had smouldered throughout the Middle Ages themselves,

and making full use in its theory of education of the school-play as a

means of inculcating pure Latinity, sound moral precepts, and

gentlemanly self-possession in the conduct of affairs. In some at least

of its manifestations this tendency is comprehensive enough to include

the professional, as well as the academic, player. An example may be

found in the treatise _De recta reipublicae administratione_ of the

German jurist, John Ferrarius. This was written in 1556 and translated

into English by William Bavande of the Middle Temple in 1559. It was

probably not without its influence upon the line of apologetic adopted

by those gentlemen of the Inns of Court to whom the London stage came to

look as its warmest supporters. For Ferrarius players are no longer the

proscribed folk of the Middle Ages. They have become one of the seven

handicrafts of the commonweal; and, provided that care is taken that

their performances shall stand with honesty, they have a function, not

merely to delight in times of recreation, but also to further morals by

ministering ensamples of virtue and goodness to be embraced, and of vice

and filthy living to be eschewed. In his short chapter, Ferrarius makes

use of two notions, which became commonplaces of Elizabethan dramatic

criticism. Both are derived from classical sources. One is Horace's

statement in the _De Arte Poetica_ of the double object of comedy in the

mingling of delight with profit;[760] the other the Plutarchan image of

the bee sucking its honey even from noxious herbs, the honey of ethical

precept from the herbs of wanton or foolish writings.[761] Even more

famous, from its glorification in _Hamlet_, is a third passage which

Ferrarius does not cite, and that is the definition of comedy,

attributed by the fourth-century grammarian Donatus to Cicero but not

discoverable in his extant works, as _imitatio vitae, speculum

consuetudinis, imago veritatis_.[762]

There were, however, other humanists who may have shared the abstract

ideal of Ferrarius, but who at any rate were sufficiently conscious of

the extent to which the popular stage of their own day fell short of

that ideal, and were in consequence led to condemn, or perhaps more

often to ignore, it. Of such was Ludovicus Vives, who devoted to

dramatic poetry a section of his work on the corruption of the arts, in

which, while accepting the Horatian account of the end of comedy, he

points out that, with the notable exception of the author of

_Celestina_, the playwrights, having been driven by the resentment of

the great against satire to find their material in love-intrigues and

similar themes, had lamentably failed to justify themselves by a proper

determination of their plots to the ends of salutary morals. Even for

Vives, Plautus and Terence are necessary to education; but he would use

his blue pencil, and is by no means so warm a champion of the Latin

drama on its ethical side as his older and more famous contemporary

Erasmus. In his formal writings on education Erasmus gives Terence the

first place amongst Latin writers, adding Plautus with more hesitation

and with a stipulation for carefully selected plays. And in a letter

written about 1489 to an anonymous friend he tilts with vehemence

against the doctrine of certain _homunciones imperituli, imo lividuli_,

who maintain that Terence is no fit reading for Christians, and explains

to their ignorance that the end of dramatic writing lies precisely in

the refutation of vice. Erasmus is closely followed by his English

disciple, Sir Thomas Elyot, whose defence of comedies in _The Governour_

(1531), as no 'doctrinall of rybaudrie' but 'a mirrour of man's life,

wherin iuell is not taught but discouered', served as a standard

authority to be quoted in support of much later apologetic. Nor is the

point of view confined to what may be called the secular wing of

humanism. The Terentian school-play is an essential feature in the

pedagogy of such convinced reformers as Philip Melanchthon at Wittenberg

and John Sturm at Strasburg,[763] and from Sturm the tradition passes

direct to one of the most scholarly and by no means one of the least

austere of early English Protestants, Roger Ascham. It is to be

observed, however, that Ascham's concern for Terence is wholly on the

side of letters and Latinity. Both Vives and Erasmus had had their

moments of uneasiness as to how far, after all, the ethics of pagan Rome

were quite meet to be assimilated by Christian youth. Vives would

expurgate both Plautus and Terence, and Erasmus Plautus at least.

Ascham, very much impressed with the demoralizing influence of Italian

books and Italian manners on English civilization, has no doubt at all

that, necessary as both Plautus and Terence are to the schoolmaster,

their matter is but 'base stuff' for the contemplation of the budding

divine or civil servant. Views similar to Ascham's had already

established themselves amongst both Catholic and Protestant teachers,

and the attempt to combine Roman impeccability of phrase with Christian

impeccability of theme and incident had produced the remarkable dramatic

type known as the 'Christian Terence'.[764] This had had its vernacular,

as well as its Latin, developments in many lands. Its acceptability in

the eyes of the earlier reformers in England may be illustrated from the

chapter _De honestis ludis_, which forms part of the treatise _De regno

Christi_ written by Martin Bucer as a New Year's gift for Edward VI in

1551.[765] Bucer allows of plays, both for the exercise of youth, and

for the honest and not unprofitable delectation of the public. They must

be written by learned and pious men, and may be either comedies or

tragedies, which deal respectively with mean and exalted actions. For

comic themes he instances the dissension between the shepherds of

Abraham and Lot, the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob's service

amongst the flocks of Laban; and he expounds no less than six moral

lessons which the first of these plots may serviceably inculcate. As for

tragedy, the histories of patriarchs, kings, prophets, and apostles,

from Adam onwards, are full of those [Greek: peripeteiai] upon which

Aristotle lays such stress. It is from such sources that Christians

should draw their poetry, rather than from the impious fables and

histories of the Gentiles. And care must be taken to let vice awaken a

horror of sin and well-doing a sense of the divine grace; for

edification is to be the end of the action, even if, in order to attain

it, some sacrifice of literary decorum is necessitated. Bucer holds that

plays conceived in this spirit may with advantage be performed by youth

in the vernacular, as well as in Greek and Latin; and declares that some

have already been written which, although men of secular learning may

miss in them the literary graces to be found in the comedies of

Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence and the tragedies of Sophocles,

Euripides, and Seneca, are yet to be preferred for their religious

character to pieces whose effect upon morality can only be deplorable.

It is to be noticed that Bucer proposes to submit all plays before

production to the judgement of persons at once expert in the dramatic

art and of sound divinity, one of whose functions it shall be to let

nothing which is _leve aut histrionicum_ be shown. This is interesting

not only because it anticipates the actual Tudor experiments in a

dramatic censorship, but also because it indicates that the idea of a

censorship arose out of ethical, as well as out of merely political,

considerations. It is possible that Bucer may have been familiar with

the actual working of the system at Geneva, to which further reference

will presently be made.

In actual practice the Protestant religious drama, whether it was

imitating Latin comedy or advancing on the lines of the popular

morality, used the Scriptures with some discrimination. It drew freely

upon the historical books and upon the parables. The parable of the

prodigal son, in particular, perhaps because it was so obviously

cognate to beloved Terentian themes, became the parent of a copious

dramatic literature, both in Christian Latin and in all the vernaculars.

The central topics, the mysteries of the faith in creation, fall, and

incarnation, and the life of Christ himself, were much more charily

touched. This may have been due to a reprobation of the methods of the

miracle-plays, which is itself traceable to more than one cause.

Protestant reverence could hardly fail to reinforce the criticism of the

_leve aut histrionicum_ in the popular representations, which often made

itself heard even amongst orthodox Churchmen. Luther is at one with

Ludovicus Vives on the point.[766] And Protestantism had its own

particular ground of quarrel with the miracle-plays, in that they were

hardly dissociable from the Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and

the like, which their great feast-day of Corpus Christi had been

specially invented to glorify. Certainly the decadence of the Corpus

Christi play sets in pretty quickly after the middle of the sixteenth

century, and in more than one instance the hand of the Protestant

reformer is to be traced in the process.[767] It is of the Corpus

Christi plays, as well as of the Hock-play at Coventry, that Robert

Laneham is thinking when he regrets 'the zeal of certain theyr

Preacherz: men very commendabl for their behauiour and learning, & sweet

in their sermons, but sumwhat too sour in preaching awey theyr

pastime'.[768] An exception to the normal temper of Protestantism in

this respect is to be found in that fiery protagonist of the earlier

English reformation, John Bale, amongst whose few extant plays are a

_Prophetae_, a _John Baptist_, and a _Temptation_, while a list of his

various dramatic experiments, which he has himself left upon record,

indicates that they included a continuous New Testament cycle from the

_Presentation in the Temple_ to the _Resurrection_.[769]

It is, of course, in form only and not in spirit that Bale touched the

ecclesiastical compilers of the Corpus Christi plays. The author of

_Kinge Johan_ and the translator of _Pammachius_ is the typical English

figure of that characteristic sixteenth-century movement whereby the

drama, like every other form of literary expression, bound itself for a

time to the service of heretical controversy. Both the Christian

Terence and the vernacular morality contained elements which could be

readily adapted to the purposes of polemic, no less than to those of

edification; and Bale appears to have been the principal agent of

Cromwell's statecraft in what was probably a deliberate attempt to

capture so powerful an engine as the stage in the interests of

Protestantism. And it is to be observed that this movement was not

confined to those academic branches of the drama in which it may be

supposed to have had its origin. For once the theologian and the

_histrio_ laid aside their ancient antagonism, and not in school and

college refectories only, but in every inn-yard and on every village

green, the praises of the pure Gospel were sung, and Pope and priests

were derided in play, at the bidding of the wily Privy Seal. Of this

there is sufficient evidence in the passionate protest of Bale after

Cromwell had fallen, and the players' mouths had been shut by the _Act_

for the _Advancement of true Religion_ in 1543.[770]

None leave ye unvexed and untrobled, no, not so much as the

poore minstrels, and players of enterludes, but ye are doing

with them. So long as they played lyes, and sange baudy songes,

blasphemed God, and corrupted men's consciences, ye never

blamed them, but were verye well contented. But sens they

persuaded the people to worship theyr Lorde God aryght,

accordyng to hys holie lawes and not yours, and to acknoledge

Jesus Chryst for their onely redeemer and Saviour without your

lowsie legerdemains, ye never were pleased with them.

No doubt many things were changed in English Protestantism after the

days of the Marian exile; and a ready explanation of the active Puritan

hostility to the stage is afforded by the substitution of a Calvinist

for a Lutheran bias in the conduct of the Reformation. But the

antithesis must not be pressed too far. Assuredly the returning

preachers brought with them a new seriousness in their view of life and

a haunting mistrust of the moral evils lurking even in innocent modes of

recreation. The 'merry England' of tradition formed no part of their

ideal. Moreover, they were less in bondage than their predecessors of

Henry's reign to the prestige of secular learning, and less likely to be

impressed, therefore, by the literary and educational significance of

the drama. But so far as the popular stage is concerned, there is no

reason to suppose that they would have failed to see eye to eye with

John Bale himself, for it is pretty clear from the passage quoted above

that Bale's tolerance of the interlude-players was entirely conditioned

by the polemical use he had been enabled to make of them, and that,

apart from what he chose to regard as their conversion, they would have

had short shrift at his hands. Now by the time of the Puritans this

break in the normal relations of the stage to the pulpit had come to an

end. The drama of Protestant controversy survived its original

manipulator, Cromwell. It flourished greatly under Edward VI. It won the

imitation of the Catholics under Mary. And when Elizabeth came, its

exponents made haste to re-enter a field which was probably by now

capable of yielding profit in a worldly as well as a spiritual sense. It

is clear that at the beginning of the reign Elizabeth and her ministers

deliberately continued Cromwell's policy of encouraging stage-polemic.

During the Christmas of 1558 the court and the streets were full of

masks, in which cardinals, bishops, and abbots were held up to derision

as crows, asses, and wolves.[771] During the debates on the Act of

Uniformity in the following spring, Abbot Feckenham protested against

the way in which 'by the onely preachers and scaffold players of this

newe religion, all thinges are turned up-side downe'.[772] Almost

simultaneously the dispatches of Venetian agents mention the prevalence

of anti-Catholic plays in hostels and taverns, and dwell particularly

upon one performance in which Philip and Mary and Cardinal Pole were

represented in exposition of their religious views.[773] The inwardness

of the movement is made clear by a letter of the Duke of Féria to Philip

himself, in which he reports Elizabeth's diplomatic repudiation of the

insolent pieces, and adds that he knew for a fact that the arguments

were given to the players by none other than Sir William Cecil.[774] The

Elizabethan methods of government were tortuous, and it is a little

difficult to say how long the licence of the stage to deal with matters

of religion lasted. Ostensibly the proclamation of 16 May 1559,

presumably issued in deference to De Feria's complaints, brought it to a

very definite stop. But it was one thing to issue a proclamation and

another to see that it was enforced; and as late as the June of 1562 we

find De Feria's successor, the Bishop of Aquila, still protesting

against Elizabeth's failure to carry out her perpetual promises, by

suppressing the books, farces, and songs which were written in dishonour

of his royal master.[775] The burden of these, however, may have been

political rather than strictly religious. Certainly, when Elizabeth

considered that she had 'settled' the affairs of the Church, it in no

way remained part of her intention that they should continue to be

matter for public debate. Nor is it likely that the extreme vulgarities

of Protestant controversy were altogether to her private taste. Already

during the Christmas of 1559 a play at court had been broken off for

some unknown offence, and when some Cambridge students pursued the queen

to Hinchinbrook in the autumn of 1564 with a scandalous dramatic parody

of Catholic ritual, the royal displeasure was unmistakable.[776]

Meanwhile the pulpit attacks upon the 'fleshly and filthy' sayings and

doings of players begin with Bishop Alley's St. Paul's sermon delivered

in 1561, and it is natural to suppose that the temporary alliance

between Church and Stage was already dissolved and the normal hostility

restored, before Bishop Grindal came to pen his vehement outburst to

Cecil on 23 February 1564 in favour of the permanent inhibition of the

'_histriones_, common playours', that 'idle sorte off people, which have

ben infamouse in all goode common weales'. The theory that the first

controversial phase of the Elizabethan popular drama was but of short

duration need not be regarded as invalidated by the fact that plays of

distinctly Protestant type continued to be published until at least the

third decade of the reign. There is no very obvious proof that these

plays were performed at all, and certainly none that they belonged to

the popular rather than the academic stage. Moreover, there is no reason

to suppose that the dates of composition fell anywhere near the dates of

publication, and in some cases such evidence as is available points to a

period very shortly after Elizabeth's accession. Several Protestant

plays of Edwardian or earlier origin were apparently revived by

publishers at about the same time.[777] In some of these the closing

prayers have been altered so as to apply to Elizabeth, and a similar

revision has taken place in the text, extant only in manuscript, of

Bale's _Kinge Johan_. This seems to be evidence, perhaps more certainly

as regards the manuscript than as regards the prints, of actual

performance during the new reign.

If, then, what might have been the natural attitude of the earlier

English Protestantism to the popular stage was deflected by something of

an accident, it is also not quite true to suppose that Calvinism was

always and everywhere uncompromisingly opposed to the drama in its more

respectable forms. Calvin himself was not unaffected by humanist

influences, and more than one of his near associates, notably Theodore

Beza, his successor at Geneva, are to be reckoned amongst academic

playwrights. The annals of stage-history at Geneva throw a valuable

light upon the order of ideas from which the Puritans started. During

the later Middle Ages the city had taken its full delight in

_spectacula_ of many kinds. The abuses connected with these had formed

the subject of constant ecclesiastical prohibitions, the tradition of

which had only been continued by the reformers.[778] Calvin's principal

forerunner, William Farel, had published _theses_ at Bâle in 1524, in

which he laid down abstinence from disguisings as a counsel of

perfection.[779] But he did not succeed in making his principles wholly

operative at Geneva, and even when, after an abortive attempt in 1537,

the so-called 'theocracy' was finally established by Calvin's

constitutions of 1541, there was no absolute condemnation, except for

the clergy, of plays.[780] Dances were prohibited and such heathen

ceremonies as the _Roi-boit_ at Twelfth Night and the _Mardigras_[781];

but it seems to have been thought sufficient to leave plays under the

close inspection and control of the body of ministers, whose functions

included the maintenance of Church discipline with the aid of a

consistory of elders, and the advising of the secular town council on

all matters appertaining to faith and morals. It was not long, however,

before more radical views began to commend themselves to a certain

section of the ministers, and the question came to a serious issue in

some stormy episodes of the year 1546. On 2 May, being Quasimodo Sunday,

the council had permitted the performance of a morality by one Roux

Monet and others. They had before them a certificate from the ministers

that it was of an edifying character, although some grumbling persons

declared that its object was to ridicule and satirize the

tradesmen.[782] About a month later, two fresh applications came before

them. One was apparently from a troupe of travelling players and

acrobats, and this was summarily refused as likely to cause

scandal.[783] The other was more plausible. Some local _joueurs des

ystoires_ desired to represent for the edification of the people a

dramatization of _The Acts of the Apostles_. The council ordered the

book of the piece to be submitted to Calvin, and agreed that it might

be performed, should his report be favourable. Calvin and the other

ministers did not much like the proposal, more particularly as the

players declined to give alms to the poor out of the profits of the

enterprise. It so happened, however, that one of the ministers, Abel

Poupin, was himself the author of the play, and partly because of this,

and partly because he was not sure that an attempt to prevent the

performance would be successful, Calvin seems to have persuaded his

colleagues to offer no objection. The formal sanction of the council was

therefore given, and Abel Poupin was ordered to make himself responsible

for the conduct of the play. Reading between the lines, we may perhaps

discern some resentment amongst the ministers, not only at the

performance itself, which they considered a waste of money that might

have gone in charity, but also at the domineering attitude adopted by

Calvin and Poupin. Even while the matter was still under discussion, one

of them, Philibert de Beauxlieux, was haled before the consistory for

saying that Calvin was taking the part of the Pope and Poupin that of

the cardinal. And when the decision was arrived at there was an

outbreak. A preacher of fiery temper, Michel Cop, got into the pulpit

and denounced the play, accusing the women performers of a shameless

desire to display themselves in public and thereby ensnare the eyes of

men. For this he was summoned before the council; but Calvin took his

part, and although they had differed as to the toleration of the play,

claimed that Cop had only exercised the preacher's proper liberty in

saying freely what he thought on a question of morals.[784] The

documents concerning this incident include, in addition to numerous

entries in official registers, two private letters from Calvin to

Farel,[785] in which he describes what had taken place, and makes it

clear that his own willingness to allow the play arose from motives of

expediency and from a feeling that there were limits to the pressure

which could be put upon the public to abstain from recreation. In reply

the aged reformer anticipated the probable future destiny of the

frequenters of plays in terms which recall the worst ferocities of

Tertullian on this subject.[786] Something more may be gathered as to

Calvin's personal attitude towards plays from a sermon preached in 1556,

in which he expounds the prohibition of the change of sex-costume in

_Deuteronomy_ xxii. 5 as an absolute one, and as applying particularly

to the wearing of men's dresses by women and of women's dresses by men

in masks and mummeries.[787] This is an exegesis which counted for a

good deal in the Puritan criticism of a stage in which boys habitually

took the female parts.

Abel Poupin's much-discussed _Acts of the Apostles_ was duly given, and

the council ordered themselves _loges_ at the public expense to see the

show, and decreed a four days' suspension of arrest for debt in honour

of the occasion. Shortly afterwards the ministers approached the council

as a body in order to urge that the money devoted to plays might be

better bestowed on the poor, and it was thereupon resolved that no more

_ystoyres_ should be given '_jusque lon voye le temps plus

propre_'.[788] This determination must, I think, have been motived by

some temporary conditions of special economic distress, for it was far

from being the end of plays in Geneva. In the following year, 1547,

Richard Chaultemps and his wife and children were refused permission for

a _jeu de passe-temps_, which was thought contrary to Christianity, and

were given a _teston_ to go on their way. On the other hand, the council

attended officially in the same year at a performance of a Latin

dialogue '_du livre de Joseph_' by the scholars of the college. In 1548

a wandering _tragechieur_ was allowed to perform on condition of

avoiding any '_chose contre Dieu_'. In 1549 the scholars played a comedy

of Terence in a meadow, and received a gift of two crowns for a banquet.

In 1551 the council forbade the recitation of a _ballade_ by Abel Poupin

at a banquet, but sanctioned a '_petite farce de joyeuseté_' for

recreation's sake. In 1558 the seigneurs of Berne paid a visit to Geneva

and one Maître Enoch proposed a play on a subject taken from the Berne

_armoiries_ of Jupiter and Europa, and another on the execution of five

Berne scholars at Lyons. This application was referred to Calvin for a

report. In 1560 the reprinting of Beza's tragedy of _Abraham's

Sacrifice_ was approved by the consistory. In 1561 Conrad Badius's

comedy of _Le Pape Malade_ was performed in the college hall and

afterwards printed, and permission was also given for a comedy by Jerome

Wyart, '_si M. Calvin est de cet avis_'. An interval of some years

without plays followed, until in 1568 the series was resumed with

Jacques Bienvenu's comedy of _Le Monde Malade et Mal Pansé_.[789] It is

hardly necessary to carry the record further, since the proof is

sufficient that, whatever the private opinions of some of the ministers

may have been, the actual working of the theocracy was not inconsistent

with the production, under a careful censorship, of academic or

bourgeois plays, or even, although more rarely, of entertainments of the

type afforded by a professional _tragechieur_. It was not until 1572

that the Synod of Nîmes passed a constitution for the whole of the

French reformed churches, by which all plays, other than those of a

strictly educational character, were forbidden.[790]

It must be doubtful whether even this decree would have fully met the

views of Michel Cop and his supporters. At any rate, it is possible to

trace the growth of a sentiment amongst English theologians of the

Calvinistic persuasion, which was not prepared to exclude the academic

play from the general condemnation of things theatrical. Naturally this

tendency shows itself mainly at the Universities, where tragedies and

comedies, both in Latin and in English, continued to be part of the

ordinary exercise of youth, especially when Christmas was kept or

entertainment had to be found for a royal visit, and where men of high

ecclesiastical standing, such as James Calfhill, Penitentiary of St.

Paul's and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, did not disdain to

furnish dramas for the use of their scholars.[791] So far as Cambridge

is concerned, we find Vice-Chancellor Beaumont reporting to Archbishop

Parker in 1565 that 'two or three in Trinity College think it very

unseeming that Christians should play or be present at any profane

comedies or tragedies'.[792] We find Sir John Harington, who was an

undergraduate from 1576 to 1578, noting his recollection about 1597 that

'in Cambridge, howsoever the presyser sort have banisht them, the wyser

sort did, and still doe mayntayn them'. And we find John Smith of

Christ's haled before the University for an unguarded attack upon the

less strict practice of his fellows in a Lenten sermon of 1586.[793] It

was at Oxford, however, that the divergence of opinion became most

articulate. The protagonist was John Rainolds, afterwards President of

Corpus Christi College, and a man of great influence in the Puritan

party, whom he represented at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604.

Rainolds first touched the question, to which his attention was probably

called by the dispute then raging in London, with a passing allusion to

the '_pestes scenicorum, theatralia spectacula_' as one of the great

interruptions to Oxford studies, in his preface to some disputations

published in 1581. There is no reason to suppose that he voiced the

general view of the University, and in particular of those of its

members who were still under the influence of the humanist spirit.

Probably these were better represented by the commentaries on the

_Ethics_ and _Politics_ of Aristotle published by John Case, Fellow of

St. John's College, in his _Speculum moralium quaestionum_ (1585) and

_Sphaera civitatis_ (1588). Case commends plays, provided that they are

an expression of _comitas_, the Aristotelian [Greek: eutrapelia], and

not of its excess _scurrilitas_. They are sanctioned by the use of

antiquity, and they give a lively picture of antiquity itself. They

teach experience of things and of the human heart, and afford

training--it is the _scenae trigemina corona_--in the management of the

voice, the features, the gestures. All this is, of course, in the

traditional humanist vein. Some of the current criticisms of the drama

are quoted, only to be refuted. It is not necessarily _indecorum_ for a

man to wear the dress of a harlot on the stage, if his object is to

expose the vices of harlotry, '_non est enim monstrum vestes sed mores

meretricis induere_'. It is true that the Fathers condemned plays, but

they had in mind the abuses of plays and in particular the devotion of

plays to the service of idols. It is ridiculous to hold that the dignity

of kingship is offended if it is impersonated by an actor. The offence

is no more than when the outlines of a king are represented in a

picture. No doubt Case has the academic drama almost wholly in his mind,

and would have been inclined to dismiss the professional stage

contemptuously enough as _scurrilitas_.[794] He is certainly careful to

make it clear that the plays of which he approves are not '_inanes et

histrionicae fabulae, Veneris illecebrae_', but witty comedies and

magnificent tragedies '_in quibus expressa imago vitae morumque

cernitur_'. He did not convince John Rainolds; it is just possible that

the ninepin arguments, which in true scholastic fashion he set up and

knocked down again, were hardly to be accepted as an adequate statement

of the Puritan position. Rainolds evidently acquired a reputation in the

University for 'preciseness' as regards the drama; and the time came

when the academic playwrights thought it well to challenge him in

public. Their champion was Dr. William Gager of Christ Church, two of

whose plays, _Ulysses Redux_ and _Rivales_, were down for performance by

the Christ Church students during the Christmas of 1591-2. Rainolds was

invited by one Thomas Thornton to see the _Ulysses Redux_. He refused

and being pressed gave his reasons. It was not therefore unnatural that

when Gager appended to the _Hippolytus_, which was also given, a new

apologetical epilogue in which arguments against the stage, very similar

to those of Rainolds, were put into the mouth of one Momus, our

theologian should infer that by Momus none other was intended than

himself. He must have cried '_Touché_', and thereby gave Gager an

opportunity of sending him a printed copy of _Ulysses_, with an

enlarged epilogue and a repudiation of any personal intention in the

character of Momus. This led to a letter from Rainolds, in which he set

out his views upon the stage at great length and with considerable

learning, to a reply from Gager, who was or professed to be stung by

some of the reflections cast by Rainolds upon the Christ Church men, and

to a rejoinder from Rainolds, in which he reiterated his original

arguments with even greater elaboration. His main contentions were four

in number. Firstly, he laid stress upon the _infamia_ with which the

Roman praetors had 'noted' _histriones_, and refused to accept Gager's

pleas that this only applied to those who played for gain, or that

gentlemen who only appeared upon the stage rarely and at long intervals

could not properly be called _histriones_ at all. Secondly, he adopted

Calvin's interpretation of the Deuteronomic prohibition of the change of

sex-costume as an absolute one, belonging to the moral and not merely

the ceremonial law. Gager had taken the view, which later on had the

support of the learned Selden, and which to a folklorist hardly needs

demonstration, that what Moses had in mind was a change of costume

forming part of an idolatrous ritual; and had also committed himself to

the weaker argument that a man might justifiably, as Achilles did, put

on a woman's clothing to save his life. The latter Rainolds denied, and

pointed out that, even if it held good, it would hardly cover a change

designed for a purely histrionic purpose. His third argument was based

on the moral deterioration entailed by counterfeiting wanton behaviour

in a play; and his fourth on the waste both of time and money involved.

He does not wish to be thought an enemy either of poetry or of

reasonable recreation, but he expresses a doubt whether some hours were

not spent over Gager's plays that ought to have been spent at sermons.

The theory of humanistic educators that acting teaches lads

self-confidence he is not prepared to admit as a sufficient

justification of their practice. The debate is, of course, a good deal

complicated by topics of mere erudition and by disputes as to whether

Momus was really meant as a caricature of Rainolds, or as to whether

Rainolds's abstract argument about _infamia_ bore the concrete

implication that such honest youths as the Christ Church students or so

well-voiced a musician as the Master of the Choristers, who had played

with them, were in fact _infames_, or as to the extent of approval

implied by the presence of University dignitaries and of the queen

herself at performances of Gager's pieces. Anyway, said Rainolds, the

queen's laws set down players as vagabonds. Given their common

premises, it must be acknowledged that both in learning and in logic

the Puritan had the advantage over his opponent, although common sense

was on the side of the latter, and it is with some scepticism that one

reads the statement of the printer who gave Rainolds's share of the

controversy to the world in 1599, that ultimately Gager 'let goe his

hold, and in a Christian modestie and humilitie yeelded to the truth,

and quite altered his judgement'. My own conviction is that Gager would

have subscribed to anything, in order to have done with receiving

argumentative letters from Rainolds. But when Rainolds had disposed of

Gager, he had to meet a fresh adversary in Alberico Gentili, an Italian

who held the professorship of civil law at Oxford and had committed

himself to a different view as to the force of the praetorian _infamia_.

Between these two pundits the discussion continued for some time without

contributing much to the elucidation of the main issue. Rainolds's book,

the first line of the title of which was _Th' overthrow of

Stage-Playes_, furnished many weapons later on for the armoury of

Prynne, and material for ridicule in the play of _Fucus, sive

Histriomastix_, produced at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1623.

The problem with which, long before the University disputants handled

the matter at all, the London Puritans had to deal, was not one of nice

differentiation between the position of the amateur and that of the

professional player. Their concern with the academic drama was

comparatively small; some at least of them were prepared to subscribe to

all the allowances for it that were made by the Synod of Nîmes.[795]

What they were face to face with was the rapid growth in London of

professional playing as a recognized occupation, using an increasing

number of playing-places, almost entirely free from control on its

ethical side, and tending more and more to become a permanent element in

the life of the community. And the attitude of condemnation which they

adopted was in the main one in which Lutheran, Calvinist, and humanist,

Case and Gager no less than Rainolds, would in theory at least have

concurred. The writings against the stage, especially those of the

critical period from 1576 to 1583, are of a very heterogeneous

character. The most important are, on the one hand, long passages in two

treatises by ministers devoted to the flagellation of social evils

generally, the _Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes, or Enterludes_ (1577) of

John Northbrooke, and the _Anatomie of Abuses_ (1583) of Phillip

Stubbes; and on the other, three special pamphlets by sometime

playwrights who had embraced conversion, and had the advantage of

speaking from inner knowledge of the profession they were attacking. Of

these two, _The Schoole of Abuse_ (1579) and _Playes Confuted in Five

Actions_ (1582) were by Stephen Gosson, who became the vicar of St.

Botolph's in the City, and the third was by Anthony Munday, who, as

Gosson put it, returned to his own vomit again, and resumed

play-writing. Munday's contribution was the _Third Blast_ of a composite

publication issued under the title of _A Second and Third Blast of

Retrait from Plaies and Theaters_ (1580). The _Second Blast_ was a

translation of the chapter against _spectacula_ from Salvian's

fifth-century _De Gubernatione Dei_.[796] These five books form the main

indictment of the stage, as it developed itself at Puritan hands or

under Puritan influences. In addition there were many minor onslaughts,

in sermons by Thomas White (1577), John Stockwood (1578), and others at

the famous City pulpit of Paul's Cross, in works of devotional theology,

such as Gervase Babington's _Exposition of the Commandements_ (1583),

and in many examples of the miscellaneous literature that stood for

modern journalism. The arguments used in support of the attack are

naturally various. Some of them coincide with those used later by

Rainolds at Oxford. Calvin's objection, based on Deuteronomy, to the

wearing of women's clothes by boys makes its appearance.[797] The

condemnations of _histriones_ by the Fathers and by the austerer pagans

are applied without discrimination to their Elizabethan successors, and

there is a deliberate attempt to brand these alike with the Roman note

of _infamia_ and with the more recent stigma of vagabondage. The

historical disquisitions lay much stress on the origin of pagan plays in

idolatry. Gosson, who in his second book affects a methodical treatment

of the subject, and draws upon his recollection of Aristotle for

analysis of the efficient, material, formal, final causes and effects of

plays, justifies himself from Tertullian in finding the efficient cause

of plays in none other than the incarnate Devil.[798] He also derives

from Aristotle, although he knew less of Aristotle than did John Case, a

theory that acting, being essentially the simulation of what is not, is

by its very nature 'with in the compasse of a lye, which by Aristotle's

judgment is naught of it selfe and to be fledde'.[799] A similar

doctrine is readily applied to the imaginations of poets which give

actors their opportunity.[800] As Touchstone puts it, poetry is not

'honest in deed and word' nor 'a true thing', for 'the truest poetry is

the most feigning'.[801]

Whatever weight such abstract reasonings may have carried, they were

after all but the fringes and trimmings of the controversy. The main

burden of the complaints raised by the Puritans rested neither on

theology nor on history, but on the character of the London plays as

they knew them, and on the actual conditions under which representations

were given. In a stage from which Protestant polemic was now banned,

they found nothing but _scurrilitas_. They resented the impurity of

speech and gesture. They resented the scoffs at virtue and religion,

especially when these were interlaced with themes taken, as dramatic

themes were still often taken, from the Scriptures.[802] And their

disapproval was hardly less when the plays were wholly secular, for in

tragedies they could discern nothing but examples to honest citizens of

murders, treacheries, and rebellions, and in comedies nothing but

demoralizing pictures of intrigues and wantonness. Plays, they declared,

are the snares of the devil set to catch souls. By plays the imagination

of youth is corrupted, and matronly chastity first turned to thoughts of

sin. With their ready touch upon vituperative rhetoric, they found for

the theatre a string of nicknames of which Gosson's 'the school of

abuse' was the model, and 'the school of bawdery', 'the nest of the

devil', 'the consultorie of Satan', may serve as further samples. And

what the plays began, they held that the surroundings of the playhouses

were only too well adapted to finish. In them was focused all the sin of

the city. Here men came, not merely to waste their time and their money,

but to meet wantons, and to whisper dishonourable proposals in the ears

of any respectable women with whom they found themselves in company. The

constant presence of harlots amongst the audience, the dallying with

them in the front of the galleries, the manning of them home afterwards,

even if the buildings adjacent to the stage did not themselves afford a

convenient shelter for ill-doing, are dwelt upon with a vigour of

description which perhaps testifies to the horror wherewith this

connexion of the stage with sexual immorality had affected the Puritan

mind.[803]

Above all, there was Sabbatarianism to be taken into account. During the

earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, Sunday was the usual day for plays.

The trumpets blew for the performances just as the bells were tolling

for afternoon prayer; and writer after writer bears testimony to the

fact that too often the yards and galleries were filled with an

appreciative crowd, while the preacher's sermon was unfrequented.[804]

Thus a touch of professional _amour propre_ gave its sting to the

conflict, and there is no one point that is more insisted upon in sermon

after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet than the desecration of the

Lord's Day which the attendance at theatres directly entailed. The

preachers did not disdain an appeal to popular superstitions which they

probably themselves shared, and the visitations of plague from which

Elizabethan London regularly suffered,[805] no less than such events as

earthquakes[806] or the fall of ruinous buildings,[807] were interpreted

as tokens of divine wrath at the wickedness of plays and in particular

at the breach of the Fourth Commandment. A curious legend was whispered

abroad in various forms, to the effect that the devil himself had been

known on occasion to take an unrehearsed part in this or that godless

piece.[808]

The playwright, no less than the theologian, has a ready pen, and the

Puritan attacks naturally provoked a counter-literature of apology. This

first took shape in critical prefaces attached to such contemporary

plays, mainly of literary rather than stage origin, as reached the

honours of print.[809] Gosson's _Schoole of Abuse_, a treacherous

performance from the point of view of his former colleagues, called for

a more elaborate reply. More than one pamphlet was written, of which the

_Honest Excuses_ (_c._ 1579) Thomas Lodge has alone come down to us. The

serious argument of this, as well as of the prefaces which preceded it,

continues the main humanist tradition. Against the denunciations of the

Fathers and of certain pagan moralists, the apologists set the antiquity

of plays and the honour in which after all they were held in the palmy

days of Greece and Rome. The examples of violence and wantonness in

tragedy and comedy they justify by the moral end of drama. Decorum--the

literary sense of what is psychologically appropriate to a given

character--requires that, as George Whetstone puts it, 'grave old men

should instruct, yonge men should show the imperfections of youth,

strumpets should be lascivious, boyes unhappy, and clownes should be

disorderly'. But whether the action be merry or mournful, grave or

lascivious, the ultimate object is edification, even as the bee sucks

honey from flowers and weeds alike. 'By the rewarde of the good, the

good are encowraged in well doinge; and with the scowrge of the lewde,

the lewde are feared from evil attempts.' Comedy, no doubt, aims at

delight, but it is a delight which, on the Horatian principle, is

mingled with the useful. This appears to have been the especial theme of

the _Play of Plays and Pastimes_, in which the actors essayed their own

defence on the boards of the Theatre. Unfortunately this piece is only

known by Gosson's unfriendly account of its plot in _Playes

Confuted_.[810] It was in the form of an allegorical morality, in which

was shown the dependence of Life on Delight and Recreation as a

protection from Glut and Tediousness, and how Zeal, in order to govern

Life aright, must be reduced to Moderate Zeal and work hand in hand with

Delight, using comedies for which it is prescribed 'that the matter be

purged, deformities blazed, sinne rebuked, honest mirth intermingled,

and fitte time for the hearing of the same appointed'. It is the note of

humanism, again, which is prominent in the group of critical writings of

which the first and most important is Sir Philip Sidney's _Defence of

Poetry_ (_c._ 1583). It is reasonable to suppose that this treatise had

its origin in the train of ideas awakened by the Puritan outcries.

Gosson had dedicated _The Schoole of Abuse_ to Sidney, and as Gabriel

Harvey told Spenser, was 'for hys labor scorned; if at leaste it be in

the goodnesse of that nature to scorne'. Certainly the _Defence_ can

hardly be regarded as a direct contribution to the controversy. Sidney

was not particularly concerned to uphold the contemporary stage, and

occupied himself rather with answering a general attack upon poetry

contained in _The Schoole of Abuse_, which had been merely incidental to

Gosson's principal argument. But in the course of his discussion he

comes to examine tragedy and comedy as branches of imaginative

literature, and the definitions which he frames are conceived once more

in the full spirit of humanism. He speaks of 'high and excellent

tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers

that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants and

tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors; that with stirring the

effects of admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this

world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded'. So, too,

the work of the comic poet is 'an imitation of the common errors of our

life which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that

may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be

such a one'. The _Defence_ was not published until 1595, but it must

have been well known in private before that, since, itself founded on

such Italian writers as Scaliger, Minturno, and Castelvetro, it in turn

furnished inspiration for William Webbe's _Discourse of English Poesie_

(1586), Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), and Sir John

Harington's _Apologie of Poetrie_ (1591). All these three writers

emphasize the moral lessons of tragedy and comedy on the familiar

humanist lines.

It must be admitted that the humanist theory was not altogether

conclusive as an answer to the Puritans. These were not prepared to

accept the authority of Horace as making delight, even in conjunction

with the useful, a legitimate end, when, as they pointed out, the

delight was a carnal and not a spiritual one.[811] Nor could the

arguments in favour of decorum, which were wholly of a literary and not

an ethical nature, be expected to appeal to them. And as to the moral

lessons to be learned by witnessing plays, whether tragedies or

comedies, they were entirely sceptical. They return again and again,

with obvious irritation, to the probably mythical story of a good woman

who swore by her troth that she had been as much edified at a play as at

any sermon.[812]

If, says Northbrooke, you will learne howe to bee false and

deceyue your husbandes, or husbandes their wyues, howe to playe

the harlottes, to obtayne ones loue, howe to rauishe, howe to

beguyle, howe to betraye, to flatter, lye, sweare, forsweare,

howe to allure to whoredome, howe to murther, howe to poyson,

howe to disobey and rebell against princes, to consume

treasures prodigally, to mooue to lustes, to ransacke and

spoyle cities and townes, to bee ydle, to blaspheme, to sing

filthie songes of loue, to speake filthily, to be prowde, howe

to mocke, scoffe and deryde any nation ... shall not you

learne, then, at such enterludes howe to practise them.[813]

And if sometimes notorious evil-doers are held up to reprobation on the

stage, it seems to the preachers that such rebuke might more suitably

come from the pulpit, since in a theatre the appeal must needs be made

to an audience hardly fit to be judges in any man's cause.[814] Gosson

and Munday, having been playwrights, and having presumably suffered at

the hands of their masters, pay off old scores with another argument. If

plays had really a moral influence, would not this be apparent in the

lives of those who are most conversant with them, the players

themselves. Yet the players are not only extremely insolent and

swaggering persons, but notoriously practise in real life the very vices

which they represent on the stage. Moreover, they take young boys and

bring them up in shamelessness. How can it be expected that good shall

be done, where there is no will in the agent to do good?[815] The

inconclusiveness of the discussion was of course largely due to the fact

that the Puritan and the humanist disputants were not talking about

quite the same thing. Obviously the influence of a play, if any, upon

conduct must depend on the manner of handling and on the dramatic idea

involved; and it may be taken for granted that the ideal comedy and

tragedy, which the humanists praised and which some of them tried to

realize, were often very imperfectly represented by the actual pieces

put before a London audience. This is to some extent admitted on both

sides. Sidney is frankly contemptuous of the popular stage. Whetstone

speaks of his 'commendable exercise' as 'discredited with the tryfels of

yonge, unadvised, and rashe witted wryters'. Lodge and the author of

_The Play of Plays_ are fully conscious of abuses, which must be

remedied if the drama is to take the place assigned to it in the

humanist scheme of things. On the other hand, Gosson is fair-minded

enough to admit that certain plays, principally his own, are beyond

reproach; and even that, as compared with an earlier period than that of

which he wrote, there had been some purging of the language used on the

boards.[816] Yet, when all allowance has been made on this score, it

would seem that there must still remain some fundamental incompatibility

between the views of the Puritans and those of the humanists as regards

the psychological effects of the drama upon conduct. Perhaps this is

hardly to be wondered at. After all, the psychological effect of a

drama, or of any other work of art, is not a simple thing, but depends

upon an incalculable relation between what the artist puts into his work

and what the spectator brings to the contemplation of it. And it may

fairly be assumed that what a Sidney brought and what a limb of

Limehouse brought were sufficiently different things. Were this a

philosophic work on the drama and not merely a history of the stage, it

might be appropriate to dwell upon the fact that, however much the

Puritans and the humanists might disagree, they were at one in

referring their judgement of the drama to purely ethical standards of

value, and that the conception of aesthetic value, which means so much

for modern thought, was in the main beyond the scope of Elizabethan

criticism.

So far as the character of the particular plays put on the stage was

material, the case for the defence grew stronger as these approached

more nearly to literature. Thus Thomas Nashe, whose _Pierce Penilesse

His Supplication_ (1592) contains by far the most effective of the

apologies for the drama from a popular point of view, is in a position,

not only to vaunt the respectability of English actors as compared with

the 'squirting baudie comedians' of beyond the seas, to repudiate the

idea that rowdy apprentices were wanted in the theatres at all, and to

claim a distinct superiority for play-going over gaming, whoreing and

drinking as a pastime for courtiers and other idle men; but also to give

point to his glorification of the moral purpose of tragedy and comedy by

a special reference to the chronicle plays then at the height of their

success, 'wherein our forefathers valiant acts, that haue line long

buried in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes, are reuiued, and they

themselues raised from the graue of obliuion, and brought to pleade

their aged honours in open presence; than which, what can be a sharper

reproofe to these degenerate, effeminate dayes of ours?' Nashe can even

illustrate his contention from the Talbot scenes of Shakespeare's _1

Henry VI_; and it is indeed the ultimate paradox of the Puritan

controversy that a movement, which was undoubtedly designed in the

interests of honest and clean living, would have had the result, if it

had been successful, of shutting out the world from the possibilities of

a Shakespeare.

After the publication of the _Anatomie of Abuses_ in 1583 there was some

slackening in the literary warfare carried on by the Puritans. The duty

of abstinence from plays becomes a commonplace of treatises on morals

and devotion, and the preachers continue to complain, but the only

specialist pamphlet during the next quarter of a century is the

comparatively unimportant _Mirrour of Monsters_ (1587) by another cast

playwright, William Rankins. It must be doubtful whether this was due to

any decrease in the strength of the sentiment against the stage. But the

trial of forces was over, and for a time there was little further

advance to be made. Something, as will be seen in the next chapter, had

been won, so far as the observance of Sunday was concerned; on the other

hand, the main issue had been pretty definitely lost. Moreover, there

were other things to be thought of; firstly the Martin Marprelate

controversy, which for a while absorbed much ink and paper, and

secondly, the persecution which recusants had to undergo at the hands of

the dominant party in Church and State. Aggressive at the beginning of

Elizabeth's reign, by its close Puritanism had to stand on its defence.

A corresponding change in its relations with the stage was inevitable.

From an assailant, it became an object of assault. The players had never

been disposed to endure criticism without hitting back. Lewis Wager, as

early as 1566, has his word against the hypocrites, who slander plays

from fear lest their own wickedness should be revealed in public; and

one may be sure that the actor's side of the question was as

remorselessly pressed from the scaffold as that of the Puritan from the

pulpit. This tendency can only have gathered impetus from the official

encouragement given for a time to the players to intervene against

Martin Marprelate.[817] The tone of the later apologists for the stage

has become insolent rather than deprecatory. Nashe, always ready to

carry any war into the enemy's quarter, boldly ascribes the attacks upon

plays to the envy felt by vintners, alewives, and victuallers for more

respectable places of entertainment than their own, and to the

indifference to greatness of avaricious citizens, who 'know when they

are dead they shall not be brought upon the stage for any goodness, but

in a merriment of the Usurer and the Diuel, or buying Armes of the

Herald'. So, too, Henry Chettle, in his _Kind-Harts Dreame_ (1592), puts

into the mouth of the ghost of Tarleton, not only the usual serious

defence of the moral value of plays and an appeal to the youth of the

city not to disturb the peace of the theatres, but also a mock protest

from the keepers of bowling-alleys, dicing-houses, and brothels against

the competition of actors with their trades, and the discovery in jig

and jest of 'our crosse-biting, our conny-catching, our traines, our

traps, our gins, our snares, our subtilties'. Nashe and Chettle are

perhaps tilting rather at some of the civic allies of the Puritans, than

at the Puritans themselves. But the latter had to bear their full share

of the stage's revengeful triumph. The printer of _Th' Overthrow of

Stage Playes_ in 1599 notes in his preface how some 'haue not bene

afraied of late dayes to bring vpon the stage the very sober

countenances, graue attire, modest and matronelike gestures & speaches

of men & women to be laughed at as a scorne and reproch to the world'. A

detailed analysis of the satire of Puritanism in later Elizabethan and

in Jacobean comedy would pass beyond the limits of this study. For a

sample may be taken the figure of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in

Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614). Busy has a scruple against eating

pig at the fair, 'for the very calling it a _Bartholmew_-pigge, and to

eat it so, is a spice of _Idolatry_, and you make the _Fayre_, no better

than one of the high _Places_'. But the lust of the flesh overcomes him,

and he eats 'two and a half to his share' and drinks 'a pailefull'.

This, however, does not dispose him to be lenient to the pride of the

eyes at the fair. He condemns a doll with 'See you not Goldylocks, the

purple strumpet, there? in her yellow gowne, and greene sleeues?' and

pulls down a pile of gingerbread cakes as 'this idolatrous groue of

images, this flasket of idols'. Naturally, his extreme wrath is against

the puppet, which he calls Dagon, and 'a beame in the eye of the

brethren; a very great beame, an exceeding great beame; such as are your

_Stage-players_, _Rimers_, and _Morrise-dancers_, who have walked hand

in hand, in contempt of the _Brethren_, and the _Cause_'. He disputes

with the puppet, and produces the 'old stale argument' of the male

putting on the apparel of the female and the female of the male, and is

finally refuted when the puppet 'takes up his garment', and reveals that

it has no sex.[818]

When Puritanism gathered head again under James, it was the sting of

caricature which directly led to the renewal of the old controversy. Two

hypocrites in _The Puritan_ (_c._ 1606) had been christened after the

churches of St. Antholin and St. Mary Overies, which were known to be

the principal centres in London of Puritan faith and practice. William

Crashaw, the father of the poet, protested in a sermon at Paul's Cross.

Two years later, he again rebuked the players for their opposition to

the Virginian expedition, which he declared to be due to pique at the

godly determination of the adventurers to take no company to their

plantation. There were other 'seditious sectists' at work, and a leading

actor of the Queen's men, who was also a prolific dramatist, Thomas

Heywood, took up the cudgels for his 'quality' against these

'over-curious heads' in an elaborate _Apology for Actors_, which must

have been written about 1608, but was not published until 1612. This

resumes, effectively enough, most of the arguments both of the humanists

and of popular disputants such as Nashe, but does not contribute

anything very novel upon a subject as to which, indeed, little novel

remained to be said, with the exception of a reminder to the preachers

that, whatever the Fathers may have thought about the Roman _ludi_,

nothing had been said against them by either Christ or his

Apostles.[819] Heywood dwells, of course, upon the established position

to which by his time actors had attained in the favour both of English

and of foreign sovereigns. But he is not blind to the abuses of his

profession, and while lauding many of his fellows as men 'of substance,

of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-keepers,

and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', regrets the

licentiousness of others, as well as a growing tendency to inveigh upon

the stage both against 'the state, the court, the law, the citty', and

against 'private men's humors'.[820] Heywood was answered by one I. G.

in _A Refutation of the Apologie for Actors_ (1615), which in its turn

covered much ground already trod; and a year later another actor, Nathan

Field, was moved to a _Remonstrance_ by some personal attacks levelled

at himself and the rest of the King's men by Thomas Sutton, minister of

St. Mary Overies. This brings us to the limit of the Shakespearian

period, and in the distance still lie the final and portentous

presentation of the whole Puritan case in Prynne's _Histriomastix_

(1633), the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament, and the

reaction of the Restoration under which men looked back to the stage of

James and Charles as a model of decency and order.[821]

There is one clear heritage of English Puritanism from the Genevan

theocracy, and that is the claim of the ministers, not only to direct

the consciences of their flocks, but also to call upon the municipal

authorities to put down with the might of the secular arm whatever in

the life of the community did not conform to the religious and ethical

standards which they preached. Most of the sermons and pamphlets of

1576-83 are quite deliberately addressed to the 'magistrate', with a

view to the exercise of the regulative powers conferred by the

proclamation of 1559 and the statute of 1572 for the remedy of the

abuses of playhouses, and if possible to the complete suppression of

playing. The City fathers, although Gosson railed against their

'sleepiness', were by no means deaf to these appeals.[822] Many of them

had themselves adopted Puritanic principles. And apart from strictly

religious considerations, they had their own reasons for looking with

disfavour upon plays. They were husbands and employers, and their wives

and apprentices wasted both time and money in gadding abroad to

theatres, at a risk to their virtue and even their honesty. They were

dignitaries, and were not invariably treated with respect upon the

boards. They were the health authority, and even if plays did not stir

the divine wrath to send a plague or an earthquake, the crowded

assemblies certainly helped to spread infection, and the rickety

structures brought hazard to life and limb.[823] They were responsible

for the maintenance of law and order, and plays were not only the

occasions for frays and riots, but also brought bad characters together,

and were suspected of affording secret opportunities for the hatching of

sedition. It must be borne in mind that, so far as the external abuses

of theatres go, the complaints of their bitterest enemies are fairly

well supported by independent evidence. The presence of improper persons

in the theatres is amply testified to by the satirists, and by

references in the plays themselves.[824] Intrigues and other nefarious

transactions were carried on there[825]; and careful mothers, such as

Lady Bacon, anxiously entreated their sons to choose more salutary

neighbourhoods for their lodgings.[826] Some serious disturbances of the

peace of which theatres were the centres will require attention in the

next chapter, while law-court and other records preserve the memory of

both grave crimes and minor misdemeanours of which they were the

scenes.[827] Like the bawdy-houses, they appear to have been at the

mercy of the traditional rowdiness of the prentices on Shrove

Tuesday.[828]

On divers grounds therefore the Corporation of London seem to have

reached the conclusion, about 1582 if not before, that the only way to

reform the theatres was to end them. Probably they were influenced by

the views of some of their permanent officials, of whom Thomas Norton,

Remembrancer from 1571 to 1584, although himself a part-author of the

tragedy of _Gorboduc_, and William Fleetwood, Recorder from 1571 to

1594, are known to have been determined opponents of the stage. The

voluminous reports on city affairs, which Fleetwood was in the habit of

sending to Lord Burghley, add much to our knowledge of a critical

period.[829] Had the matter rested wholly with the Corporation, the

policy of prohibition would doubtless have been brought into effective

operation. But it did not rest wholly with them. Not only were the most

important theatres, from 1576, outside the limits of their jurisdiction,

but also account had to be taken of an authority greater even than that

of the City of London, the authority, ill-defined but imperative, of the

Privy Council. And the Privy Council was, as a rule, swayed by

principles and personalities by no means enamoured of prohibition. Of

this the anti-stage pamphleteers show themselves fully conscious.

Gosson, addressing his _Schoole of Abuse_ to the Lord Mayor for the time

being, acknowledges the difficulties which the 'letters of

commendations' held by the companies put in the way of reform, and

laments that players share the natures of the cuttle-fish and the

torpedo, so that 'how many nets so euer ther be layde to take them, or

hookes to choke them, they haue ynke in their bowels to darken the

water, and sleights in their budgets, to dry up the arme of euery

magistrate'. In _Playes Confuted_, he prayed for 'some noble Scipio in

the courte' to drive the 'daunsing chaplines of Bacchus' out of England,

and in a prefatory epistle to Sir Francis Walsingham he declared that

the cleansing of the Augean stable was only possible for 'some Hercules

in the court, whom the roare of the enimy can never daunt'. No doubt he

hoped that the combined functions of a Scipio and of a Hercules would be

undertaken by Walsingham himself.[830] Anthony Munday is even more

explicit. He urges the city not to be daunted by 'particular men of

auctoritie', and inveighs against the nobility who 'restraine the

magistrates from executing their office', in order to pleasure servants

whom they are unwilling to maintain themselves, and therefore license to

roam throughout the country, publishing their 'mametree' in every temple

of God, and begging alms in their masters' names from house to

house.[831] The Council, however, were by no means disposed to give the

City a free hand, and with themselves the policy of prohibition made

little headway. They had, indeed, to reconcile conflicting

considerations. They too, like the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, feared the

opportunities for riots and seditions which the theatres afforded;[832]

and the danger of the spread of plague was their constant preoccupation.

Moreover, they were especially concerned to see that the players did not

touch upon matters of state or religion, and to visit with sharp

chastisement any offences in these directions. They frequently,

therefore, thought it well to intervene with temporary inhibitions of

plays, particularly during hot summers when the anticipations of plague

were at their greatest. But they were never prepared to assent to the

chronic request of the City that these inhibitions should be made

permanent. After all, the people must have their recreation, and, what

was more, the Queen must have hers.[833] And if her majesty's 'solace'

at Christmas was to be provided upon economical terms, it was necessary

that the players should be allowed facilities for 'exercise', and

incidentally for earning their living, through public performances.[834]

In a sense, therefore, it was really the Court play which saved the

popular stage, and enabled the companies to establish themselves in a

position which neither preachers nor aldermen could shake. One may

suppose that the members of the Privy Council did not all quite see eye

to eye on the theatrical question; and there were occasional

fluctuations of policy which caused alarm in the tiring-rooms. Even in

the high quarters where the natural attitude to the drama was that of

humanism, Puritan sympathies were sometimes to be found. Leicester,

indeed, who frequently curried favour with the Puritans, failed them in

this respect, as may be seen from a letter written in 1581 by John

Field, minister of the word of God, and author of an _Exhortation_ on

the fall of Paris Garden, in which he rebukes Leicester for his

patronage of plays 'to the great greife of all the godly'.[835] Burghley

may have been personally inclined to the views of his friend and

correspondent William Fleetwood, although even at the end of his long

life he had not forgotten the services of the stage to his earlier

statecraft.[836] It was to Walsingham that Gosson looked as a Scipio

and a Hercules in the dedication of his _Playes Confuted_ in 1583, but

Gosson was unlucky in his dedications, and in the following year

Walsingham was officially concerned in the formation of the company of

Queen's players. One would gladly know who was the 'notable wise

counseller' dead in 1591, who, according to Sir John Harington, stood up

for the play of _The Cards_, against those who thought that it was

'somewhat too plaine'. I should not be surprised if this were

Walsingham.[837] By virtue of their offices, the Lord Chamberlain and

Vice-Chamberlain, who were responsible for Court entertainments, were

almost bound to take the players' part. But there was a moment of

trepidation when Lord Cobham, who was known to be touched with

Puritanism, succeeded for a few months in 1596 the 'old lord', Henry

Lord Hunsdon, on whom the companies had learnt to rely. There is nothing

to show that Elizabeth, beyond holding out for her 'solace', took any

personal interest in the controversy. That very irritating document, the

_Acts of the Privy Council_, which is little more than a letter-book,

does not record whether she was present or not at the Council meetings

at which theatrical affairs were discussed. But it must be assumed that

the general attitude of the Council had her concurrence. Certainly she

had no Puritan tendencies, and on the rare occasions on which her

interference can be traced she was acting in the interests of one or

other favoured company.[838]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 759: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 206.]

[Footnote 760: Horace, _De Arte Poetica_, 343:

Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,

lectorem delectando pariterque monendo.

Horace's treatise was first translated into English by Thomas Drant in

1567; cf. O. L. Jiriczek, _Der Elisabethanische Horaz_ (1911,

_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlvii. 42).]

[Footnote 761: Plutarch, _Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debet_, c.

xii.]

[Footnote 762: Donatus (ed. Wessner, i. 22), _Excerpta de Comoedia_; cf.

_Hamlet_, III. ii. 23, also Gosson's criticism of Lodge's scholarship on

this point in App. C, No. xxx.]

[Footnote 763: W. H. Woodward, _Studies in Education during the Age of

the Renaissance_, 218; C. H. Herford, _Studies in the Literary Relations

of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century_, 101.]

[Footnote 764: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 216.]

[Footnote 765: Extract in App. C, No. v. Symmes, 31, cites Peter Martyr

Vermigli as representing the same point of view, but the passage on

plays in his _In librum Iudicum Commentarii_ (1563), c. 14, reproduced

in his _Loci Communes_ (1563), Classis ii, c. 12, is not very lucid.]

[Footnote 766: J. E. Gillet (_M. L. A._ xxxiv. 465), citing e.g. an

utterance of 1530, 'Et ego non illibenter viderem gesta Christi in

scholis puerorum ludis seu comoediis latine et germanice rite ac pure

compositis repraesentari propter rei memoriam et affectum iunioribus

augendum'.]

[Footnote 767: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 111.]

[Footnote 768: _Robert Laneham's Letter_ (ed. Furnivall), 27.]

[Footnote 769: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 224, 446.]

[Footnote 770: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 222. The passage quoted is from

the _Epistel Exhortatorye of an Inglyshe Christian_ (1544), written

under the pseudonym of Henry Stalbridge. Foxe, _Book of Martyrs_, vi.

57, says of Bishop Gardiner, 'He thwarteth and wrangleth much against

players, printers, preachers. And no marvel why: for he seeth these

three things to be set up of God, as a triple bulwark against the triple

crown of the Pope to bring him down; as, God be praised, they have done

meetly well already.']

[Footnote 771: Cf. ch. v.]

[Footnote 772: Strype, _Annals_, 1. ii. 436, 'Sithence the comynge and

reigne of our most soveraigne and dear lady quene Elizabeth, by the

onely preachers and scaffold players of this newe religion, all thinges

are turned up-side downe, and notwithstandinge the quenes majesties

proclamations most godly made to the contrarye, and her vertuous example

of lyvinge, sufficyent to move the hearts of all obedyent subjects to

the due service and honour of God.' If a proclamation as to plays is

meant, it must be the earlier one of 8 April 1559, as the speech was

probably delivered in the debate on the second reading of the Act of

Uniformity on 26 April. Strype, 1. i. 109, points out that it is

definitely assigned by _Cotton MS. Vesp._ D. 18, to Feckenham, and that

Burnet's ascription to Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, which has

been followed by Collier, i. 168, and others, rests on a mistaken note

by a later hand on a copy in a _C. C. C. C. Synodalia MS._]

[Footnote 773: _V. P._ vii. 65, 71, 80.]

[Footnote 774: _Sp. P._ i. 62 (29 April 1559), 'She was very emphatic in

saying that she wished to punish severely certain persons who had

represented some comedies in which your Majesty was taken off. I passed

it by, and said that these were matter of less importance than the

others, although both in jest and earnest more respect ought to be paid

to so great a prince as your Majesty, and I knew that a member of her

Council had given the arguments to construct these comedies, which is

true, for Cecil gave them, as indeed she partly admitted to me.']

[Footnote 775: _Sp. P._ i. 247. England and Protestantism got as good as

they gave. Bohun, 99, records how, about 1560-2, Sir Nicholas

Throgmorton was made the butt of French court jesters and comedians.

Mary of Scotland was hardly persuaded, in 1565, to punish some Catholics

who had made a play against the ministers, with a mock baptism of a cat

in it (Randolph to Cecil, in Wright, _Eliz._ i. 190).]

[Footnote 776: Cf. ch. v.]

[Footnote 777: Cf. ch. xxii.]

[Footnote 778: Calvin, _Opera_, xxi. 207 (_Annales Calviniani_), gives

prohibitions made under Farel's influence in 1537; for earlier records,

cf. E. Doumergue, _Jean Calvin_, iii. 579; H. D. Foster, _Geneva before

Calvin_ in _American Hist. Review_, viii. 231.]

[Footnote 779: A. L. Herminjard, _Correspondance des Réformateurs dans

les pays de langue française_, i. 195, 'Christianum alienum oportet a

bachanalibus quae gentium more celebrantur, et ab hypocrisi Iudaica in

ieiuniis et aliis quae non directore spiritu fiunt: ac cavere oportet a

simulachris quam maxime.' Possibly, however, 'simulachra' means 'images'

rather than 'disguisings'.]

[Footnote 780: Calvin, _Opera_, xᵃ. 5, 16.]

[Footnote 781: The proceedings against Mme Françoise Perrin for allowing

a dance in her house are described in A. Roget, _Hist. du Peuple de

Genève_, ii. 225. In 1550 the council resolved (Calvin, _Opera_, xxi.

460), 'Item des ordonnances des dances qu'elles ne soyent point

admoindries mais que l'on ne soufre pas cela. Surquoy est arreste que

soyent faictes cries a voix de trompe que nulz naye a danser ny chanter

chansons deshonnestes ny dancer en façon que soit: sur poienne de estre

mis troys iours en prison en pain et eaue et de soixante sols pour une

chescune foy la moytie applique a l'hospital et laultre moytie a la

court'. In 1557 (_Opera_, xxi. 662) persons were brought before the

consistory on an accusation of 'insolences faictes a un royaulme'. They

had a cake, and in one girl's slice 'y mirent ung grain de genievre et

pour ce lappellerent Royne et crierent a aulte voix la Royne boit'.]

[Footnote 782: Calvin, _Opera_, xxi. 379; cf. Roget, ii. 235.]

[Footnote 783: Calvin, _Opera_, xxi. 382; cf. Roget, ii. 238, 'Aulcungs

joueurs des antiques et puissance de Hercules ont prié que plaise a MM.

de les laisser jouer de bonne grâce la bataille des Mores et puissance

de Harodes et aultres antiques héros. Arresté pour obvier scandalle que

ne doibgent point jouer, mes que demain se doibgent retirer.' Cf. the

notices of the Hercules performances at Paris in 1572 and at Utrecht in

1586 (ch. xiii, s.v. Leicester's), and p. 152, n. 1, for an early

Italian parallel.]

[Footnote 784: Calvin, _Opera_, xxi. 381-4; cf. Roget, ii. 236;

Doumergue, iii. 579; W. Walker, _John Calvin_, 298.]

[Footnote 785: Calvin, _Ep._ 800 (_Opera_, xii. 347), '... Nihil hic

habemus novi, nisi quod secunda comedia iam cuditur. Cuius actionem

testati sumus nobis minime probari. Pugnare tamen ad extremum noluimus,

quia periculum erat ne elevaremus nostram autoritatem, si pertinaciter

repugnando tandem vinceremur. Video non posse negari omnia oblectamenta.

Itaque mihi satis est si hoc, quod non est adeo vitiosum, indulgeri sibi

intelligant, sed nobis invitis....' This was on 3 June. _Ep._ 807

(_Opera_, xii. 355), of 4 July, describes the dissensions amongst the

ministers, and adds, 'Auditis fratribus, respondi multas ob causas nobis

non videri expedire ut agerentur, et simul causas exposui; nos tamen

nolle contendere, si senatus contenderet ... nunc ludi aguntur'.]

[Footnote 786: Calvin, _Ep._ 802 (_Opera_, xii. 351) 'Farellus Calvino

... Isti qui tam delectantur ludis, utinam non serio dolore torqueantur.

Timendum est, ne qui alienis personis oblectantur quum propriam in

Christo debeant sustinere in omni genere officiorum, ne ferre cogantur

non personatos, qui fingunt nocere, sed qui nimis vere afflictent et

angant. Sed quis tandem perfectam ... habebit plebem? Utinam in malis

personati tandem essent, nec aliquid ipsi facerent, tantum aliorum

peccata repraesentarent ... omnes ea vitarent, in bonis veri essent

actores, imo factores.... 16 Iunii, 1546.']

[Footnote 787: Calvin, _Sermo_, cxxvi (_Opera_, xxviii. 18), 'Ainsi donc

ce n'est point sans cause que ceste loy a esté mise; et ceux qui

prennent plaisir à se desguiser, despittent Dieu: comme en ces masques,

et en ces momons, quand les femmes s'accoustrent en hommes, et les

hommes en femmes, ainsi qu'on en fait: et qu'adviendra-t-il? Encores

qu'il n'y eust point nulle mauvaise queue, la chose en soy est

desplaisante à Dieu: nous oyons ce qui en est ici prononcé: _Quiconques

le fait, est en abomination_.' Other sermons, e.g. _Sermo_ lvii, condemn

dances and _jeux_ generally, without any special stress on plays; cf. P.

Lobstein, _Die Ethik Calvins_, 113.]

[Footnote 788: Calvin, _Opera_, xxi. 385.]

[Footnote 789: Calvin, _Opera_, xxi. 406, 450, 684, 734; Roget, ii. 238,

243; iii. 139; vi. 192; Doumergue, iii. 579, sqq.]

[Footnote 790: _Discipline des Églises Réformées_, ch. xiv, art. 28

(_Bulletin de la Soc. de l'Hist, du Protestantisme_, xxxv. 211), 'Il ne

sera aussi permis aux fidèles d'assister aux comédies, tragédies,

farces, moralités et autres jeux, joués en public ou en particulier, vu

que de tout temps cela a été défendu entre chrétiens, comme apportant

corruption de bonnes mœurs, mais surtout quand l'Écriture sainte est

profanée; néanmoins, quand, dans un collège, il sera trouvé utile à la

jeunesse de représenter quelque histoire, on la pourra tolérer pourvu

qu'elle ne soit comprise en l'Écriture sainte, qui n'est pas donnée pour

être jouée, mais purement prêchée, et aussi que cela se fasse rarement

et par l'avis du Colloque qui en verra la composition.' The original

decree of the Synod of Poitiers in 1560, to which this was an addition,

only laid down that 'les momeries et batelleries ne seront point

souffertes, ni faire le Roi boit, ni le Mardi gras'.]

[Footnote 791: Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Calfhill, for Walter Haddon's

somewhat slighting reference to his _theatri celebritas_.]

[Footnote 792: _Parker Correspondence_ (Parker Soc.), 226.]

[Footnote 793: Strype, _Annals_ (1824), III. i. 496. Smith had said, 'Si

illud verum sit quod auditione accepi, istius modi certe ludos diris

devoveo et actores et spectatores'.]

[Footnote 794: I am not writing the history of the Oxford stage, but it

is pertinent to note that a statute of 1584, just as Case was writing,

had excluded common stage-plays from the University, both on grounds of

health and economy, and that 'the younger sort ... may not be

spectatours of so many lewde and evill sports as in them are practised'

(Boas, 225).]

[Footnote 795: Northbrooke, 103. Stubbes took the same line in the

_Preface_ to his first edition, but afterwards cancelled the passage.]

[Footnote 796: Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 18.]

[Footnote 797: Gosson, _P. C._ 195.]

[Footnote 798: Gosson, _P. C._ 169.]

[Footnote 799: Gosson, _P. C._ 197.]

[Footnote 800: Gosson, _P. C._ 188; Munday, 145.]

[Footnote 801: _A. Y. L._ III. iii. 17.]

[Footnote 802: Northbrooke, 92; Munday, 144; Stubbes, 140.]

[Footnote 803: Gosson, _S. A._ 35; _P. C._ 215; Munday, 139.]

[Footnote 804: Northbrooke, 92; Stockwood, 23; Munday, 128; Field,

_Epistle_.]

[Footnote 805: White, 46; Gosson, _P. C._ 215.]

[Footnote 806: Stubbes, 180, speaks of serious accidents at theatres due

to panic at an earthquake, which must be that of 6 April 1580; but the

account published at the time (cf. App. C, No. xxv) makes no reference

to theatres, although it does, oddly enough, record that the only deaths

were those of two children who were listening to a sermon in Christ

Church, Newgate.]

[Footnote 807: The fall of the Paris Garden bear-baiting house on 13

January 1583 led John Field, in his _A Godly Exhortation_ (1583) on that

event, which is closely related to the anti-stage literature, to

anticipate a similar fate for the theatres. The Puritans should have

taken to heart the wise comment of Sir Thomas More on a similar occasion

(cf. ch. xvi, s.v. Hope).]

[Footnote 808: Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Marlowe, _Dr. Faustus_.]

[Footnote 809: Cf. App. C, Nos. iv, ix, x, xiv, xix. Something might be

added from the prefaces of the Senecan translators (cf. ch. xxiii).]

[Footnote 810: Gosson, _P. C._ 201.]

[Footnote 811: Gosson, _P. C._ 203.]

[Footnote 812: Northbrooke, 92; Munday, 139; Stubbes, 143.]

[Footnote 813: Northbrooke, 92; cf. Stubbes, 144.]

[Footnote 814: Munday, 150.]

[Footnote 815: Gosson, _P. C._ 182; Munday, 147.]

[Footnote 816: Gosson, _S. A._ 37.]

[Footnote 817: Cf. ch. ix and App. C, No. xl.]

[Footnote 818: _B. Fair_, i. 2, 3, 6; iii. 2, 6; iv. 1, 6; v. 5; cf.

Jonson's _Epigr._ lxxv. _On Lippe the Teacher_. I suppose that the

treatise on the question of sex-apparel which Selden sent to Jonson in

1616 (App. C, No. lxii) was meant to furnish annotations for _B. Fair_.]

[Footnote 819: Heywood, 24.]

[Footnote 820: Heywood, 43, 61.]

[Footnote 821: Cf. App. J.]

[Footnote 822: Gosson, _P. C._ 211.]

[Footnote 823: Henslowe, i. 136, records a payment of 10_s._ by the

Admiral's in May 1601, 'to geatte the boye into the ospetalle which was

hurt at the Fortewne'. At St. James, Clerkenwell, was buried on 26 May

1613 (_Harl. Soc._ xvii. 123) 'John Brittine yᵗ was killed with a fall

in the Pley howse'. There was a shooting accident also in an Admiral's

play of 1587; cf. ch. xiii.]

[Footnote 824: Cf. ch. xviii.]

[Footnote 825: One of the charges brought against the Venetian

ambassador Foscarini on his return to Venice in 1616 was that he had

tried to seduce the penitent of an English religious attached to the

embassy, 'sometimes attending the public comedies and standing among the

people on the chance of seeing her' (_Venetian Papers_, xiv. 593). About

1594 a diamond stolen from the loot of a Spanish carrack was bought by

some goldsmiths from a mariner whom they met by chance 'at a play in the

theatre at Shoreditch', and who afterwards showed them the diamond in

Finsbury Fields (_Cecil Papers_, vii. 504).]

[Footnote 826: Cf. ch. xvi, s.v. Bull.]

[Footnote 827: In _Stukeley_, 610, the hero owes the bailiff of

Finsbury, 'for frays and bloodshed in the Theatre fields, five marks'.

The Middlesex justices had to deal with cases of stealing a purse at the

Curtain in 1600, of a 'notable outrage' at the Red Bull in 1610, of

abusing gentlemen at the Fortune in 1611, of stealing a purse at the Red

Bull in 1613, and of stabbing at the Fortune in 1613 (_Middlesex County

Records_, i. 205, 217, 259; ii. xlvii, 64, 71, 86, 88). On 7 July 1602

James wrote from Scotland to one James Hudson to intercede with the

Council for John Henslay or Henchelawe of Grimsby, who was assaulted by

Nicholas Blinstoun or Blunston at a play about the previous Whitsunday

(23 May), and slew him (_Scottish Papers_, ii. 815; _Hatfield MSS._ xii.

363). Dekker (ii. 326), in _Jests to Make you Merrie_ (1607), gives the

private playhouse as the habitat of the 'foist' or pickpocket, and says,

'The times when his skirmishes are hottest, or yᵉ time when they run

attilt, is ... a new play'. Again (iii. 158), in _The Belman of London_

(1608), he tells us that rogues haunt playhouses, and (iii. 212) in

_Lanthorne and Candlelight_ (1609), 'A foyst nor a nip shall not walke

into a fayre or a Play-house, but euerie cracke will cry looke to your

purses'.]

[Footnote 828: Divers persons were slain and others hurt and wounded in

an attempt to pull down the Cockpit in Drury Lane on Shrove Tuesday 1617

(_M. S. C._ i. 374); cf. Camden, _Annales_ (4 March 1617), 'Theatrum

ludionum nuper erectum in Drury-Lane a furente multitudine diruitur, et

apparatus dilaceratur'; John Taylor, _Jack a Lent_ (1620, ed. Hindley),

'Put play houses to the sack and bawdy houses to the spoil'; _The Owles

Almanack_ (1618), 9, 'Shroue-tuesday falls on that day, on which the

prentices plucked downe the cocke-pit, and on which they did alwayes vse

to rifle Madam _Leakes_ house, at the vpper end of _Shorditch_'. This

was not Puritanism, but a traditional Saturnalia of apprentices at

Shrovetide; cf. Earle, _Microcosmography_, char. 64 (A Player),

'Shrove-tuesday he feares as much as the bawdes'; Busino, _Anglopotrida_

(1618, _V. P._ xv. 246), describing the bands of prentices, 3,000 or

4,000 strong, who on Shrove Tuesday and 1 May do outrages in all

directions, especially the suburbs, where they destroy houses of

correction; E. Gayton, _Festivous Notes upon Don Quixote_ (1654), 271,

'I have known upon one of these festivals, but especially at

Shrove-tide, where the players have been appointed, notwithstanding

their bills to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company

had a mind to. Sometimes _Tamerlane_, sometimes _Jugurtha_, sometimes

_The Jew of Malta_, and sometimes parts of all these; and at last, none

of the three taking, they were forced to undress and put off their

tragick habits, and conclude the day with _The Merry Milkmaides_. And

unless this were done, and the popular humour satisfied (as sometimes it

so fortun'd that the players were refractory), the benches, the tiles,

the laths, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally;

and as there were mechanicks of all professions, who fell every one to

his trade, and dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruin of a

stately fabric'.]

[Footnote 829: Most of these letters are printed in Wright, _Eliz._; a

few are still unprinted among the _Lansdowne_ and _Hatfield MSS._; cf.

App. D, Nos. xxxv, xxxvii, lxxiv.]

[Footnote 830: Gosson, _S. A._ 56; _P. C._ Epistle, 178.]

[Footnote 831: Munday, 128.]

[Footnote 832: Occasionally players were of use as spies. On 30 March

1603 four players gave information of an alleged proclamation of Lord

Beauchamp as king by Lord Southampton (_Hist. MSS._ xiii. 4. 126).]

[Footnote 833: Cf. App. D, Nos. xl, liii, lviii, lxxi, lxxiii, lxxv,

lxxxiv, lxxxv, ci, cxiv. The notion of the need of the public, as

distinct from that of the Queen, for dramatic recreation gradually makes

its appearance (cf. especially App. D, No. cii); but imperial Rome might

have taught its lesson of _panem et circenses_.]

[Footnote 834: Taylor, _Wit and Mirth_ (1629, Hazlitt, _Jest Books_,

iii. 62), burlesques the point of view in a story of the visit of the

Queen's ape to Looe in Cornwall. The showman approached the mayor, who

did visit and 'put off his hat and made a leg', and there was a

proclamation, 'These are to will and require you, and every of you, with

your wives and families, that upon the sight hereof, you make your

personall appearance before the Queenes Ape, for it is an Ape of ranke

and quality, who is to bee practised through her Majesties dominions,

that by his long experience amongst her loving subjects, hee may bee the

better enabled to doe her majesty service hereafter; and hereof faile

you not, as you will answer the contrary'.]

[Footnote 835: App. D, No. liv.]

[Footnote 836: Hawarde, 48, records that in a Star Chamber case of

cozening on 18 June 1596 'The Lord Treasurer would haue those yᵗ make

the playes to make a comedie hereof, & to acte it with these names'; cf.

p. 244. In _Hatfield MSS._ vii. 270 is a 'lewd saucy letter' of 25 June

1597 from Sir John Hollis to Burghley, who on the last Star Chamber day

had pronounced Hollis's great-grandfather 'an abominable usurer, a

merchant of broken paper, so hateful and contemptible a creature that

the players acted him before the King [Henry VII or VIII] with great

applause'. It is printed in H. Walpole, _Royal and Noble Authors_ (ed.

Park, ii. 283).]

[Footnote 837: App. C, No. xlv. Was this the Chapel _Game of the Cards_

on 26 Dec. 1582, or was it the play in which Tarlton (cf. ch. xv)

glanced at Raleigh as the knave commanding the queen?]

[Footnote 838: These interventions were the Admiral's men in 1600 and

for Oxford's and Worcester's men in 1602 (cf. App. D, Nos. cxvii,

cxxx).]

IX

THE STRUGGLE OF COURT AND CITY

[_Bibliographical Note._--Most of the material for the present

chapter is collected in Appendix D. An outline of the subject

was given in _Tudor Revels_ (1906), and it is well and fully

treated in V. C. Gildersleeve, _Government Regulation of the

Elizabethan Drama_ (1908). G. M. G., _The Stage Censor_ (1908),

and F. Fowell and F. Palmer, _Censorship in England_ (1913),

are perhaps more valuable on later periods. Vagabond life and

legislation may be studied in G. Nicholls, _History of the

English Poor Law_² (1898), C. J. Ribton-Turner, _History of

Vagrants and Vagrancy_ (1887), E. M. Leonard, _Early History of

English Poor Relief_ (1900), and F. Aydelotte, _Elizabethan

Rogues and Vagabonds_ (1913), and the working of local

government in C. A. Beard, _The Office of Justice of the Peace

in England_ (1904), and E. Trotter, _Seventeenth Century Life

in the Country Parish_ (1919).]

The foregoing chapter has endeavoured to define the practical and

spiritual forces which underlay the controversy between Puritanism and

the stage; it remains to study the working of the constitutional forms

through which, as a resultant of those forces, the 'quality' of the

player ultimately established itself as a recognized constituent of the

polity. And first, for the social status of the players. The wittier

Puritans were fond of twitting them, on the ground that, if all men had

their rights, they would count as no better than vagabonds. There is

little more than a verbal truth in the taunt. No doubt, in certain

circumstances, players, like minstrels before them, might fall within

the danger of a series of statutes which, in the course of formulating

the provisions of a nascent poor-law, attempted also to regulate the

wandering elements of society. It was part of the mediaeval conception

of things to assign to every individual a definite function in the

social organism and to expect from him the regular fulfilment of that

function. To such a theory the migratory beggar and the masterless man

were naturally repugnant. But it was primarily a shortage of labour

towards the end of the fourteenth century which brought about the first

serious endeavour to check vagabondage by legislation, and to compel the

able-bodied vagrant, through the machinery of local government, to

return to the village of his domicile and there take up again the

service which he had abandoned. This policy was continued and developed

by the Tudors. The principal act which was operative, when Elizabeth

came to the throne, had been passed under Henry VIII in 1531. It

provided that any able-bodied beggar or idle vagrant, having no land or

master, and using no lawful merchandise, craft, or mystery for his

living, should be brought before a justice of the peace, or in a

corporate town the mayor, who should see him whipped at the cart-tail,

and then, if a beggar, returned to his place of birth or residence,

there to work as a true man ought to do, or if an idle person but no

beggar, either put to labour or set in the stocks until he found surety

to go to service. This statute was replaced by one of greater severity

in 1547, under which vagabonds were to be branded and put to forced

labour as slaves. But it was revived in 1550 and kept in force by

frequent renewals, of which the last was under Elizabeth herself in

1563. In these Acts there is no mention by name either of players or of

minstrels.[839] It may, however, be assumed that the quality of a player

would no more be regarded than that of a tinker or a pedlar as a

merchandise, craft or mystery, and the fact that some of the early

companies were composed of men for whom playing had originally been

subsidiary to a regular craft would hardly serve them, after they had

obviously deserted that craft and were travelling abroad to make a

living by the arts of migratory entertainment.[840] Their actual

safeguard was quite a different one. By definition the vagabond was a

masterless man, and with the exception of a few bodies of town players,

who probably did not wander far from their settled habitations, the

Tudor companies were not masterless. They were all under the protection

of some nobleman or gentleman of position, as whose 'servants' they

passed, bearing with them, no doubt, at any rate after this was required

by a proclamation of 1554, a 'certificate' or letter of recommendation

as proof of identity.[841] No doubt the relation in the larger companies

of lord and servants was little more than a nominal one. The strict

regulations of Henry VII against retainers who were not household

servants had become relaxed with the disappearance of the conditions

which necessitated them.[842] The players would wear a livery or badge,

and would do some courtesy of attendance on festival occasions. The lord

might intervene to help them if they got into an undeserved difficulty,

and would see to it that they did not bring his name into bad repute.

There was no economic dependence; the players lived by their earnings,

not by wages. But they were not reckoned as masterless men.

A secure status, however, did not mean complete absence of control. The

players had no free hand to play just when and where and what they

liked. They were subject to certain conveniences as to times and seasons

and localities, to precautions against breaches of the peace and dangers

to public health and safety. Above all, in a time of political and

ecclesiastical ferment, the sentiments of their plays had to be such as

would stand the scrutiny of a government by no means tolerant of

criticism. On these matters it was not, except in so far as heresy was

constituted by Acts of Uniformity and the like, with statutes that they

had to deal, but with the administrative regulations of the local and

central executives. All over the country there were bodies charged with

a general responsibility for public order, public safety, and public

decency, as the Elizabethans conceived it. In the rural districts there

were the justices of the peace, with powers more considerable than

clearly defined; in the towns there were mayors and corporations, also

acting as justices, but armed with a further authority derived both from

custom and from charters, and with a very clear intention to use this

authority to the full in the government of their communities. The

regulation of amusements had always been regarded as falling within the

scope of municipal activity, and in the end it proved a fortunate thing

for the players, in London at any rate, that the central authority found

itself driven by the pressure of circumstances to take over a large

measure of the responsibility for stage control from the hands of the

corporations.

For it need hardly be said that in the Tudor scheme of things the power

of the local authorities was an immediate rather than an ultimate one.

Both the justices of the peace and, for all their charters, the

corporations had to reckon with a considerable and growing measure of

central control, resting upon the royal prerogative, and claiming not

merely to further define, but also in some respects to replace, dispense

with, or override legislative enactments. This development of regulation

from the centre is, of course, an established feature of

sixteenth-century history. It arose out of many convergent causes, the

strength of the monarchy in face of the great houses weakened by civil

contention, the personal qualities of the Tudor sovereigns, the urgent

need of fresh machinery to deal with problems created by ecclesiastical

changes, by the growth of the press, by the growth of the stage itself,

for which the legal and administrative traditions of the Middle Ages

provided no solution. And if it was largely unconstitutional and

destined ultimately to bring the prerogative to perdition, this did not

in the meantime affect the position of the actor, who would certainly be

fined and imprisoned if he did not obey, or to any great extent that of

the justices or corporations, who might prove recalcitrant or at least

argumentative, but in the long run found it profitable to obey also.

There were three main avenues through which the royal prerogative found

exercise. The first of these was the ancient procedure of Chancery. The

will of the sovereign might be expressed in a writ or mandate, directed

to the subject, and stamped for greater solemnity with the impression of

the Great Seal of England. Such a writ was generally used in granting

licences, in conferring offices, or in issuing commissions to execute

functions on behalf of the Crown. It took the form of letters patent, so

called because they were intended as open communications to all whom

they might concern. These were handed to the recipient after an

elaborate diplomatic process during which they passed successively under

the royal Sign Manual, the Signet, the Privy Seal, and the Great Seal

itself, while a copy was enrolled in the Court of Chancery, and thus

became matter of public record.[843] Secondly, there was the

proclamation. This was in theory the formal announcement either of an

executive act, or of the royal intention as to the enforcement or

interpretation of a statute. In practice it tended more and more, during

the Tudor period, itself to take the place of a statutory enactment.

Proclamations were made by direction of the sovereign in council, and

were enrolled, like the patents, in Chancery. Both proclamations and, at

a comparatively late stage, patents were made use of in the process of

regulating players. But they were largely supplemented by the third

method through which the royal prerogative expressed itself, namely that

day-by-day activity of the Privy Council in the general co-ordination

and supervision of affairs, which has already been described.[844] The

Council Register itself and the local archives, especially those of

London, are full of letters from head-quarters to justices and

corporations, directing them as to the allowance or inhibition of plays

in general, or calling for special action in cases in which a company of

players had provoked a breach of the peace or had brought themselves

under suspicion of heresy or sedition. No doubt the corporations, in

particular, would often have preferred to act upon their own discretion.

Sometimes they argued or protested or deferred compliance. But the

Council had the powers of the Star Chamber behind them; and if in the

end they resorted to more direct ways of control, this was probably

rather for the sake of avoiding administrative friction than because

they found any ultimate difficulty in imposing their will by means of

correspondence upon reluctant magistrates.

It was, of course, until plague and Puritanism became serious

preoccupations, with the subject-matter of plays, rather than the

details of times and places, that the central government mainly

concerned itself; and it was apparently the disturbed ecclesiastical

position of the later years of Henry VIII that directed attention to the

drama as a subject of state instead of merely local concern. I have

dealt elsewhere with the encouragement given to controversial interludes

by Cromwell and Cranmer, with the swing of the pendulum when the

controversialists began to apply themselves, not merely to points of

church government which Henry desired to alter, but with heresies which

he was not prepared to adopt, and with the proclamations and

counter-proclamations and the interventions by the Privy Council to

which the problem gave rise under Edward VI and Mary.[845] Some

additional material which has more recently been published throws light

upon the regulative functions of the City of London in particular during

1549 and 1550.[846] More than once the prevalence of 'lewd' and

'naughty' plays on this side or that led to the complete inhibition of

all performances for a season. There is also some trace of a system of

licences for particular companies. It is not clear why Lord Dorset

should have thought it necessary to obtain a special authorization from

the Council for his men to play in his presence only in 1551.[847] A

forged licence taken from some players and sent to Sir William Cecil in

1552 may perhaps have purported to have been nothing more than such a

certificate from a lord as was required by the proclamation of

1554.[848] Two general conclusions may be drawn from these early

records. One is that, although the local authorities were certainly

responsible for the regulation of plays as a matter of public order,

they were not always in a position to make their control effective

without an appeal to head-quarters. The performances were popular and

the players had inherited from the minstrels a prescriptive right to

municipal encouragement and reward, rather than interference. And if

they bore the badge of some great personage, himself perhaps a privy

councillor, one may be sure that Dogberry and Verges would think twice

before they ventured on a rebuff. Even in London the Lord Mayor had to

appeal to the Privy Council in 1543 to get certain joiners imprisoned

and reprimanded for playing on a Sunday.[849] And if this was so in

London, where the Lord Mayor had certainly a firm seat in his saddle, it

was naturally still more so in the county areas, whose looser methods of

government ultimately proved to have a very marked significance for the

history of the London theatres. The weak position of the Surrey

justices, for example, is illustrated by a letter from Stephen Gardiner,

Bishop of Winchester, to Sir William Paget, Secretary of State, written

on 5 February 1547, shortly after the death of Henry VIII. He asks that

Paget or the Protector will intervene to prevent Lord Oxford's men, who

have threatened 'to try who shall have most resort, they in game or I in

earnest', from giving a play in Southwark at the moment when he sings

his _Dirige_ for the dead king; and he reports that one Master Acton, a

justice of the peace, has attempted to stop the assembly, but the

players 'smally regard' him, and 'press him to a peremptory answer,

whether he dare lett them play or not; whereunto he answereth neither

yea nor nay as to the playing'.[850]

The second point is that, although the Privy Council might intervene to

help the magistrates, their own primary interest at this time was in the

exclusion of heresy and sedition from plays. This shows itself in two

ways. Individual plays are brought before the Council itself, and lead

to disciplinary measures. But there is also the germ of a censorship. At

first it is exercised through the local authorities. The London aldermen

in 1549 appoint two of the Corporation officers, known as the

Secondaries of the Compters, who are bound under recognizances to

'peruse' plays and report upon them to the Lord Mayor. But in the

following year the London players themselves are bound only to perform

plays licensed by the King himself or the Privy Council, and this too is

the basis of Edward's proclamation of 1551 and Mary's of 1553.[851] The

former requires a licence 'in writing vnder his maiesties signe, or

signed by vj of his highnes priuie counsail'; the latter 'her graces

speciall licence in writynge for the same'. By 1557, however, another

change has taken place, and the duty of licensing is apparently

delegated to the ecclesiastical authorities, that is to say the

Commissioners for Religion.[852] These licences are of course for

individual plays, and distinct from any general licences needed by a

company in order to enable it to play at all.