CHAPTER V
“THE REHEARSAL TRANSPROSED”
It is never easy for ecclesiastical controversy to force its way into literature. The importance of the theme will be questioned by few. The ability displayed in its illumination can be denied by none. It is the temper that usually spoils all. A collection in any way approaching completeness, of the pamphlets this contention has produced in England, would contain tens of thousands of volumes; full of curious learning and anecdotes, of wide reading and conjecture, of shrewdness and wit; yet these books are certainly the last we would seek to save from fire or water. Could they be piled into scales of moral measurement a single copy of the Imitatio, of the Holy Dying, of the Saint’s Rest, would outweigh them all. Man may not be a religious animal, but he recognises and venerates the spirit of religion whenever he perceives it, and it is a spirit which is apt to evaporate amidst the strife of rival wits. Who can doubt the sincerity of Milton, when he exclaimed with the sad prophet Jeremy, “Woe is me my Mother that thou hast borne me a man of strife and contention.”
Marvell’s chief prose work, the two parts of The Rehearsal Transprosed, is a very long pamphlet indeed, composed by way of reply to certain publications of Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford. Controversially Marvell’s book was a great success.[1] It amused the king, delighted the wits, was welcomed, if not read, by the pious folk whose side it espoused, whilst its literary excellence was sufficient to win, in after years, the critical approval of Swift, whose style, though emphatically his own, bears traces of its master having given, I will not say his days and nights, but certainly some profitable hours, to the study of Marvell’s prose.
Biographers of controversialists seldom do justice to the other side. Possibly they do not read it, and Parker has been severely handled by my predecessors. He was not an honour to his profession, being, perhaps, as good or as bad a representative of the seamy side of State Churchism as there is to be found. He was the son of a Puritan father, and whilst at Wadham lived by rule, fasting and praying. He took his degree in the early part of 1659, and migrating to Trinity came under the influence of Dr. Bathurst, then Senior Fellow, to whom, so he says in one of his dedications, “I owe my first rescue from the chains and fetters of an unhappy education.”[2] Anything Parker did he did completely, and we next hear of him in London in 1665, a nobleman’s chaplain, setting the table in a roar by making fun of his former friends, “a mimical way of drolling upon the puritans.” “He followed the town-life, haunted the best companies and, to polish himself from any pedantic roughness, he read and saw the plays with much care and more preparing than most of the auditory.” In 1667 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon, a very mundane person indeed, made Parker his chaplain, and three years later Archdeacon of Canterbury. He reached many preferments, so that, says Marvell, “his head swell’d like any bladder with wind and vapour.” He had an active pen and a considerable range of subject. In 1670 he produced “A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie wherein the Authority of the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in Matters of External Religion is Asserted; The Mischiefs and Inconveniences of Toleration are represented and all Pretenses pleaded in behalf of Liberty of Conscience are fully answered.” Some one instantly took up the cudgels in a pamphlet entitled Insolence and Impudence Triumphant, and the famous Dr. Owen also protested in Truth and Innocence Vindicated. Parker replied to Owen in A Defence and Continuation of Ecclesiastical Politie, and in the following year, 1672, reprinted a treatise of Bishop Bramholl’s with a preface “shewing what grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery.”
This was the state of the controversy when Marvell entered upon it with his Rehearsal Transprosed, a fantastic title he borrowed for no very good reasons from the farce of the hour, and a very good farce too, the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, which was performed for the first time at the Theatre Royal on the 7th of November 1671, and printed early in 1672. Most of us have read Sheridan’s Critic before we read Buckingham’s Rehearsal, which is not the way to do justice to the earlier piece. It is a matter of literary tradition that the duke had much help in the composition of a farce it took ten years to make. Butler, Sprat, and Clifford, the Master of Charterhouse, are said to be co-authors. However this may be, the piece was a great success, and both Marvell and Parker, I have no doubt, greatly enjoyed it, but I cannot think the former was wise to stuff his plea for Liberty of Conscience so full as he did with the details of a farce. His doing so should, at all events, acquit him of the charge of being a sour Puritan. In the Rehearsal Bayes (Dryden), who is turned by Sheridan in his adaptation of the piece into Mr. Puff, is made to produce out of his pocket his book of Drama Commonplaces, and the play proceeds (Johnson and Smith being Sheridan’s Dangle and Sneer):
“Johnson. Drama Commonplaces! pray what’s that?
Bayes. Why, Sir, some certain helps, that we men of Art have found it convenient to make use of.
Johnson. How, Sir, help for Wit?
Bayes. I, Sir, that’s my position. And I do here averr, that no man yet the Sun e’er shone upon, has parts sufficient to furnish out a Stage, except it be with the help of these my rules.