Plays and Puritans

by Charles Kingsley

One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as against Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from Italy. We must fairly put ourselves into the position of an honest Englishman of the seventeenth century before we can appreciate the huge præjudicium which must needs have arisen in his mind against anything which could claim a Transalpine parentage. Italy was then not merely the stronghold of Popery. That in itself would have been a fair reason for others beside Puritans saying, ‘If the root be corrupt, the fruit will be also: any expression of Italian thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome while her vitals are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only half believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher classes, even those of the priesthood; but only kept up for their private aggrandisement.’ But there was more than hypothesis in favour of the men who might say this; there was universal, notorious, shocking fact. It was a fact that Italy was the centre where sins were invented worthy of the doom of the Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all nations who had connection with her. We dare give no proof of this assertion. The Italian morals and the Italian lighter literature of the sixteenth and of the beginning of the seventeenth century were such, that one is almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them, although the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes to understand either the European society of the time or the Puritan hatred of the drama. Non ragionam di lor: ma guarda è passa.

It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into England by the young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish, travelled to Italy. From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, this foul tide had begun to set toward England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in passing through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its course hitherward; till, to judge by Marston’s ‘Satires,’ certain members of the higher classes had, by the beginning of James’s reign, learnt nearly all which the Italians had to teach them. Marston writes in a rage, it is true; foaming, stamping, and vapouring too much to escape the suspicion of exaggeration; yet he dared not have published the things which he does, had he not fair ground for some at least of his assertions. And Marston, be it remembered, was no Puritan, but a playwright, and Ben Jonson’s friend.

Bishop Hall, in his ‘Satires,’ describes things bad enough, though not so bad as Marston does; but what is even more to the purpose, he wrote, and dedicated to James, a long dissuasive against the fashion of running abroad. Whatever may be thought of the arguments of ‘Quo vadis?—a Censure of Travel,’ its main drift is clear enough. Young gentlemen, by going to Italy, learnt to be fops and profligates, and probably Papists into the bargain. These assertions there is no denying. Since the days of Lord Oxford, most of the ridiculous and expensive fashions in dress had come from Italy, as well as the newest modes of sin; and the playwrights themselves make no secret of the fact. There is no need to quote instances; they are innumerable; and the most serious are not fit to be quoted, scarcely the titles of the plays in which they occur; but they justify almost every line of Bishop Hall’s questions (of which some of the strongest expressions have necessarily been omitted):—

‘What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed?

‘To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had the variety of our vain disguises? As if we had not wit enough to be foolish unless we were taught it. These dresses, being constant in their mutability, show us our masters. What is it that we have not learned of our neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap? whom would it not vex to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks and monsters of themselves? Whence come their (absurd fashions); but the one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the worse-minded courtesans of Italy? Whence else learned they to daub these mud-walls with apothecaries’ mortar; and those high washes, which are so cunningly licked on that the wet napkin of Phryne should he deceived? Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their borrowed hair? As if they were ashamed of the head of God’s making, and proud of the tire-woman’s. Where learned we that devilish art and practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men? Where had we that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the nose is no less pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than either? wherein the piles of dishes make barricadoes against the appetite, and with a pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry guest. Where those forms of ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make gods of others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason while they pretend to do reason? Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a wild tongue, that runs, with reins on the neck, through the bedchambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness? Where the change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some few butterflies? Where the art of dishonesty in practical Machiavelism, in false equivocations? Where the slight account of that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as not unnecessary? Where the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy in those formal compliments which do neither expect belief from others nor carry any from ourselves? Where’ (and here Bishop Hall begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of matters notorious and undeniable.) ‘Where that close Atheism, which secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe, wisdom to profess any religion? Where the bloody and tragical science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation hath endangered the infection of our peace?’—Bishop Hall’s ‘Quo Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,’ vol xii. sect. 22.

Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since the beginning of the sixteenth century. However much truth there may be in the common assertion that the old ‘miracle plays’ and ‘mysteries’ were the parents of the English drama (as they certainly were of the Spanish and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much our stage owed, from its first rise under Elizabeth, to direct importations from Italy. This is merely thrown out as a suggestion; to establish the fact would require a wide acquaintance with the early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due weight. The names of the characters in most of our early regular comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes, are the manners, at least they profess to be so. Next, the plots of many of the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where others found poison) went to Cinthio for ‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for Measure,’ to Bandello for ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and to Boccaccio for ‘Cymbeline,’ there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to the same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these profligate writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts adultery into a virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a duty; which revels in the horrible as freely as any French novelist of the romantic school; and whose only value is its pitiless exposure of the profligacy of the Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be valuable which makes a mock equally of things truly and falsely sacred, and leaves on the reader’s mind the fear that the writer saw nothing in heaven or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self-sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.

Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to judge from their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to assert, were drawn from life, and for which they give names, places, and all details which might amuse the noble gentlemen and ladies to whom these stories are dedicated), this had been the morality of Italy for some centuries past. This, also, is the general morality of the English stage in the seventeenth century. Can we wonder that thinking men should have seen a connection between Italy and the stage? Certainly the playwrights put themselves between the horns of an ugly dilemma. Either the vices which they depicted were those of general English society, and of themselves also (for they lived in the very heart of town and court foppery); or else they were the vices of a foreign country, with which the English were comparatively unacquainted. In the first case, we can only say that the Stuart age in England was one which deserved purgation of the most terrible kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal measures would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the experience of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never have been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines. In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds of the people, and, instead of ‘holding up a mirror to vice,’ instructing frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and fully justifying old Prynne’s indignant complaint—

‘The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the spectators’ minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them, till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill-serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic interlude.’

That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police reports will sufficiently prove. It is notorious that the representation in our own days of ‘Tom and Jerry’ and of ‘Jack Sheppard’ did excite dozens of young lads to imitate the heroes of those dramas; and such must have been the effect of similar and worse representations in the Stuart age. No rational man will need the authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor Leighton, Archbishop Parker, Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any one else, Churchman or Puritan, prelate or ‘penitent reclaimed play-poet,’ like Stephen Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert, citizens’ wives (who are generally represented as the proper subjects for seduction) ‘have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they have received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women, light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt, their children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault of a dangerous state;’ or that ‘The devices of carrying and re-carrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport their tokens by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other kinds of policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of their wives, guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants, were aptly taught in these schools of abuse.’ [27a]

The matter is simple enough. We should not allow these plays to be acted in our own day, because we know that they would produce their effects. We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to see such representations. [27b] Why, in all fairness, were the Puritans wrong in condemning that which we now have absolutely forbidden?

We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the old play-houses. Gosson and his colleague the anonymous Penitent assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but antechambers to houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned in the pit were only not practised also in the pit. What reason have we to doubt it, who know that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical reformation of this abuse, for which his name will be ever respected, our own comparatively purified stage was just the same? Let any one who remembers the saloons of Drury Lane and Covent Garden thirty years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the Globe or the Fortune must have been, in days when players were allowed to talk inside as freely as the public behaved outside.