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]