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]