after. But the fact is, (and this seems to have been, like many other facts, conveniently forgotten,) that the Puritans were by no means alone in their protest against the stage, and that the war was not begun exclusively by them. As early as the latter half of the sixteenth century, not merely Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and Reynolds, had lifted up their voices against them, but Archbishop Parker, Bishop Babington, Bishop Hall, and the author of the "Mirror for Magistrates." The University of Oxford, in 1584, had passed a statute forbidding common plays and players in the university, on the very same moral grounds on which the Puritans objected to them. The city of London, in 1580, had obtained from the queen the suppression of plays on Sunday, and not long after, "considering that playhouses and dicing-houses were traps for young gentlemen and others," obtained leave from the queen and privy-council to thrust the players out of the city, and to pull down the play-houses, five in number; and, paradoxical as it may seem, there is little doubt that, by the letter of the law, "stage-plays and interludes" were, even to the end of Charles the First's reign, "unlawful pastime," being forbidden by 14 Eliz., 39 Eliz., 1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1 Caroli, and the players subject to severe punishment as rogues and vagabonds." The Act of 1 Jacobi seems even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which, in Elizabeth's reign, had allowed companies of players the protection of a "baron or honourable person of greater degree," who might "authorise them to play under his hand and seal of arms." So that the Puritans were only demanding of the Sovereigns that they should enforce the very laws which they themselves had made, and which they and their nobles were setting at defiance. Whether the plays ought to have been put down, and whether the laws were necessary, are different questions; but certainly the court and the aristocracy stood in the questionable, though too common, position of men who made laws to prohibit to the poor amusements in which they themselves indulged without restraint. But were these plays objectionable? As far as the comedies are concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery? Now, we cannot but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject for comedy at all. It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never. It is a sin; not merely theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the parent of seven other sins-of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a whole bevy of devils. D-2 VOL. XXV. The prevalence of adultery in any country has always been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and revolution; and where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light thing, that people has been always careless, base, selfish, cowardly-ripe for slavery. And we must say, that either the courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles the First were in that state, or that the poets were doing their best to make them so. We shall not shock our readers by any disgusting details on this point; we shall only say, that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century, with the exception of Shakspeare's, in which adultery is not introduced as a subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the whole plot. The seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a "handsome gentleman;" the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of which we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn and ridicule. In this latter habit (common to most European nations) there is a sort of justice. A man can generally retain his wife's affec tions if he will behave himself like a man, and "injured husbands" have for the most part no one to blame but themselves. But the matter is not a subject for comedy; not even in that case which has been always too common in France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to have been painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a "mariage de convenance," a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a decrepit old man. Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry. And the men who look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists did are not good men, and do no good service to the country, especially when they erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity, pointing "Eastward, Ho!" i. e., to the city of London, as the quarter where court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions, amid the fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens. If the citizens drove the players out of London, the play-wrights took good care to have their revenge. The citizen is their standard butt. These shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse, and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure, in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley's Gamester, Charles the First's favourite play, a passage like that in Act I. Scene 1., where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow-merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of having given those base words his royal warrant and approbation. was more than hypothesis in favour of the 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 ra The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as questionable as the comedies. That there are noble plays among them here and there, no one denies-nolian lighter literature of the sixteenth and of more than that there are exquisitely amusing plays among the comedies; but as the staple interest of the comedies is dulness, so the staple interest of the tragedies is crime. Revenge, hatred, villany, incest, and murder upon murder, are the constant themes, and (with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Mas-gionam di lor: ma guarda è passa. singer) they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience, and of displaying their own power of delineation, in a way which makes one but too ready to believe the accusations of the Puritans, (supported as they are by many painful anecdotes,) that the play-writers and actors were mostly men of fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch. This is notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern "Literature of Horror," and the two literatures are morally identical. We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought against the School of Vic-stamping, and vapouring too much to escape tor Hugo and Dumas, which will not equally apply to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars. 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, 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 This public appetite for horrors, for which his assertions. And Marston, be it rememthey catered so greedily, tempted them to-bered, was no Puritan, but a play-wright, ward another mistake, which brought upon and Ben Jonson's friend. them (and not undeservedly) heavy odium. 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 arise in his mind against anything which could claim a Transalpine parentage. Italy was then not merely the stronghold of Popery, though that in itself would have been a fair reason for any man's 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 of the priesthood, but only kept up for their private aggrandizement." But there Bishop Hall, in his Satires, described things as 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 play-wrights themselves make no secret of the fact. There is no need to quote instances; they are innumerable, and the stronger ones are not fit to be quoted, any more than the titles of the plays in which they occur; but justifying almost every line of Bishop Hall's fierce questions, (of which some of the strongest expressions have necessarily been omitted) "What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed? As 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 to learn how much our stage owed, from its of the Spanish and the Italian,) we have yet 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 Shakespeare (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 play-wrights 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 en "To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had the variety of our vain disguises? 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 illshaped dame of France, the other from the worse-minded courtezans of Italy? Whence else learned they to daub these mud-walls with apothecaries' mortar; and those high washes, which are so cunnningly licked on, that the wet napkin of Phryne should be deceived? Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their borrowed excrement? 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 in the neck, through the bed-chambers 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 secresy of inferior greatness? Where, the change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some few butterflies? Where, the art of dis-joyment. honesty in practical Machiavelism, in false Now this is the morality of the Italian equivocations? Where, the slight account of novelists; and to judge from their vivid that filthiness, which is but condemned as venial, sketches, (which, they do not scruple to asand tolerated as not unnecessary? Where, the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy, in those sert, were drawn from life, and for which formal compliments, which do neither expect they unblushingly give names, places, and belief from others, nor carry any from our- all details which might amuse the noble selves? Where," (and here Bishop Hall begins gentlemen and ladies to whom the stories to speak concerning things on which we must are dedicated,) this had been the morality of be silent, as of matters notorious and unde- Italy for some centuries past. This, also, niable.) "Where, that close Atheism, which is the general morality of the English stage secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it in the seventeenth century. Can we wonweakness to believe, wisdom to profess any re-der that thinking men should have seen a ligion? Where, the bloody and tragical science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience connexion between Italy and the stage? 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. Certainly the play-wrights 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 Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy | heart of town and court foppery); or else they were the vices of a foreign country, tokens by colorable means to sell their with which the English were comparatively merchandise, and other kinds of policies to unacquainted. In the first case, we can beguile fathers of their children, husbands of only say, that the Stuart age in England their wives, guardians of their wards, and was one which deserved purgation of the masters of their servants, were aptly taught most terrible kind, and to get rid of which in these schools of abuse?" the severest and most abnormal measures The matter is simple enough. We should would have been not only justifiable, but, not allow these plays to be acted in our to judge by the experience of all history, own day because we know that they would necessary; for extraordinary diseases never produce their effects. We should call him have been, and never will be, eradicated a madman who allowed his daughters or his save by extraordinary medicines. In the servants to see such representations. Why, second case, the play-wrights were wanton- in all fairness, were the Puritans wrong in ly defiling the minds of the people, and in- condemning that which we now have absostead of "holding up a mirror to vice," in- lutely forbidden? structing 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 degenerous 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." side. We will go no further into the sickening details of the licentiousness of the old playhouses. Gosson, and his colleague the anonymous Penitent, assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but ante-chambers 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 That Prynne spoke herein nought but judge for himself what the accessories of sober sense, our own police reports will the Globe or the Fortune must have been, sufficiently prove. It is notorious that the in days when players were allowed to talk representation, in our own days, of Tom inside, as freely as the public behaved outand Jerry and of Jack Sheppard, did excite dozens of young lads to imitate the scounNot that the poets or the players had any drel heroes of those base dramas; and such conscious intention of demoralizing their must have been the effect of similar and hearers, any more than they had of correctworse representations in the Stuart age. ing them. We will lay on them the blame of No rational man will need the authority of no special "malus animus;" but, at the same Bishop Babington, Doctor Layton, Archbi- time, we must treat their fine words about shop Parker, Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds," holding a mirror up to vice," and "shewWhite, or any one else, Churchman or ing the age its own deformity," as mere Puritan, prelate or penitent reclaimed cant, which the men themselves must have play-poet" like Stephen Gosson, to convince spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an him that, as they assert, citizens' wives, insincere cant in those days as it was when, (who are generally represented as the pro- two generations later, Jeremy Collier exper subjects for seduction,)* have, even on posed its impudent falsehood in the mouth their death-beds, with tears confest that they of Congreve. If the poets had really inhave received, at these spectacles, such evil tended to show vice its own deformity they infections as have turned their minds from would have represented it, (as Shakspeare chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest always does,) as punished, and not as triwomen, light hus-wives; umphant. It is ridiculous to talk of moral have brought their husbands into contempt, purpose in works in which there is no motheir children into question, ral justice. The only condition which can and their souls into the assault of a dangerexcuse the representation of evil is omitted. ous state;" or that "The devices of The simple fact is, that the poets wanted to carrying and re-carrying letters by laundresses, draw a house; that this could most easily practising with pedlars to transport their be done by the coarsest and most violent means, and that not being able to find sto*The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and ries exciting enough, from their foulness or Theatres. Penned by a Play-poet. horror, in the past records of sober British society, they went to Italy and Spain for the bled to think toward the least profaneness, and violent passions and wild crimes of southern have loathed the use of such foul and un[his expression is too strong temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, washed," by a superstition believed in enough to for quotation]"as is now made the food of the scene." darken and brutalize, but not enough to control its victims. Romish countries, then as We are loth to curtail this splendid pasnow, furnished that strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, for its corroboration of the Puritan comsage, both for its lofty ideal of poetry, and which is the immoral play-wright's fittest plaints against the stage: but a few lines on material, because, while the inward savagery a still stronger sentence occurs, moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of themselves in their worst moments, which no "Mystery of Cain and Abel," or "Tragedy of Oronooko" can do. "The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal soul doth not abhor? Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered, and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with (indecency) able to violate the of a Christian to water." ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn the blood Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama for its lessons in human nature? On that especial point something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to "Volpone," tell us, in his own noble prose, what he thought of the average morality of his cotemporary play-mosphere, (as Prynne says it was,) that of wrights: So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company. After him, we should say, no farther testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to be necessary. He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative: but his bitter words suggest at least this dilemma. Either they are true, and the play-house at Gehenna or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against more suc"For if men will impartially and not asquint cessful poets. And what does that latter look toward the offices and functions of a poet, prove, but that the greatest poet of his age they will easily conclude to themselves the im- (after Shakspeare was gone) was not as possibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a good man. He that is said to be much esteemed as some poets whom we able to inform young men to all good discipline, know to have been more filthy, and more inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep horrible than he? which, indeed, is the main old men in their best and supreme state, or, as complaint of Jonson himself. It will be rethey decline to childhood, recover them to their joined, of course, that he was an altogether first strength; that comes forth the interpreter envious man; that he envied Shakspeare, and arbitrer of nature, a teacher of things divine girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at no less than human, a master in manners; and The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, in the can alone (or with a few) effect the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for prologue to Every Man in his Humor; and, pride and ignorance to exercise their railing indeed, Jonson's writings, and those of many rhetorick upon. But it will here be hastily other play-wrights, leave little doubt that answered, that the writers of these days are stage rivalry called out the bitterest hatred, other things, that not only their manners but and the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, their natures are inverted, and nothing remain- Shakspeare's great soul was giving way to ing of them of the dignity of poet but the the pettiest passions, when in Hamlet he abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick, or (as they term had his fling at the "aiery of children, little it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profan- eyases, that cry out on the top of question, ation, blasphemies, all licence of offence toward and are most tyrannically clapp'd for't." It God and man is practised. I dare not deny a may be that he was girding in return at great part of this, (and I am sorry I dare not,) Jonson, when he complained that "their because in some men's abortive features, (and writers did them wrong to make them comwould God they had never seen the light,) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold plain against their own succession," i.e., adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable against themselves, when " grown to comthought, and uttered, a more malicious slander. mon players." Be that as it may. Great For every particular I can (and from a most Shakspeare may have been unjust to only clear conscience) affirm, that I have ever trem-less great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shaks |