Of
Jonson's work, something has already been said in an earlier
chapter?
Jonson's work, something has already been said in an earlier
chapter?
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
make room for the Bouncing Belly
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly,
Prime master of arts, and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit.
After nearly thirty lines in this style, the bowl-bearer speaks
a prose oration on the Belly, which introduces the first anti-
masque of 'men in the shape of bottles, tuns, etc. ' Hercules,
the 'active friend of virtue,' enters, to reclaim his bowl and
denounce Comus and his crew; 'Help, virtue! These are sponges
and not men. ' He drives them off, asking, 'Can this be pleasure,
to extinguish man? ' Then he lies down at the foot of Atlas, and
the pigmies forming the second antimasque steal in and try to steal
his club. At his rising, they run into holes, and Mercury descends
to crown Hercules with poplar, because he has 'the voluptuous
Comus, God of cheer, Beat from his grove, and that defaced. ' So
far, the idea is clear and well-balanced, and the moral that
pleasure must be the servant of virtue is expressed with an in-
tensity that, obviously, influenced Milton in his Comus. But it is
interesting to contrast the gross homely Comus of Jonson, the
Belly god, with Milton's dignified abstraction, and to note, that to
match his Comus, Jonson's dramatic instinct supplies, not Virtue,
but Hercules. There is fine poetry in the conception and workman-
ship of Jonson’s masque; but it loses coherence after the crowning
of Hercules. Hercules is told that, in James's court, the 'cessation
of all jars' between pleasure and virtue is to be found; and, as
a proof, twelve princes are brought forth, bred upon Atlas, 'the
hill of knowledge. ' These, led by prince Charles, are the true
masquers. The chaplain of the Venetian ambassador1 has described
the masque.
He says that, after many dances, the dancers began to flag,' whereupon
the King who is naturally choleric got impatient, and shouted aloud,“ Why
don't they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you
all; dance ! ” On hearing this, the marquis of Buckingham, his majesty's
most favoured minion, immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty
and very minute capers with so much grace and agility, that he not only
appeased the ire of his angry sovereign, but, moreover, rendered himself the
admiration and delight of everybody. The other masquers, being thus
encouraged, continued successively exhibiting their prowess with various
ladies; finishing in like manner with capers and by lifting their goddesses
from the ground. '
1 Rawdon Brown's translation, quoted in Harrison's England, Part 11, Forewords,
p. 58. (New Shakspere Society)
## p. 361 (#379) ############################################
Jonson's Later Masques
361
Finally, James, delighted at the grace of the prince's dancing,
kisses him affectionately, and pats the marquis on the cheek.
The king caused the masque to be repeated, but with additions. '
This, apparently, meant that his majesty did not appreciate
the opening part of the masque. Contemporary critics asserted
that Inigo Jones had lost his charm, and that Ben Jonson 'should
return to his old trade of brickmaking? ' Jonson, therefore,
rewrote it for its second performance on 17 February, making it
elaborately complimentary to Wales? . Mount Atlas now becomes
Craig-Ereri, and we have a dialogue between three Welshmen,
which, like the dialogue in The Irish Masque, is inferior in wit
and vigour, but curious for the Welsh-English. The Welshmen
criticise the first device of Hercules and the Comus rout-there
was a tale of a tub'—and the pigmies, and we have, instead, a
dance of men and a dance of goats—'the Welsh goat is an
excellent dancer by birth'-as antimasques, with songs in Welsh-
English; and then, apparently, the real masquers with their dances
and songs followed. Though the first part of Pleasure Reconciled
to Vertue seems to have been too serious for the taste of king
James, it was able to stir Milton to the composition of Comus.
A break now occurs in Jonson's masque writing. His journey
to Scotland took place in 1618, and Jonson was not in London
again till about May 1619. The new banqueting house at
Whitehall was burnt down on 12 January 1619. Queen Anne
died in March. Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones was in progress.
He produced no more masques till 6 January 1621, when the
court called upon him again, and the admirable Newes from the
New World discovered in the Moone was the first of a series of
eight masques, containing some of his best work and ending in
1625 before his paralytic stroke. Every one of these, except the
imperfectly reported Masque of Owls, contains dramatic work
that brings before us contemporary London life and manners, with
a lighter and easier touch than Jonson uses in his plays. In Newes
from the New World, the printer, the chronicler and the factor
allow us a glance, tantalisingly brief, at the lower walks of litera-
ture in London and the beginnings of the London press ; Neptune's
Triumph, in a witty dialogue between a cook and a poet, magnifies
the art of Jacobean cookery; the Fencer, in Pan's Anniversarie,
is an amalgamation of all the old gamesters who swaggered in
the Elizabethan fencing ring ; A Masque of the Metamorphos'd
1 Brent to Carlton, Cal. State Papers, Dom. vol.
Called, by Gifford, For the Honour of Wales.
XCV, p. 12.
## p. 362 (#380) ############################################
362
Masque and Pastoral
Gypsies, Jonson's longest masque, 'thrice presented to King James,
is an exhaustive study of gipsy manners and gipsy language,
wonderful for scope and minuteness. It contains the ribald song of
Cocklorrel, another song of the street, almost Aristophanic in lusty
vigour. The ballad of the bearward, John Urson, in the excellent
Masque of Augures, is another lyric of the same quality. This
lyric of the gutter is found cheek by jowl with the solemn Latin
notes about augurs as if to reveal to us the two sides of Jonson-
the schoolmaster and the street arab. Both characters in Eliza-
bethan London were endowed with a fuller humanity than their
modern representatives. There is no failure of poetical power in
these later masques.
Pan's Anniversarie and The Fortunate
Isles contain exquisite lyrical work, and there is hardly anywhere
in the masques a finer song than the last 'hunting chorus' of
Time Vindicated, with its characteristic ending
Man should not hunt mankind to death,
But strike the enemies of man;
Kill vices if you can:
They are your wildest beasts,
And when they thickest fall, you make the gods true feasts.
Two masques, in 1631, conclude his series. It would seem as if
Jonson's experience in 1618 convinced him that he could not rely
upon the contrast between the fantastic and poetic to hold the
attention of his audiences. Popular taste began to ask for sen-
sational antimasque, and the multiplication of these threatened to
reduce the masque to chaos. Jonson fell back upon the dramatic
scene as a means of compelling the interest of his audiences, and,
either by the wit of his comic invention or the truth of his comic
characterisation, succeeded nearly always in rising above mere
farce.
Jonson has been called a prose Aristophanes? In his masques,
.
taken as a whole, he may be recognised as more truly Aristophanic
than any other English writer. His serious lyrics are Horatian in
their restraint and classic dignity and have none of the splendour
of the imaginative choruses of Aristophanes. Nevertheless, in
the lyrical and descriptive parts of the masques, Jonson’s fancy,
elevated as it is by his moral intensity and his sense of the poet's
dignity, continually produces a total result which is more than
fanciful—which, in a high sense, is imaginative. But, on the side of
full-blooded humanity, of intense appreciation of the joy of life in
Jonson n'est pas seulement un Labiche ou un Scribe qui aurait du style ; c'est
pour ainsi parler, un Aristophane en prose, Castelain, Ben Jonson, p. 353.
## p. 363 (#381) ############################################
Masques under Charles I. Pastoral Poetry 363
the coarsest and commonest types, of wonderful knowledge of con-
temporary men and manners, Jonson matches even Aristophanes.
Moreover, in the rollicking energy of his lyrics of the gutter and
his long prose harangues, the challenging insolence and swagger
of the Aristophanic parabasis is more than suggested. Jonson's
gusto, his vigour and virility, are the most natural and unforced
part of his genius. They were cramped in the masque. They were
cramped even on the Elizabethan stage. An Athenian Dionysiac
festival might have given them scope. Jonson, therefore, expresses
this side of himself in his masques only in fragments, and cannot
be called Aristophanic unless his masques are taken as a whole.
Jonson, as a masque writer, had no successor. The two great
sensations of Charles's reign, Shirley's Triumph of Peace and
Carew's Coelum Britannicum, both produced in 1634, are aptly
characterised by Schelling : ‘as to form, Shirley's masque is chaos
in activity, Carew's chaos inert' D'Avenant's Salmacida Spolia,
in which the king and queen took part in 1640, has so large a
number of successive ‘entries' in the antimasque as to make it
very like modern pantomime.
esse.
But, in 1634, Comus was produced at Ludlow castle. We have
pointed out that Milton took suggestions from Peele’s Araygne-
ment of Paris and from Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,
but his main inspiration came from Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheard-
Comus must not be classed as a masque because there is no
disguising and no dancing. It is a species of outdoor entertain-
4, ment, and, therefore, akin to pastoral. There is a natural tendency
for the outdoor entertainment, if it be lengthy, to approximate to
the pastoral; and pastoral resembles the masque, because, by its
conventions, it is undramatic.
It may, therefore, not seem inappropriate to consider the pas-
toral drama along with the masque. The one is an offshoot of
the legitimate drama for indoor use, the other for outdoor. Both,
in the main, may be described as efforts made by amateurs to
y bring the theatre into their own halls or parks. But it is not
until the professed poet and dramatist come to the help of the
amateur that any great art results. Jonson and Milton, so far,
have been examples of this fact, which becomes even more apparent
when we turn to pastoral drama in its fullest manifestation.
Pastoral poetry is without a place among the greater forms of
literary art, because it is essentially a reaction. Its two motives
are a longing for simplicity of thought and feeling and a longing
## p. 364 (#382) ############################################
364
Masque and Pastoral
for country as opposed to town. This latter longing is innate in
man, because his original home was the field or the forest, and
is the soundest and best part of pastoral art. The desire for
simplicity, on the other hand, has in it an element of weakness
and disillusionment. The pastoral poet is not strong enough to
confront and master his own age and find in it the materials
for his poem; his own age is too complicated and sophisticated.
He, therefore, takes refuge in Arcadia-in an Arcadia of feeling
and thought, which has the defect of being visionary and unreal.
It is not the life the poet knows, but his refuge from that life.
The Elizabethan drama was so firmly rooted in present realities
of passion and thought that it swept pastoral poetry, for a time,
out of sight. The prose of Sidney and the verse of Spense
noble as they were, were superseded by the new art of drama, and
it was only after the dramatic impulse had spent itself that the
exhausted dramatists accepted pastoral as a sufficient exercise for
their energies.
Theocritus and Vergil are the two fathers of pastoral poetry.
Of the two, Theocritus is commonly preferred as less artificial than
Vergil. The clear, bright naturalism of Theocritus, which, in fact,
is the perfection of art, makes Vergil's Eclogues seem artificial; but
these must not be considered apart from his Georgics. The Italian
farmer was very real in Vergil. He was less of an artist but more
of a man than the Greek, and, spiritually, he is far above Theocritus.
All his work is touched and glorified by his natural piety, the
wistful sincerity of his religious feeling and his contemplative
intensity. On its dramatic and realistic side, pastoral poetry owes
most to Theocritus ; on its contemplative and visionary, to Vergil.
Usually, both influences cooperated.
When the renascence begins in the fourteenth century, pastoral
composition follows three main lines of development. First, there
is the eclogue proper, beginning with the Latin eclogues of
Petrarch and the Italian eclogues of Boccaccio and producing,
in 1498, the extraordinarily popular twelve eclogues of Mantuan.
In English literature, this type is represented by The Shepheards
Calender of Spenser! Secondly, there is the mixture of prose
pastoral story and poetical interlude of which Boccaccio's Admeto?
is the prototype. Boccaccio developed from it his own Decameron,
and Sanazzaro's less potent genius, regularising the prose and
verse sections, produced, in 1481, his Arcadia, which, in Spain,
i Ante, vol. 111, p. 221.
2 In 1341. Boccaccio calls it Commedia della ninfe fiorentine.
## p. 365 (#383) ############################################
in
Italian and English Influences 365
prompted the Dianal of George of Montemayor, printed about
1560. The Spanish romance added to the pastoral and classical
elements of the Italian writers a new chivalrous element. In
English literature, these works inspired Sidney's Arcadia? . The
third type is the pastoral play, of which two famous examples
were published in Italy about the same time—Tasso's Aminta,
in 1581, and Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, in 1590. Aminta is
distinguished by its sensuous charm, its poetic grace and its
emotional sweetness: 1 Pastor Fido by its intricate and in-
genious plot. Both works were printed in London in 1591,
which year Fraunce translated Aminta into English verse. But
the direct influence of this third kind of pastoral on English
dramatic literature is not apparent till the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. The second kind reaches English writers earlier.
It has a great influence through the prose romances of Sidneys,
Lodge and Greene, but, before this begins, Peele’s Araynement
of Paris and Lyly's dramas especially his Gallathea and Love's
Metamorphosis exhibit an English type of pastoral so original
in its mixture of pastoral, mythology, allegory and satire, that
some critics have denied that it is pastoral at all. And when
Shakespeare, in As You Like It, uses Lodge's romance, Rosalynde,
his play is closer to English traditions“ of Robin Hood and
Sherwood forest than to anything Italian. Among the lesser
dramatists of the end of Elizabeth's reign, Munday, in his use
of the Robin Hood stories, offers, on his own low level, an English
kind of pastoral similar to Shakespeare's. The feature of this
dubious pastoral of Peele, of Lyly, of Shakespeare and of Munday
is that it is joyful, fresh and irresponsible. It comes at the
beginning of a literary epoch instead of at the end, and the ex-
hausted passion and elaborate artificiality of the court of Ferrara
are replaced by the heedless gaiety and robust life of Elizabethan
England. The Shepheards Calender and The Fairie Queene, as
well as The Countess of Pembroke': Arcadia, are examples of an
appropriation of influences from Italy, France and Spain, which
resulted in distinctive types of art. The new romance type was
produced by the noble-minded idealism which characterised the
1 Los siete libros de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor. Bartholomew Young
translated it into English in 1583, but his translation was not printed till 1598.
For Sidney's Arcadia, cf. ante, vol. in, p. 351.
3 For plays founded on Sidney's Arcadia, see ante, vol. 11.
• For the formation of pastoral traditions in England, consult chap. II of Greg's
Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama.
o The Maydes Metamorphosis, a good play, of doubtful authorship, should be
included in this group.
>
## p. 366 (#384) ############################################
366
Masque and Pastoral
genius of both Spenser and Sidney. In the plays, a parallel mani-
festation of the free and careless Elizabethan spirit produces again
a new type of art.
It is curious that Daniel should have been the writer who
attempted to reproduce in English the Italian pastoral play of
Tasso and Guarini, as he had tried to reproduce the Senecan
drama of Garnier. In 1602, he prefixed a sonnet to a translation
of Il Pastor Fido in which he claimed acquaintance with Guarini,
and, in 1605, he wrote for queen Anne at Oxford The Queenes
Arcadia, which he calls 'a Pastorall Trage-comedie. ' In 1614, his
second pastoral tragicomedy for the queen, Hymen's Triumph,
was performed at Somerset house at the marriage of lord
Roxborough. These plays are not without interest and charm.
The satirical element in the first and the scholarly workmanship
of the second are worthy of attention. But they have neither the
freshness of Peele nor the passionate sentiment of Tasso. Daniel
is the schoolmaster in drama ; his plays are never more than
praiseworthy exercises in composition. The effort of copying
Garnier or Guarini was sufficient to extinguish his small
dramatic gift, and his dramatic experiments did not produce any
results of importance. As the virile Elizabethan drama softened
and degenerated, pastoral revived, and meritorious plays were
produced, such as The Careless Shepherdess of Thomas Goffe
and The Shepherd's Holiday of Joseph Rutter.
But, before this decline came about, pastoral drama was three
times essayed by men of genius, with the consequence that the
Elizabethan and Jacobean period has left three plays which are
the best that the language has produced in the pastoral kind, and
are almost masterpieces. These are The Faithfull Shepheardesse
of Fletcher, The Sad Shepherd of Jonson and Thomas Randolph's
Amyntas. These three plays stand out conspicuously from the
generally feeble and formless work of the pastoral drama; and,
therefore, we shall leave on one side many works of minor import-
ance, and endeavour shortly to indicate the interest, and estimate
the value, of these three best specimens of their kind.
These three plays are alike attempts by dramatists to put
pastoral poetry upon the boards. They are not, like Milton's
Comus, written for outdoor presentation. In all three cases, the
dramatist is consciously original. He is trying to see whether
the conventions of the pastoral drama can be used with advantage
on the London stage and be made to satisfy a London audience.
Fletcher, unmistakably basing his effort on Guarini's Pastor
## p. 367 (#385) ############################################
Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse 367
Fido, was the first to try, and his attempt failed. He tells us
that the public, 'missing Whitsun-ales, cream, wassel, and morris-
dances, began to be angry. ' They did not understand that pastoral
deals with shepherds who own their flocks, and not with ‘hirelings,
who would be reasonably expected to behave as rude rustics.
Such 'owners of flocks,' says Fletcher,
are not to be adorned with any art but such improperl ones as nature is said
to bestow, as singing and poetry; or such as Experience may teach them, as
the virtues of herbs and fountains, the ordinary course of the sun, moon and
stars, and such like.
His characters were to be unsophisticated, but not vulgar, country
people ; and his play was to be a tragicomedy; there were to be
no deaths, but some were to come near it. It is impossible to
read this note ‘To the reader' without feeling that Fletcher, as
yet, has no practical experience as a dramatist. His effort is not
to create men and women but to observe certain rules of pastoral
tragicomedy. As a drama, the play fails; the plot is crude, and
the characters are without life. But Fletcher has taken it for
granted that his play must take us out of doors, and he has put so
much exquisite description of nature into it that his dramatic
failure hardly matters. Swinburne claims justly that The Faithfull
Shepheardesse “is simply a lyric poem in semi-dramatic shape, to be
judged only as such, and as such almost faultless. ' The liquid
melody of the verse, too, has the natural sweetness of the songs of
birds, and the rustle of leaves, and the flow of waters? There is
no laboured description of nature; but green grass and cool
waters are everywhere in the play; the poet has the spring in his
heart, and his poetry blossoms like the flowers of April and
bubbles like the brook ; there is no natural magic to compare
with it until we come to Keats ; and, even in Endymion, there is
something hectic, something strained, when it is read along with
Fletcher's play. In A Midsummer's Nights Dream and As You
Like It, we get descriptions of nature which, in our literature,
are the nearest in their quality to Fletcher's work in The Faithfull
Shepheardesse ; but Fletcher is both more copious and more con-
centrated than Shakespeare just because his art fails on the
dramatic side; whereas Shakespeare succeeds, and nature, in his
dramas, is duly subordinated to human character. As a work of
art, therefore, The Faithfull Shepheardesse is like Comus. Neither
is dramatic; although it is probable that, in both cases, the
1 Not proper, not peculiar, general.
As to the verse of The Faithfull Shepheardesse, cf. ante, chap. v, p. 117.
## p. 368 (#386) ############################################
368
Masque and Pastoral
writers aimed at a kind of drama. But, in both poems, we find,
instead of drama, descriptive poetry of extraordinary richness
and beauty, the first full expression of the young writer's genius.
But, here, a contrast begins. Fletcher is Elizabethan ; his self-
consciousness is unruffled and unaware of the spiritual emotion
stirring vehemently in Milton; while, on the other hand, this self-
consciousness of Milton puts him out of touch with nature—which,
for two centuries, was to recede into the background in English
poetry. In Comus, the beautiful descriptions of nature are inci-
dental ; in no sense are they the reason or aim of the poem. And
Milton's spiritual imagination is everywhere, ousting Pan and
installing Apollo. But Fletcher's unembarrassed, happy enjoy-
ment of Pan's Arcadia, in its natural greenness and freshness, is
the abiding merit of his poem.
But a word must be said on the dramatic question. Fletcher
has some plan of describing various types of love for there is a
'modest shepherd,' a 'wanton shepherd,' a 'holy shepherdess' and
a ‘wanton shepherdess. ' Having his mind fixed on some special
grade of propriety or impropriety in love, he does not give us men
and women.
If we do not ask for men and women, there is much
in his work that is beautiful. The conception of Clorin, who has
'buried her love in an arbour,' and has her mind fixed on holy
things, except in so far as she pursues 'the dark hidden virtuous use
of herbs' for the relief of the sick-that being an 'art' with which
a shepherdess may be adorned—has much imaginative beauty and
charm. The satyr, again, the wild creature tamed by a dim
perception of spiritual beauty, and stedfastly loyal to that per-
ception, is exquisite in its simplicity. But what can we say of
Cloe, 'a wanton shepherdess'? If she were a woman, she would
be endurable, however wanton ; but an abstraction illustrating
wantonness in shepherdesses is unendurable, except when Fletcher
forgets about the wantonness, and makes her talk pure poetry, as
when she says to Thenot:
Tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she conveyed him, softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest.
This particular problem, as to how a young girl thinks of love
## p. 369 (#387) ############################################
Jonson's Sad Shepherd
369
is particularly delicate and difficult for a young poet, whether the
girl be good or bad. He reads his own mind into the woman's,
and the result has an unnaturalness something like that which
must have been the drawback of the acting of women's parts by
men on the Elizabethan stage. This unnaturalness passes over
from Fletcher's pastoral into Milton's Comus. There, it is the
young Milton, disguised as a maiden, who utters, with some self-
consciousness and bashfulness, the famous encomium on chastity.
The speech is essentially undramatic—what neither the man nor
the maiden would have said in their own persons.
Our second pastoral is Jonson's Sad Shepherd, which is almost
as fine an achievement as Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse.
Of
Jonson's work, something has already been said in an earlier
chapter? The work suggests a most perplexing problem of literary
criticism. It was published after Jonson’s death, and thus purports
to be a work of his last years left unfinished because of his death.
But this last effort of the partially paralysed poet is distinguished
by a vigour of style and freshness of imagination that seem to mark
it as a work of his prime. After reading Jonson's last masques
and plays, in which a certain stiffening and flagging of his powers
are clearly to be discerned, it seems impossible to ascribe The Sad
Shepherd to the same date. Moreover, we hear of a work by Jonson
called The May Lord, composed before his visit to Edinburgh, which
has disappeared. The title may have been suggested by Sidney's
The May Lady, in which case, Jonson's poem, probably, was some
kind of pastoral play. Was The May Lord the first title of The
Sad Shepherd, when Robin Hood was intended to be the central
figure of the play? In that case, Æglamour's part would be a
later addition. But Æglamour, in some respects, is the most
remarkable of all the characters. He strikes the true romantic
note, which is conspicuously absent in Jonson’s main work. What
could be finer in cadence and romantic suggestion than the first
lines of the play, when Æglamour appears for a moment ?
Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
The world may find the spring by following her.
Even if we suppose that Jonson borrowed this opening from
Goffe, we have not got over the difficulty, because Æglamour's
speeches are consistently and strongly romantic in tone. It is
easier to connect them in style and spirit with the additions to
1 Ante, chap. 1, p. 11.
E. L. VI.
CH, XIII.
24
## p. 370 (#388) ############################################
370
Masque and Pastoral
The Spanish Tragedie than with anything else written by Jonson.
The man who wrote those additions and The Sad Shepherd might
have been a great romantic. Castelain' has pointed out that the
prologue divides itself into two parts. The first thirty lines are
the real prologue to The Sad Shepherd. They are beautiful in
feeling, and the silent passing of the Sad Shepherd over the stage
in the middle of them seems absolutely right in imagination, if we
omit the second thirty-six lines about the heresy “that mirth by no
means fits a pastoral. ' These last lines might have been a prologue
for The May Lord, but our problem is to decide when the first
lines were written which form an admirable prologue to The Sad
Shepherd. As to this, we must note that, in spite of the ‘forty
years' of the first line, the succeeding statement, that the public
have at length grown up to him,' must refer to the vogue enjoyed
by Jonson from 1605 to 1615, and cannot mean that he has for-
given the rejection of The New Inne. Another fine romantic motive
in the play is Karolin's kissing of Amie under the mad Æglamour's
compulsion. It compels us to revise all our conceptions of Jonson.
He treats it with a sureness and delicacy of touch that Shakespeare
could hardly have bettered; while, at the same time, he proves
his authorship of the episode by the absurd list of 'lovers’
scriptures' and by putting into innocent Amie's lips the reference to
the dear good angel of the spring,
The nightingale.
But, so far, we have only touched upon one side or aspect of
the play. We must add that the part of the witch is realised with
great power. Alken’s speech beginning ‘Within a gloomy dimble
she doth dwell,' and his later speech which describes the
spanlong elves that dance about a pool,
With each a little changeling in their arms,
are both in blank verse, marked by a freer movement than Jonson
usually permits himself, and they also convey the old world idea
of the witch with a force to be paralleled only in Jonson's own
Masque of Queens, presented in 1609. One would wish to place
these speeches of Alken within measurable distance of that date.
Finally, the presentment of Robin Hood and Marian, while not so
fully romantic as Æglamour's part, is such sunny sweet realism as
touches upon romance; and may have led Jonson to add a fully
romantic note to a play originally intended to prove that mirth
befitted pastoral. Puck-Hairy or Robin Goodfellow appeared in the
i See the note in his Ben Jonson, p. 459.
6
## p. 371 (#389) ############################################
Randolph's Amyntas
371
masque Love Restored, which we have dated 1612; again, we desire
to put the Puck-Hairy of the play and all its Robin Hood scenes
not too far from the splendid Robin Goodfellow of the masque.
But the Scottish dialect, which is the only serious drawback to
the artistic effect of the play, must, surely, have been introduced
after the poet's visit to Scotland in 1618'. That visit may have
stimulated Jonson to compose The Sad Shepherd as we have it ;
our fragment began, perhaps, as The May Lord, for which the
last thirty-six lines were originally intended as prologue. Its
composition should be placed both before and after the visit.
The doubtful question of the date must not divert our attention
from the merits of Jonson's play. The Sad Shepherd reads as if
the poet had forborne to write out his play in prose, as he tells us
was his custom, and had set down his first sketch in verse, rapidly,
with his impulse fresh upon him. Perhaps, he found he could not
finish it by his usual methods. Perhaps, he was disconcerted by the
unfamiliar features of this surprising child of his imagination and
was half-ashamed of it. It is strongly dramatic, and the breath of
Jonson's realism gives it substance, but it is touched by a romantic
grace which is almost romantic passion ; and, therefore, it stands
alone among Jonson's dramas and will always have a special
fascination for his readers.
The third and last pastoral on our list does not require so full
a consideration as the first two. It is not a poem like Fletcher's,
nor unfinished like Jonson's; but it belongs to a new order of
art, which has not the full humanity or high imagination of the
Elizabethan era. Randolph does not attempt, like Fletcher and
Jonson, to cast the pastoral into a new mould. His Amyntas or
the Impossible Dowry follows the conventions of Tasso and
Guarini, and its plot is deliberately artificial, removed from any
contact with life's realities. His style recalls the work of John
Day, and has a scholarly finish and point that raise the play above
the other pastorals of Jacobean times? . It is in curious contrast
to The Muses Looking-Glasse. In that play, the force of the
writing, and a touch of dramatic reality in the sketch of the
puritan onlookers, are remarkable. In Amyntas, Randolph's muse
is strangely subdued and gentle. He develops a very individual
type of pathetic and ironical fantasy in his delineation of the mad
Amyntas, which seems very far removed from the boisterous fun
1 Compare the Irish of The Irish Masque, December 1613, and the Welsh of
For the Honour of Wales, February 1618.
? As to Randolph's university plays, see ante, chap, xn,
24-2
## p. 372 (#390) ############################################
372 Masque and Pastoral
and rollicking rimes of Aristippus. This mellowing and softening
of Randolph's spirit extends to the comic scenes of the play, and
gives us the Latin rimes of the orchard-robbing elves—the
beata Fauni proles
Quibus non est magna moles.
Few such Latin rimes have been written since the Middle Ages.
There are sweet and tender passages of poetry continually occur-
ring in the careful blank verse in which most of the pastoral is
composed, but they are so unemphatic and quiet in tone that some
familiarity with the poem is necessary before the reader becomes
aware of them. Fletcher impetuously injects into his artificial
plot and characters the fire of his poetic genius ; Randolph, with
wonderful art and restraint, keeps his true vein of poetry always
in the right key-his play is a more complete and coherent pro-
duction than either Fletcher's or Jonson’s, but it is essentially
artificial ; its excellence is all in the handling and embroidery.
It was, presumably, the last work of Randolph, and it raises our
opinion both of his art and of his genius.
## p. 373 (#391) ############################################
CHAPTER XIV
THE PURITAN ATTACK UPON THE STAGE
SEEING that the stage has always been intimately associated
with religion, we can scarcely be surprised to find it the subject of
vehement controversy at the two most important periods of re-
ligious revolution known to history—the rise of Christianity and
the dissolution of the medieval ecclesiastical system. The latter
event, being less fundamental and less universal than its prede-
cessor, was, also, less disastrous to the stage, and in England alone,
where the forces for and against the drama were most evenly
matched, was there any real struggle. This struggle possessed
many of the characteristics of that which had gone before; and
indeed, at first sight, the puritan attack upon the Elizabethan
theatre seems little more than a distant echo of the great battle
which had raged around the Roman spectacula. Yet the stage
was hated as sincerely and as bitterly in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries as it was in the third and fourth, and for
reasons strikingly similar. These reasons were both theological
and ethical ; and it will be instructive to consider them separately
by way of introduction.
The Roman stage was essentially a pagan institution and re-
mained such, in spirit, long after the triumph of Christianity. The
early church hated it, therefore, first and foremost for its idolatry.
It represented the old religion in a peculiarly alluring and in-
eradicable form, and it was the most dangerous of those 'pomps
which every Christian renounced at baptism? So long as the
Roman theatre existed, it was felt to be a rival of the church, and
not until the dramatic elements inherent in the catholic ritual had
given birth to the religious drama of the Middle Ages was a
temporary reconciliation between church and stage brought about.
From that time forward, the stage was included in the ecclesiastical
machinery and was freed from the attacks of all save heretics
1 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, $ 4. See also, bibliography s. v. Prynne.
## p. 374 (#392) ############################################
374 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
and reformers? . In the fourteenth century, for example, there was
produced in England A tretise of miraclis pleyinge, in all proba-
bility by one of Wyclif's followers, which condemns the miracle on
the score of its profanity. The reformation itself, however, was at
first not at all, and never completely, hostile to the stage. Fired
by the renewed interest in the classical drama and conscious of
the convenience of the religious play as a controversial weapon”,
reformers, among whom Melanchthon stands conspicuous, were,
in the first half of the sixteenth century, setting themselves,
all over Europe, to bring the stage into the service of the
reformation. England, like Germany, had her protestant drama-
tists, chief of whom were John Bale and, strange as it may sound,
John Foxe, both working under the direct influence of the Lutheran
drama; while, at Cambridge, the movement found its theoretical
exponent in Melanchthon's disciple, Martin Bucer, whose De
honestis ludis“, was published about 1551. Precept and example,
however, were alike soon forgotten in England, and this for two
reasons. First, the English stage was destined by force of cir-
cumstances to become secular. The frequent religious changes
in the middle years of the sixteenth century made it dangerous
for the government to allow the theatre to be used for partisan
purposes, and, accordingly, one regulation after another was passed
to prevent the handling of matters of religion or state upon the
stage, culminating in the proclamation of 16 May 1559, whereby
Elizabeth provided for the strict licensing of the drama. Secondly,
the reformation was itself rapidly changing its character; and,
as Geneva became its centre of authority instead of Wittenberg,
the realm of anti-Christ was mapped out with greater precision
and was found to embrace many spheres of activity which had
hitherto been considered honest". When protestants became
puritans, they were not long in discovering that the drama, which
they had been forbidden to utilise for their own purposes, was
without authority in holy writ, and before long, that it might not
be suffered in any Christian commonwealth. It was natural, also,
1 The most important of these, before Lollard days, were Gerhoh of Reichersberg
and Robert Grosseteste. See Chambers, vol. 11. pp. 98-100.
Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage, p. 73.
3 Chambers, op. cit. vol. 11, pp. 216 ff. ; for the part played by the drama in the
Scots reformation, see ante, vol. III, pp. 122, 141, 161, and, for the whole topic of the
Protestant and humanistic drama, see Creizenach, vols. II and m.
• Scripta Anglicana, 1577, pp. 141—6; Symmes, Débuts de la critique dramatique,
1
app. A.
5 Calvin himself was reluctantly brought into conflict with the stage by the zeal of
his disciples. See Stähelin, Calvin (1863), vol. 1, pp. 392—4.
1
## p. 375 (#393) ############################################
a
Theological Objections 375
that they should hark back to the early fathers for their arguments :
for the puritans had the same casus belli as the fathers, though
in a stronger form. The Elizabethan drama was, in a measure,
the direct heir of the medieval miracle-play: probably, the
contemporaries of the later growth scarcely realised the funda-
mental differences between the two. And the medieval miracle-
play was, in origin, half liturgy and half folk-play: in other
words, it was twice damned, since, like the maypole, it was
heathen, and, like the mass, popish. 'Idolatry,' Cyprian had
declared, “is the mother of all public amusements’; the puritan
could add a second parent-popery. As William Crashawe, father
-
of the poet, put the case in a sermon at Paul's cross :
The ungodly Playes and Enterludes so rife in this nation, what are they
but a bastard of Babylon, a daughter of error and confusion, a hellish device
(the devils own recreation to mock at holy things) by him delivered to the
Heathen, from them to the Papists and from them to us1.
As a 'bastard of Babylon,' the stage which Shakespeare trod
was, in the eyes of his puritan contemporaries, more than immoral:
it was unholy. When this is realised, we catch and understand the
note of passion in tracts which at first sight seem academic essays
in polemic borrowed from early Christian divines.
In other and more obvious ways, also, dramatic performances
conflicted with the religious prejudices of puritans. For example,
there was a conscious rivalry, frequently referred to in the
literature of the subject, between the pulpit and the stage. The
function of the latter, until quite recently, had been almost entirely
didactic; and, as we shall see, its defenders maintained that it was
so still. But the protestant preacher, with the newly-opened Bible
in his hand, would brook no competition. At the mere thought of
comparing a play with a sermon, he raised the cry of 'blasphemy
intolerable'; or he admitted the comparison, only to declare
that 'enterludes weare the divells sarmons? ' Again, the actor's
practice, also derived from medieval tradition, of performing on
Sundays: and holy days did not tend to soften the exasperation of
the godly, who listened with indignant horror to the sound of
the player's trumpet passing the open door of the church and
3
1 Sermon, 14 February 1607. See, also, Selden, Table Talk (1892), p. 134.
? Harington, Nugae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 191, quoting a puritan objector. Osmund
Lake, A Probe Theologicall, 1612, declares that God's blessing cannot rest upon the
Scriptural play because he hath ordained the Preaching, and not the Playing of bis
word,' pp. 267–272.
3 Furnivall (Stubbes's Anatomy, part 1, pp. 296—301) brings together many in.
teresting passages in reference to Sunday sports and Sabbath-breaking.
## p. 376 (#394) ############################################
376 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
mingling defiantly with the peal of the bells. Finally, the actor, as
the early fathers had discovered and every puritan was careful to
point out, was bound by the very necessities of his craft to infringe
the divine law which forbade one sex to wear the costume of the
other; and the point was a particularly telling one in an age when
it was customary for boys to act female parts? All things con-
sidered, it was natural that the stage should appear to rest under
the peculiar displeasure of God. Lists of divine judgments meted
out to sinful players or those who visited the theatre are a common
feature in the tracts of the period. An earthquake, the fall of a
scaffold or, indeed, a public disaster of any kind, also, seemed to
the devout primitive intelligence of the time to indicate the
Almighty's wrath at the continued existence of playhouses. Few
things of this kind made a greater impression than London's
grim annual guest-the plague. As one of the earliest writers
against the stage unanswerably put the matter : 'the cause of
plagues is sinne, if you look to it well: and the cause of sinne
are playes : therefore the cause of plagues are playes? '
Turning from the theological to the moral aspect of the matter,
we may notice that here, too, puritans were walking in the
steps of the early fathers. Roman shows and Elizabethan stage
plays were both denounced as sinks of iniquity. Led into many
absurdities by his theological prejudices, the puritan reformer,
nevertheless, was at one with the best tendencies of his age
in his attack upon 'abuses. ' A considerable literature upon
this subject has come down to us from the sixteenth century,
the most famous example being Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses.
A perusal of this and similar productions shows us that puri-
tanism was largely a revolt against medievalism; for a great
number of the evils denounced were medieval practices and
observances, folk festivals and such like, often innocent enough
in themselves but commonly tending to rioting and wantonness.
And, in singling out the theatre from among these as the special
object of his abhorrence and invective, the puritan was not
actuated by theological reasons alone. Undoubtedly, the stage
was the main channel through which what may be called the
1 Deuteronomy xxii, 5. Ben Jonson thought the matter so important that he asked
Selden's advice upon it. The antiquary's letter in reply, dated 28 February 1615, is
interesting as an early example of biblical criticism. See Opera Omnia (1726), vol. 11,
pp. 1690—6; also, De Venere Syriacâ (Opera, vol. II, p. 365) and Table Talk, 4. 8.
· Thomas White, Sermon, 1576, p. 47; and the lord mayor remarks, in 1584,
that to play in plague time increases the plague by infection, to play out of plague time
calls down the plague from God. See Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 173.
## p. 377 (#395) ############################################
6
Feeling on the Continent
377
saturnalian elements of medieval life emptied themselves into the
broad stream of the renascence. Furthermore, the rise of a secular
theatre was one of the many problems created by the break-up of
the medieval world which were engaging the attention
of
popular writers all over Europe in the sixteenth century. It is
remarkable that, with hardly an exception, they condemned it
as a sinister development, and gave moral reasons for excluding
the player from the commonwealth. When a man like Montaigne,
in one essay, classes 'enterlude-players' with ‘harlots and curti-
zans , and, in another, describes them as 'vagabond objects,' we
are not surprised to find Jean Bodin expressing the strongest
disapprobation of plays in his Six livres de la Republique", and the
well known Jesuit publicist Mariana, in a chapter on 'Spectacles'
in his De Rege et Regis Institutione (1599), denouncing the
evils of the theatre and recommending its strict regulations.
Not a few of these continental writers were translated into
English and so came to influence the development of puritan
opinion. It is interesting, for example, to notice that two of the
most popular translations of the Tudor period, North’s version of
the Spaniard Guevara's El Relox de Principes (1557) and Sand-
ford's rendering of the German Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine
et vanitate scientiarum (1569), contain unfavourable references
to the stage. Puritans, however, did not have it all their own
way. In 1559, William Bavand produced a translation of a
Latin treatise, this time, appropriately enough, from Italy, under
the title : A Woorke of Joannes Ferrarius Montanus touchynge
the good orderynge of a common weale, which is important as
being the first book in English to offer a defence of the secular
drama, assigning it a place in a well ordered state on the ground
that it 'doth minister unto us good ensamples 4. ' This was exactly
the line of argument that all subsequent English defenders of the
drama adopted. Equally important on the other side is Sir
Geffraie Fenton's Forme of Christian pollicie gathered out of
French". In his treatment of stage plays and enterludes, the
unknown French writer anticipates in a few pages all the principal
arguments of the puritans, and his book, translated in 1574 just
a
See Essays (Florio's translation), bk. I, chaps. XLII and xlii.
? English edition, 1606, bk. vi, chap. I, pp. 645, 646.
3 Bk. I, chap. xv. Cf. , also, his Contra los Juegos Publicos (Obras, vol. II, pp.
413–462).
* Bk. v, chap. VIII.
5 Yet Fenton, in his Tragicall Discourses (1567), employs the same arguments in
support of the novel as were used later by apologists for the drama.
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly,
Prime master of arts, and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit.
After nearly thirty lines in this style, the bowl-bearer speaks
a prose oration on the Belly, which introduces the first anti-
masque of 'men in the shape of bottles, tuns, etc. ' Hercules,
the 'active friend of virtue,' enters, to reclaim his bowl and
denounce Comus and his crew; 'Help, virtue! These are sponges
and not men. ' He drives them off, asking, 'Can this be pleasure,
to extinguish man? ' Then he lies down at the foot of Atlas, and
the pigmies forming the second antimasque steal in and try to steal
his club. At his rising, they run into holes, and Mercury descends
to crown Hercules with poplar, because he has 'the voluptuous
Comus, God of cheer, Beat from his grove, and that defaced. ' So
far, the idea is clear and well-balanced, and the moral that
pleasure must be the servant of virtue is expressed with an in-
tensity that, obviously, influenced Milton in his Comus. But it is
interesting to contrast the gross homely Comus of Jonson, the
Belly god, with Milton's dignified abstraction, and to note, that to
match his Comus, Jonson's dramatic instinct supplies, not Virtue,
but Hercules. There is fine poetry in the conception and workman-
ship of Jonson’s masque; but it loses coherence after the crowning
of Hercules. Hercules is told that, in James's court, the 'cessation
of all jars' between pleasure and virtue is to be found; and, as
a proof, twelve princes are brought forth, bred upon Atlas, 'the
hill of knowledge. ' These, led by prince Charles, are the true
masquers. The chaplain of the Venetian ambassador1 has described
the masque.
He says that, after many dances, the dancers began to flag,' whereupon
the King who is naturally choleric got impatient, and shouted aloud,“ Why
don't they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you
all; dance ! ” On hearing this, the marquis of Buckingham, his majesty's
most favoured minion, immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty
and very minute capers with so much grace and agility, that he not only
appeased the ire of his angry sovereign, but, moreover, rendered himself the
admiration and delight of everybody. The other masquers, being thus
encouraged, continued successively exhibiting their prowess with various
ladies; finishing in like manner with capers and by lifting their goddesses
from the ground. '
1 Rawdon Brown's translation, quoted in Harrison's England, Part 11, Forewords,
p. 58. (New Shakspere Society)
## p. 361 (#379) ############################################
Jonson's Later Masques
361
Finally, James, delighted at the grace of the prince's dancing,
kisses him affectionately, and pats the marquis on the cheek.
The king caused the masque to be repeated, but with additions. '
This, apparently, meant that his majesty did not appreciate
the opening part of the masque. Contemporary critics asserted
that Inigo Jones had lost his charm, and that Ben Jonson 'should
return to his old trade of brickmaking? ' Jonson, therefore,
rewrote it for its second performance on 17 February, making it
elaborately complimentary to Wales? . Mount Atlas now becomes
Craig-Ereri, and we have a dialogue between three Welshmen,
which, like the dialogue in The Irish Masque, is inferior in wit
and vigour, but curious for the Welsh-English. The Welshmen
criticise the first device of Hercules and the Comus rout-there
was a tale of a tub'—and the pigmies, and we have, instead, a
dance of men and a dance of goats—'the Welsh goat is an
excellent dancer by birth'-as antimasques, with songs in Welsh-
English; and then, apparently, the real masquers with their dances
and songs followed. Though the first part of Pleasure Reconciled
to Vertue seems to have been too serious for the taste of king
James, it was able to stir Milton to the composition of Comus.
A break now occurs in Jonson's masque writing. His journey
to Scotland took place in 1618, and Jonson was not in London
again till about May 1619. The new banqueting house at
Whitehall was burnt down on 12 January 1619. Queen Anne
died in March. Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones was in progress.
He produced no more masques till 6 January 1621, when the
court called upon him again, and the admirable Newes from the
New World discovered in the Moone was the first of a series of
eight masques, containing some of his best work and ending in
1625 before his paralytic stroke. Every one of these, except the
imperfectly reported Masque of Owls, contains dramatic work
that brings before us contemporary London life and manners, with
a lighter and easier touch than Jonson uses in his plays. In Newes
from the New World, the printer, the chronicler and the factor
allow us a glance, tantalisingly brief, at the lower walks of litera-
ture in London and the beginnings of the London press ; Neptune's
Triumph, in a witty dialogue between a cook and a poet, magnifies
the art of Jacobean cookery; the Fencer, in Pan's Anniversarie,
is an amalgamation of all the old gamesters who swaggered in
the Elizabethan fencing ring ; A Masque of the Metamorphos'd
1 Brent to Carlton, Cal. State Papers, Dom. vol.
Called, by Gifford, For the Honour of Wales.
XCV, p. 12.
## p. 362 (#380) ############################################
362
Masque and Pastoral
Gypsies, Jonson's longest masque, 'thrice presented to King James,
is an exhaustive study of gipsy manners and gipsy language,
wonderful for scope and minuteness. It contains the ribald song of
Cocklorrel, another song of the street, almost Aristophanic in lusty
vigour. The ballad of the bearward, John Urson, in the excellent
Masque of Augures, is another lyric of the same quality. This
lyric of the gutter is found cheek by jowl with the solemn Latin
notes about augurs as if to reveal to us the two sides of Jonson-
the schoolmaster and the street arab. Both characters in Eliza-
bethan London were endowed with a fuller humanity than their
modern representatives. There is no failure of poetical power in
these later masques.
Pan's Anniversarie and The Fortunate
Isles contain exquisite lyrical work, and there is hardly anywhere
in the masques a finer song than the last 'hunting chorus' of
Time Vindicated, with its characteristic ending
Man should not hunt mankind to death,
But strike the enemies of man;
Kill vices if you can:
They are your wildest beasts,
And when they thickest fall, you make the gods true feasts.
Two masques, in 1631, conclude his series. It would seem as if
Jonson's experience in 1618 convinced him that he could not rely
upon the contrast between the fantastic and poetic to hold the
attention of his audiences. Popular taste began to ask for sen-
sational antimasque, and the multiplication of these threatened to
reduce the masque to chaos. Jonson fell back upon the dramatic
scene as a means of compelling the interest of his audiences, and,
either by the wit of his comic invention or the truth of his comic
characterisation, succeeded nearly always in rising above mere
farce.
Jonson has been called a prose Aristophanes? In his masques,
.
taken as a whole, he may be recognised as more truly Aristophanic
than any other English writer. His serious lyrics are Horatian in
their restraint and classic dignity and have none of the splendour
of the imaginative choruses of Aristophanes. Nevertheless, in
the lyrical and descriptive parts of the masques, Jonson’s fancy,
elevated as it is by his moral intensity and his sense of the poet's
dignity, continually produces a total result which is more than
fanciful—which, in a high sense, is imaginative. But, on the side of
full-blooded humanity, of intense appreciation of the joy of life in
Jonson n'est pas seulement un Labiche ou un Scribe qui aurait du style ; c'est
pour ainsi parler, un Aristophane en prose, Castelain, Ben Jonson, p. 353.
## p. 363 (#381) ############################################
Masques under Charles I. Pastoral Poetry 363
the coarsest and commonest types, of wonderful knowledge of con-
temporary men and manners, Jonson matches even Aristophanes.
Moreover, in the rollicking energy of his lyrics of the gutter and
his long prose harangues, the challenging insolence and swagger
of the Aristophanic parabasis is more than suggested. Jonson's
gusto, his vigour and virility, are the most natural and unforced
part of his genius. They were cramped in the masque. They were
cramped even on the Elizabethan stage. An Athenian Dionysiac
festival might have given them scope. Jonson, therefore, expresses
this side of himself in his masques only in fragments, and cannot
be called Aristophanic unless his masques are taken as a whole.
Jonson, as a masque writer, had no successor. The two great
sensations of Charles's reign, Shirley's Triumph of Peace and
Carew's Coelum Britannicum, both produced in 1634, are aptly
characterised by Schelling : ‘as to form, Shirley's masque is chaos
in activity, Carew's chaos inert' D'Avenant's Salmacida Spolia,
in which the king and queen took part in 1640, has so large a
number of successive ‘entries' in the antimasque as to make it
very like modern pantomime.
esse.
But, in 1634, Comus was produced at Ludlow castle. We have
pointed out that Milton took suggestions from Peele’s Araygne-
ment of Paris and from Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,
but his main inspiration came from Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheard-
Comus must not be classed as a masque because there is no
disguising and no dancing. It is a species of outdoor entertain-
4, ment, and, therefore, akin to pastoral. There is a natural tendency
for the outdoor entertainment, if it be lengthy, to approximate to
the pastoral; and pastoral resembles the masque, because, by its
conventions, it is undramatic.
It may, therefore, not seem inappropriate to consider the pas-
toral drama along with the masque. The one is an offshoot of
the legitimate drama for indoor use, the other for outdoor. Both,
in the main, may be described as efforts made by amateurs to
y bring the theatre into their own halls or parks. But it is not
until the professed poet and dramatist come to the help of the
amateur that any great art results. Jonson and Milton, so far,
have been examples of this fact, which becomes even more apparent
when we turn to pastoral drama in its fullest manifestation.
Pastoral poetry is without a place among the greater forms of
literary art, because it is essentially a reaction. Its two motives
are a longing for simplicity of thought and feeling and a longing
## p. 364 (#382) ############################################
364
Masque and Pastoral
for country as opposed to town. This latter longing is innate in
man, because his original home was the field or the forest, and
is the soundest and best part of pastoral art. The desire for
simplicity, on the other hand, has in it an element of weakness
and disillusionment. The pastoral poet is not strong enough to
confront and master his own age and find in it the materials
for his poem; his own age is too complicated and sophisticated.
He, therefore, takes refuge in Arcadia-in an Arcadia of feeling
and thought, which has the defect of being visionary and unreal.
It is not the life the poet knows, but his refuge from that life.
The Elizabethan drama was so firmly rooted in present realities
of passion and thought that it swept pastoral poetry, for a time,
out of sight. The prose of Sidney and the verse of Spense
noble as they were, were superseded by the new art of drama, and
it was only after the dramatic impulse had spent itself that the
exhausted dramatists accepted pastoral as a sufficient exercise for
their energies.
Theocritus and Vergil are the two fathers of pastoral poetry.
Of the two, Theocritus is commonly preferred as less artificial than
Vergil. The clear, bright naturalism of Theocritus, which, in fact,
is the perfection of art, makes Vergil's Eclogues seem artificial; but
these must not be considered apart from his Georgics. The Italian
farmer was very real in Vergil. He was less of an artist but more
of a man than the Greek, and, spiritually, he is far above Theocritus.
All his work is touched and glorified by his natural piety, the
wistful sincerity of his religious feeling and his contemplative
intensity. On its dramatic and realistic side, pastoral poetry owes
most to Theocritus ; on its contemplative and visionary, to Vergil.
Usually, both influences cooperated.
When the renascence begins in the fourteenth century, pastoral
composition follows three main lines of development. First, there
is the eclogue proper, beginning with the Latin eclogues of
Petrarch and the Italian eclogues of Boccaccio and producing,
in 1498, the extraordinarily popular twelve eclogues of Mantuan.
In English literature, this type is represented by The Shepheards
Calender of Spenser! Secondly, there is the mixture of prose
pastoral story and poetical interlude of which Boccaccio's Admeto?
is the prototype. Boccaccio developed from it his own Decameron,
and Sanazzaro's less potent genius, regularising the prose and
verse sections, produced, in 1481, his Arcadia, which, in Spain,
i Ante, vol. 111, p. 221.
2 In 1341. Boccaccio calls it Commedia della ninfe fiorentine.
## p. 365 (#383) ############################################
in
Italian and English Influences 365
prompted the Dianal of George of Montemayor, printed about
1560. The Spanish romance added to the pastoral and classical
elements of the Italian writers a new chivalrous element. In
English literature, these works inspired Sidney's Arcadia? . The
third type is the pastoral play, of which two famous examples
were published in Italy about the same time—Tasso's Aminta,
in 1581, and Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, in 1590. Aminta is
distinguished by its sensuous charm, its poetic grace and its
emotional sweetness: 1 Pastor Fido by its intricate and in-
genious plot. Both works were printed in London in 1591,
which year Fraunce translated Aminta into English verse. But
the direct influence of this third kind of pastoral on English
dramatic literature is not apparent till the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. The second kind reaches English writers earlier.
It has a great influence through the prose romances of Sidneys,
Lodge and Greene, but, before this begins, Peele’s Araynement
of Paris and Lyly's dramas especially his Gallathea and Love's
Metamorphosis exhibit an English type of pastoral so original
in its mixture of pastoral, mythology, allegory and satire, that
some critics have denied that it is pastoral at all. And when
Shakespeare, in As You Like It, uses Lodge's romance, Rosalynde,
his play is closer to English traditions“ of Robin Hood and
Sherwood forest than to anything Italian. Among the lesser
dramatists of the end of Elizabeth's reign, Munday, in his use
of the Robin Hood stories, offers, on his own low level, an English
kind of pastoral similar to Shakespeare's. The feature of this
dubious pastoral of Peele, of Lyly, of Shakespeare and of Munday
is that it is joyful, fresh and irresponsible. It comes at the
beginning of a literary epoch instead of at the end, and the ex-
hausted passion and elaborate artificiality of the court of Ferrara
are replaced by the heedless gaiety and robust life of Elizabethan
England. The Shepheards Calender and The Fairie Queene, as
well as The Countess of Pembroke': Arcadia, are examples of an
appropriation of influences from Italy, France and Spain, which
resulted in distinctive types of art. The new romance type was
produced by the noble-minded idealism which characterised the
1 Los siete libros de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor. Bartholomew Young
translated it into English in 1583, but his translation was not printed till 1598.
For Sidney's Arcadia, cf. ante, vol. in, p. 351.
3 For plays founded on Sidney's Arcadia, see ante, vol. 11.
• For the formation of pastoral traditions in England, consult chap. II of Greg's
Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama.
o The Maydes Metamorphosis, a good play, of doubtful authorship, should be
included in this group.
>
## p. 366 (#384) ############################################
366
Masque and Pastoral
genius of both Spenser and Sidney. In the plays, a parallel mani-
festation of the free and careless Elizabethan spirit produces again
a new type of art.
It is curious that Daniel should have been the writer who
attempted to reproduce in English the Italian pastoral play of
Tasso and Guarini, as he had tried to reproduce the Senecan
drama of Garnier. In 1602, he prefixed a sonnet to a translation
of Il Pastor Fido in which he claimed acquaintance with Guarini,
and, in 1605, he wrote for queen Anne at Oxford The Queenes
Arcadia, which he calls 'a Pastorall Trage-comedie. ' In 1614, his
second pastoral tragicomedy for the queen, Hymen's Triumph,
was performed at Somerset house at the marriage of lord
Roxborough. These plays are not without interest and charm.
The satirical element in the first and the scholarly workmanship
of the second are worthy of attention. But they have neither the
freshness of Peele nor the passionate sentiment of Tasso. Daniel
is the schoolmaster in drama ; his plays are never more than
praiseworthy exercises in composition. The effort of copying
Garnier or Guarini was sufficient to extinguish his small
dramatic gift, and his dramatic experiments did not produce any
results of importance. As the virile Elizabethan drama softened
and degenerated, pastoral revived, and meritorious plays were
produced, such as The Careless Shepherdess of Thomas Goffe
and The Shepherd's Holiday of Joseph Rutter.
But, before this decline came about, pastoral drama was three
times essayed by men of genius, with the consequence that the
Elizabethan and Jacobean period has left three plays which are
the best that the language has produced in the pastoral kind, and
are almost masterpieces. These are The Faithfull Shepheardesse
of Fletcher, The Sad Shepherd of Jonson and Thomas Randolph's
Amyntas. These three plays stand out conspicuously from the
generally feeble and formless work of the pastoral drama; and,
therefore, we shall leave on one side many works of minor import-
ance, and endeavour shortly to indicate the interest, and estimate
the value, of these three best specimens of their kind.
These three plays are alike attempts by dramatists to put
pastoral poetry upon the boards. They are not, like Milton's
Comus, written for outdoor presentation. In all three cases, the
dramatist is consciously original. He is trying to see whether
the conventions of the pastoral drama can be used with advantage
on the London stage and be made to satisfy a London audience.
Fletcher, unmistakably basing his effort on Guarini's Pastor
## p. 367 (#385) ############################################
Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse 367
Fido, was the first to try, and his attempt failed. He tells us
that the public, 'missing Whitsun-ales, cream, wassel, and morris-
dances, began to be angry. ' They did not understand that pastoral
deals with shepherds who own their flocks, and not with ‘hirelings,
who would be reasonably expected to behave as rude rustics.
Such 'owners of flocks,' says Fletcher,
are not to be adorned with any art but such improperl ones as nature is said
to bestow, as singing and poetry; or such as Experience may teach them, as
the virtues of herbs and fountains, the ordinary course of the sun, moon and
stars, and such like.
His characters were to be unsophisticated, but not vulgar, country
people ; and his play was to be a tragicomedy; there were to be
no deaths, but some were to come near it. It is impossible to
read this note ‘To the reader' without feeling that Fletcher, as
yet, has no practical experience as a dramatist. His effort is not
to create men and women but to observe certain rules of pastoral
tragicomedy. As a drama, the play fails; the plot is crude, and
the characters are without life. But Fletcher has taken it for
granted that his play must take us out of doors, and he has put so
much exquisite description of nature into it that his dramatic
failure hardly matters. Swinburne claims justly that The Faithfull
Shepheardesse “is simply a lyric poem in semi-dramatic shape, to be
judged only as such, and as such almost faultless. ' The liquid
melody of the verse, too, has the natural sweetness of the songs of
birds, and the rustle of leaves, and the flow of waters? There is
no laboured description of nature; but green grass and cool
waters are everywhere in the play; the poet has the spring in his
heart, and his poetry blossoms like the flowers of April and
bubbles like the brook ; there is no natural magic to compare
with it until we come to Keats ; and, even in Endymion, there is
something hectic, something strained, when it is read along with
Fletcher's play. In A Midsummer's Nights Dream and As You
Like It, we get descriptions of nature which, in our literature,
are the nearest in their quality to Fletcher's work in The Faithfull
Shepheardesse ; but Fletcher is both more copious and more con-
centrated than Shakespeare just because his art fails on the
dramatic side; whereas Shakespeare succeeds, and nature, in his
dramas, is duly subordinated to human character. As a work of
art, therefore, The Faithfull Shepheardesse is like Comus. Neither
is dramatic; although it is probable that, in both cases, the
1 Not proper, not peculiar, general.
As to the verse of The Faithfull Shepheardesse, cf. ante, chap. v, p. 117.
## p. 368 (#386) ############################################
368
Masque and Pastoral
writers aimed at a kind of drama. But, in both poems, we find,
instead of drama, descriptive poetry of extraordinary richness
and beauty, the first full expression of the young writer's genius.
But, here, a contrast begins. Fletcher is Elizabethan ; his self-
consciousness is unruffled and unaware of the spiritual emotion
stirring vehemently in Milton; while, on the other hand, this self-
consciousness of Milton puts him out of touch with nature—which,
for two centuries, was to recede into the background in English
poetry. In Comus, the beautiful descriptions of nature are inci-
dental ; in no sense are they the reason or aim of the poem. And
Milton's spiritual imagination is everywhere, ousting Pan and
installing Apollo. But Fletcher's unembarrassed, happy enjoy-
ment of Pan's Arcadia, in its natural greenness and freshness, is
the abiding merit of his poem.
But a word must be said on the dramatic question. Fletcher
has some plan of describing various types of love for there is a
'modest shepherd,' a 'wanton shepherd,' a 'holy shepherdess' and
a ‘wanton shepherdess. ' Having his mind fixed on some special
grade of propriety or impropriety in love, he does not give us men
and women.
If we do not ask for men and women, there is much
in his work that is beautiful. The conception of Clorin, who has
'buried her love in an arbour,' and has her mind fixed on holy
things, except in so far as she pursues 'the dark hidden virtuous use
of herbs' for the relief of the sick-that being an 'art' with which
a shepherdess may be adorned—has much imaginative beauty and
charm. The satyr, again, the wild creature tamed by a dim
perception of spiritual beauty, and stedfastly loyal to that per-
ception, is exquisite in its simplicity. But what can we say of
Cloe, 'a wanton shepherdess'? If she were a woman, she would
be endurable, however wanton ; but an abstraction illustrating
wantonness in shepherdesses is unendurable, except when Fletcher
forgets about the wantonness, and makes her talk pure poetry, as
when she says to Thenot:
Tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she conveyed him, softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest.
This particular problem, as to how a young girl thinks of love
## p. 369 (#387) ############################################
Jonson's Sad Shepherd
369
is particularly delicate and difficult for a young poet, whether the
girl be good or bad. He reads his own mind into the woman's,
and the result has an unnaturalness something like that which
must have been the drawback of the acting of women's parts by
men on the Elizabethan stage. This unnaturalness passes over
from Fletcher's pastoral into Milton's Comus. There, it is the
young Milton, disguised as a maiden, who utters, with some self-
consciousness and bashfulness, the famous encomium on chastity.
The speech is essentially undramatic—what neither the man nor
the maiden would have said in their own persons.
Our second pastoral is Jonson's Sad Shepherd, which is almost
as fine an achievement as Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse.
Of
Jonson's work, something has already been said in an earlier
chapter? The work suggests a most perplexing problem of literary
criticism. It was published after Jonson’s death, and thus purports
to be a work of his last years left unfinished because of his death.
But this last effort of the partially paralysed poet is distinguished
by a vigour of style and freshness of imagination that seem to mark
it as a work of his prime. After reading Jonson's last masques
and plays, in which a certain stiffening and flagging of his powers
are clearly to be discerned, it seems impossible to ascribe The Sad
Shepherd to the same date. Moreover, we hear of a work by Jonson
called The May Lord, composed before his visit to Edinburgh, which
has disappeared. The title may have been suggested by Sidney's
The May Lady, in which case, Jonson's poem, probably, was some
kind of pastoral play. Was The May Lord the first title of The
Sad Shepherd, when Robin Hood was intended to be the central
figure of the play? In that case, Æglamour's part would be a
later addition. But Æglamour, in some respects, is the most
remarkable of all the characters. He strikes the true romantic
note, which is conspicuously absent in Jonson’s main work. What
could be finer in cadence and romantic suggestion than the first
lines of the play, when Æglamour appears for a moment ?
Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
The world may find the spring by following her.
Even if we suppose that Jonson borrowed this opening from
Goffe, we have not got over the difficulty, because Æglamour's
speeches are consistently and strongly romantic in tone. It is
easier to connect them in style and spirit with the additions to
1 Ante, chap. 1, p. 11.
E. L. VI.
CH, XIII.
24
## p. 370 (#388) ############################################
370
Masque and Pastoral
The Spanish Tragedie than with anything else written by Jonson.
The man who wrote those additions and The Sad Shepherd might
have been a great romantic. Castelain' has pointed out that the
prologue divides itself into two parts. The first thirty lines are
the real prologue to The Sad Shepherd. They are beautiful in
feeling, and the silent passing of the Sad Shepherd over the stage
in the middle of them seems absolutely right in imagination, if we
omit the second thirty-six lines about the heresy “that mirth by no
means fits a pastoral. ' These last lines might have been a prologue
for The May Lord, but our problem is to decide when the first
lines were written which form an admirable prologue to The Sad
Shepherd. As to this, we must note that, in spite of the ‘forty
years' of the first line, the succeeding statement, that the public
have at length grown up to him,' must refer to the vogue enjoyed
by Jonson from 1605 to 1615, and cannot mean that he has for-
given the rejection of The New Inne. Another fine romantic motive
in the play is Karolin's kissing of Amie under the mad Æglamour's
compulsion. It compels us to revise all our conceptions of Jonson.
He treats it with a sureness and delicacy of touch that Shakespeare
could hardly have bettered; while, at the same time, he proves
his authorship of the episode by the absurd list of 'lovers’
scriptures' and by putting into innocent Amie's lips the reference to
the dear good angel of the spring,
The nightingale.
But, so far, we have only touched upon one side or aspect of
the play. We must add that the part of the witch is realised with
great power. Alken’s speech beginning ‘Within a gloomy dimble
she doth dwell,' and his later speech which describes the
spanlong elves that dance about a pool,
With each a little changeling in their arms,
are both in blank verse, marked by a freer movement than Jonson
usually permits himself, and they also convey the old world idea
of the witch with a force to be paralleled only in Jonson's own
Masque of Queens, presented in 1609. One would wish to place
these speeches of Alken within measurable distance of that date.
Finally, the presentment of Robin Hood and Marian, while not so
fully romantic as Æglamour's part, is such sunny sweet realism as
touches upon romance; and may have led Jonson to add a fully
romantic note to a play originally intended to prove that mirth
befitted pastoral. Puck-Hairy or Robin Goodfellow appeared in the
i See the note in his Ben Jonson, p. 459.
6
## p. 371 (#389) ############################################
Randolph's Amyntas
371
masque Love Restored, which we have dated 1612; again, we desire
to put the Puck-Hairy of the play and all its Robin Hood scenes
not too far from the splendid Robin Goodfellow of the masque.
But the Scottish dialect, which is the only serious drawback to
the artistic effect of the play, must, surely, have been introduced
after the poet's visit to Scotland in 1618'. That visit may have
stimulated Jonson to compose The Sad Shepherd as we have it ;
our fragment began, perhaps, as The May Lord, for which the
last thirty-six lines were originally intended as prologue. Its
composition should be placed both before and after the visit.
The doubtful question of the date must not divert our attention
from the merits of Jonson's play. The Sad Shepherd reads as if
the poet had forborne to write out his play in prose, as he tells us
was his custom, and had set down his first sketch in verse, rapidly,
with his impulse fresh upon him. Perhaps, he found he could not
finish it by his usual methods. Perhaps, he was disconcerted by the
unfamiliar features of this surprising child of his imagination and
was half-ashamed of it. It is strongly dramatic, and the breath of
Jonson's realism gives it substance, but it is touched by a romantic
grace which is almost romantic passion ; and, therefore, it stands
alone among Jonson's dramas and will always have a special
fascination for his readers.
The third and last pastoral on our list does not require so full
a consideration as the first two. It is not a poem like Fletcher's,
nor unfinished like Jonson's; but it belongs to a new order of
art, which has not the full humanity or high imagination of the
Elizabethan era. Randolph does not attempt, like Fletcher and
Jonson, to cast the pastoral into a new mould. His Amyntas or
the Impossible Dowry follows the conventions of Tasso and
Guarini, and its plot is deliberately artificial, removed from any
contact with life's realities. His style recalls the work of John
Day, and has a scholarly finish and point that raise the play above
the other pastorals of Jacobean times? . It is in curious contrast
to The Muses Looking-Glasse. In that play, the force of the
writing, and a touch of dramatic reality in the sketch of the
puritan onlookers, are remarkable. In Amyntas, Randolph's muse
is strangely subdued and gentle. He develops a very individual
type of pathetic and ironical fantasy in his delineation of the mad
Amyntas, which seems very far removed from the boisterous fun
1 Compare the Irish of The Irish Masque, December 1613, and the Welsh of
For the Honour of Wales, February 1618.
? As to Randolph's university plays, see ante, chap, xn,
24-2
## p. 372 (#390) ############################################
372 Masque and Pastoral
and rollicking rimes of Aristippus. This mellowing and softening
of Randolph's spirit extends to the comic scenes of the play, and
gives us the Latin rimes of the orchard-robbing elves—the
beata Fauni proles
Quibus non est magna moles.
Few such Latin rimes have been written since the Middle Ages.
There are sweet and tender passages of poetry continually occur-
ring in the careful blank verse in which most of the pastoral is
composed, but they are so unemphatic and quiet in tone that some
familiarity with the poem is necessary before the reader becomes
aware of them. Fletcher impetuously injects into his artificial
plot and characters the fire of his poetic genius ; Randolph, with
wonderful art and restraint, keeps his true vein of poetry always
in the right key-his play is a more complete and coherent pro-
duction than either Fletcher's or Jonson’s, but it is essentially
artificial ; its excellence is all in the handling and embroidery.
It was, presumably, the last work of Randolph, and it raises our
opinion both of his art and of his genius.
## p. 373 (#391) ############################################
CHAPTER XIV
THE PURITAN ATTACK UPON THE STAGE
SEEING that the stage has always been intimately associated
with religion, we can scarcely be surprised to find it the subject of
vehement controversy at the two most important periods of re-
ligious revolution known to history—the rise of Christianity and
the dissolution of the medieval ecclesiastical system. The latter
event, being less fundamental and less universal than its prede-
cessor, was, also, less disastrous to the stage, and in England alone,
where the forces for and against the drama were most evenly
matched, was there any real struggle. This struggle possessed
many of the characteristics of that which had gone before; and
indeed, at first sight, the puritan attack upon the Elizabethan
theatre seems little more than a distant echo of the great battle
which had raged around the Roman spectacula. Yet the stage
was hated as sincerely and as bitterly in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries as it was in the third and fourth, and for
reasons strikingly similar. These reasons were both theological
and ethical ; and it will be instructive to consider them separately
by way of introduction.
The Roman stage was essentially a pagan institution and re-
mained such, in spirit, long after the triumph of Christianity. The
early church hated it, therefore, first and foremost for its idolatry.
It represented the old religion in a peculiarly alluring and in-
eradicable form, and it was the most dangerous of those 'pomps
which every Christian renounced at baptism? So long as the
Roman theatre existed, it was felt to be a rival of the church, and
not until the dramatic elements inherent in the catholic ritual had
given birth to the religious drama of the Middle Ages was a
temporary reconciliation between church and stage brought about.
From that time forward, the stage was included in the ecclesiastical
machinery and was freed from the attacks of all save heretics
1 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, $ 4. See also, bibliography s. v. Prynne.
## p. 374 (#392) ############################################
374 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
and reformers? . In the fourteenth century, for example, there was
produced in England A tretise of miraclis pleyinge, in all proba-
bility by one of Wyclif's followers, which condemns the miracle on
the score of its profanity. The reformation itself, however, was at
first not at all, and never completely, hostile to the stage. Fired
by the renewed interest in the classical drama and conscious of
the convenience of the religious play as a controversial weapon”,
reformers, among whom Melanchthon stands conspicuous, were,
in the first half of the sixteenth century, setting themselves,
all over Europe, to bring the stage into the service of the
reformation. England, like Germany, had her protestant drama-
tists, chief of whom were John Bale and, strange as it may sound,
John Foxe, both working under the direct influence of the Lutheran
drama; while, at Cambridge, the movement found its theoretical
exponent in Melanchthon's disciple, Martin Bucer, whose De
honestis ludis“, was published about 1551. Precept and example,
however, were alike soon forgotten in England, and this for two
reasons. First, the English stage was destined by force of cir-
cumstances to become secular. The frequent religious changes
in the middle years of the sixteenth century made it dangerous
for the government to allow the theatre to be used for partisan
purposes, and, accordingly, one regulation after another was passed
to prevent the handling of matters of religion or state upon the
stage, culminating in the proclamation of 16 May 1559, whereby
Elizabeth provided for the strict licensing of the drama. Secondly,
the reformation was itself rapidly changing its character; and,
as Geneva became its centre of authority instead of Wittenberg,
the realm of anti-Christ was mapped out with greater precision
and was found to embrace many spheres of activity which had
hitherto been considered honest". When protestants became
puritans, they were not long in discovering that the drama, which
they had been forbidden to utilise for their own purposes, was
without authority in holy writ, and before long, that it might not
be suffered in any Christian commonwealth. It was natural, also,
1 The most important of these, before Lollard days, were Gerhoh of Reichersberg
and Robert Grosseteste. See Chambers, vol. 11. pp. 98-100.
Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage, p. 73.
3 Chambers, op. cit. vol. 11, pp. 216 ff. ; for the part played by the drama in the
Scots reformation, see ante, vol. III, pp. 122, 141, 161, and, for the whole topic of the
Protestant and humanistic drama, see Creizenach, vols. II and m.
• Scripta Anglicana, 1577, pp. 141—6; Symmes, Débuts de la critique dramatique,
1
app. A.
5 Calvin himself was reluctantly brought into conflict with the stage by the zeal of
his disciples. See Stähelin, Calvin (1863), vol. 1, pp. 392—4.
1
## p. 375 (#393) ############################################
a
Theological Objections 375
that they should hark back to the early fathers for their arguments :
for the puritans had the same casus belli as the fathers, though
in a stronger form. The Elizabethan drama was, in a measure,
the direct heir of the medieval miracle-play: probably, the
contemporaries of the later growth scarcely realised the funda-
mental differences between the two. And the medieval miracle-
play was, in origin, half liturgy and half folk-play: in other
words, it was twice damned, since, like the maypole, it was
heathen, and, like the mass, popish. 'Idolatry,' Cyprian had
declared, “is the mother of all public amusements’; the puritan
could add a second parent-popery. As William Crashawe, father
-
of the poet, put the case in a sermon at Paul's cross :
The ungodly Playes and Enterludes so rife in this nation, what are they
but a bastard of Babylon, a daughter of error and confusion, a hellish device
(the devils own recreation to mock at holy things) by him delivered to the
Heathen, from them to the Papists and from them to us1.
As a 'bastard of Babylon,' the stage which Shakespeare trod
was, in the eyes of his puritan contemporaries, more than immoral:
it was unholy. When this is realised, we catch and understand the
note of passion in tracts which at first sight seem academic essays
in polemic borrowed from early Christian divines.
In other and more obvious ways, also, dramatic performances
conflicted with the religious prejudices of puritans. For example,
there was a conscious rivalry, frequently referred to in the
literature of the subject, between the pulpit and the stage. The
function of the latter, until quite recently, had been almost entirely
didactic; and, as we shall see, its defenders maintained that it was
so still. But the protestant preacher, with the newly-opened Bible
in his hand, would brook no competition. At the mere thought of
comparing a play with a sermon, he raised the cry of 'blasphemy
intolerable'; or he admitted the comparison, only to declare
that 'enterludes weare the divells sarmons? ' Again, the actor's
practice, also derived from medieval tradition, of performing on
Sundays: and holy days did not tend to soften the exasperation of
the godly, who listened with indignant horror to the sound of
the player's trumpet passing the open door of the church and
3
1 Sermon, 14 February 1607. See, also, Selden, Table Talk (1892), p. 134.
? Harington, Nugae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 191, quoting a puritan objector. Osmund
Lake, A Probe Theologicall, 1612, declares that God's blessing cannot rest upon the
Scriptural play because he hath ordained the Preaching, and not the Playing of bis
word,' pp. 267–272.
3 Furnivall (Stubbes's Anatomy, part 1, pp. 296—301) brings together many in.
teresting passages in reference to Sunday sports and Sabbath-breaking.
## p. 376 (#394) ############################################
376 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
mingling defiantly with the peal of the bells. Finally, the actor, as
the early fathers had discovered and every puritan was careful to
point out, was bound by the very necessities of his craft to infringe
the divine law which forbade one sex to wear the costume of the
other; and the point was a particularly telling one in an age when
it was customary for boys to act female parts? All things con-
sidered, it was natural that the stage should appear to rest under
the peculiar displeasure of God. Lists of divine judgments meted
out to sinful players or those who visited the theatre are a common
feature in the tracts of the period. An earthquake, the fall of a
scaffold or, indeed, a public disaster of any kind, also, seemed to
the devout primitive intelligence of the time to indicate the
Almighty's wrath at the continued existence of playhouses. Few
things of this kind made a greater impression than London's
grim annual guest-the plague. As one of the earliest writers
against the stage unanswerably put the matter : 'the cause of
plagues is sinne, if you look to it well: and the cause of sinne
are playes : therefore the cause of plagues are playes? '
Turning from the theological to the moral aspect of the matter,
we may notice that here, too, puritans were walking in the
steps of the early fathers. Roman shows and Elizabethan stage
plays were both denounced as sinks of iniquity. Led into many
absurdities by his theological prejudices, the puritan reformer,
nevertheless, was at one with the best tendencies of his age
in his attack upon 'abuses. ' A considerable literature upon
this subject has come down to us from the sixteenth century,
the most famous example being Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses.
A perusal of this and similar productions shows us that puri-
tanism was largely a revolt against medievalism; for a great
number of the evils denounced were medieval practices and
observances, folk festivals and such like, often innocent enough
in themselves but commonly tending to rioting and wantonness.
And, in singling out the theatre from among these as the special
object of his abhorrence and invective, the puritan was not
actuated by theological reasons alone. Undoubtedly, the stage
was the main channel through which what may be called the
1 Deuteronomy xxii, 5. Ben Jonson thought the matter so important that he asked
Selden's advice upon it. The antiquary's letter in reply, dated 28 February 1615, is
interesting as an early example of biblical criticism. See Opera Omnia (1726), vol. 11,
pp. 1690—6; also, De Venere Syriacâ (Opera, vol. II, p. 365) and Table Talk, 4. 8.
· Thomas White, Sermon, 1576, p. 47; and the lord mayor remarks, in 1584,
that to play in plague time increases the plague by infection, to play out of plague time
calls down the plague from God. See Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 173.
## p. 377 (#395) ############################################
6
Feeling on the Continent
377
saturnalian elements of medieval life emptied themselves into the
broad stream of the renascence. Furthermore, the rise of a secular
theatre was one of the many problems created by the break-up of
the medieval world which were engaging the attention
of
popular writers all over Europe in the sixteenth century. It is
remarkable that, with hardly an exception, they condemned it
as a sinister development, and gave moral reasons for excluding
the player from the commonwealth. When a man like Montaigne,
in one essay, classes 'enterlude-players' with ‘harlots and curti-
zans , and, in another, describes them as 'vagabond objects,' we
are not surprised to find Jean Bodin expressing the strongest
disapprobation of plays in his Six livres de la Republique", and the
well known Jesuit publicist Mariana, in a chapter on 'Spectacles'
in his De Rege et Regis Institutione (1599), denouncing the
evils of the theatre and recommending its strict regulations.
Not a few of these continental writers were translated into
English and so came to influence the development of puritan
opinion. It is interesting, for example, to notice that two of the
most popular translations of the Tudor period, North’s version of
the Spaniard Guevara's El Relox de Principes (1557) and Sand-
ford's rendering of the German Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine
et vanitate scientiarum (1569), contain unfavourable references
to the stage. Puritans, however, did not have it all their own
way. In 1559, William Bavand produced a translation of a
Latin treatise, this time, appropriately enough, from Italy, under
the title : A Woorke of Joannes Ferrarius Montanus touchynge
the good orderynge of a common weale, which is important as
being the first book in English to offer a defence of the secular
drama, assigning it a place in a well ordered state on the ground
that it 'doth minister unto us good ensamples 4. ' This was exactly
the line of argument that all subsequent English defenders of the
drama adopted. Equally important on the other side is Sir
Geffraie Fenton's Forme of Christian pollicie gathered out of
French". In his treatment of stage plays and enterludes, the
unknown French writer anticipates in a few pages all the principal
arguments of the puritans, and his book, translated in 1574 just
a
See Essays (Florio's translation), bk. I, chaps. XLII and xlii.
? English edition, 1606, bk. vi, chap. I, pp. 645, 646.
3 Bk. I, chap. xv. Cf. , also, his Contra los Juegos Publicos (Obras, vol. II, pp.
413–462).
* Bk. v, chap. VIII.
5 Yet Fenton, in his Tragicall Discourses (1567), employs the same arguments in
support of the novel as were used later by apologists for the drama.
