The city usually
resisted
these recommenda-
tions with all the power and ingenuity at its command.
tions with all the power and ingenuity at its command.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
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.
## p. 378 (#396) ############################################
378 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
before the attack began in England, exercised an appreciable
influence upon Northbrooke and was read and quoted by the
author of the Third Blast. Other examples, also, might be added
to our list, such as a translation from Petrarch by Francis
Twynne', who introduces into his original an unfavourable comment
upon the newly erected Theater and Curtain.
The puritan opposition to the English stage did not burst forth
in any violence until about 1576; but there are indications of its
existence, apart from the translations just noticed, long before
this date. English humanism, for example, though, for reasons
already given, inclined to look favourably upon the drama, was in
this as in many other respects laying down the lines upon which
puritanism developed later. Roger Ascham was no puritan;
yet his famous outburst against the popular romances of the
day is remarkably similar in tone and feeling to the invectives
launched by subsequent writers against plays which, to a large
extent, were nothing but dramatised versions of these very
romances. The connection between the humanistic attack upon
the Italian novel and the puritan attack upon the romantic drama
comes out most clearly in the case of William Alley, bishop
of Exeter, whose condemnation of Wanton Bookes' in The
Poore Man's Librarie (1565) expressly embraces plays. Alley
appears to have been the first in England, since Lollard days,
to take up the pen against the stage; he was the first English-
man, also, to cite with approbation the example of the ancient
city of Marseilles, which ‘kept so greate gravitie' that it would
never allow a player within its walls. A classical precedent
of this kind was so well adapted to the case of the city of
London that it was eagerly seized upon by later writers and
reappears in almost every pamphlet written against the stage.
Another remarkable indication of the prevalence of the anti-
dramatic spirit at this comparatively early period is to be
found in the prologue of Lewis Wager's Life and Repentance
of Marie Magdalene, first printed in 1566 but probably acted
considerably earlier, which shows us a dramatist not only already
on the defensive but employing the same arguments as were used,
afterwards, by Lodge, Gager and Heywood. But perhaps the most
tangible proof of the rising puritan flood was the quiet but
persistent suppression by bishop, preacher and zealous mayor of
local plays and pageants throughout England during the middle
years of the sixteenth century, as no longer seemly in this happie
1 Phisicke against Fortune (v. bibliography).
## p. 379 (#397) ############################################
General Attitude of the Authorities 379
time of the gospell\' London, almost the only city in the kingdom
with its own stage when the cleansing process was completed, was
to be the scene of the great struggle between puritan and player.
The puritan forces advanced against the London stage in three
lines : preachers, pamphleteers and civic authorities. In the
nature of the case, it is impossible to do more than indicate here
the incessant denunciation of the stage from the pulpits, and
especially from the famous rostrum at Paul's cross. The work of
the preachers was to sound the note for battle and to urge the
godly forward in the war; but, save for one or two sermons
which have found their way into print, few traces of their contri-
bution to the controversy have come down to our day. With the
pamphleteer it was different; his weapon was the book, and the
book has a tendency to endure. It will be well, however, to
defer our consideration of this aspect of the campaign until we
have examined the efforts of the corporation of London to drive
players out of the city; for, in its opening phases at any rate,
the literary attack was of secondary importance as compared with
the administrative. Indeed, to some extent, it seems to have been
prompted and controlled by the lord mayor himself.
The city merchant had reasons, other than those already
mentioned, for hating the player. The customary processions
through the streets, before playing, interfered with traffic. Public
performances were a possible source of disturbance. As for the
actor himself, he and his like, as the lord mayor informed the
privy council upon one occasion, were 'a very superfluous sort
of men? ' He was either the retainer of some nobleman, in which
case he was supported by his master, instead of being left to make
his living at the public expense, or he was by law a rogue
and a vagabond and ought to be dealt with accordingly. He
lived for and by pleasure alone, grew rich by beguiling the simple
poor of their money and, hereupon, aped the manners and habits
of gentlefolk, swaggering about the city in dress so extravagant
and costly as to be positively offensive to the eye'. In short,
his profession, as it seemed to the civic mind, represented a definite
and constant drain on the national resources. In the language
of the day, he was a caterpillar of the commonwealth. '
The player, therefore, could expect no mercy from the city
authorities ; but, fortunately for the development of the English
i Chambers, op. cit. vol. 81, pp. 110-113; Laneham's letter, Furnivall, pp. 26–28.
2 Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 46.
3 A Second and Third Blast, Hazlitt, op. cit. p. 133.
• Schoole of Abuse, Arber, p. 39. Anatomy of Abuses, Furnivall, p. 146.
>
## p. 380 (#398) ############################################
380 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
а
romantic drama, he found a rock of defence in the queen and her
courtiers Elizabeth liked to be provided every Christmas with
theatrical amusements, but refused to be responsible for the entire
maintenance of a special company. The privy council, accordingly,
was instructed to satisfy both her love of pleasure and her passion
for economy by seeing that the common players' were allowed
full opportunity, not merely of practising for Christmas festivities,
but of earning sufficient to maintain themselves at other seasons.
The privy council was not sorry to have an excuse for interfering
with the city's internal policy; but there was no reason why
without special royal injunctions, it should have lifted a finger
to succour the stage. Throughout its whole career, the Elizabethan
theatre, though essentially popular in origin and character,
depended for its very existence, upon the patronage of the court,
and the quarrel which we are now to consider was an early
trial of strength between the same forces which, later, broke
up England into two hostile camps. Apart from other considera-
tions, the legal status of the actor would have been sufficient of
itself to produce a conflict. It was defined by two regulations :
the proclamation of 16 May 1559, issued to prevent the handling
of religious and political questions upon the stage, which forbade
performances in any town without a licence from the mayor; and
the statute of 1572, which imposed the penalties of vagrancy upon
any player not in the service of some nobleman? . In other words,
acting companies, while placed under the direct protection of
great lords at court, were not allowed to produce plays without
the express permission of the lord mayor. Thus, the stage was
subject to two authorities, not only different in character but
rivals in policy and interest. The lord mayor was perpetually
trying to put his legal powers into force and so to clear the city of
actors; the court party, on the other hand, as perpetually inter-
vened through the privy council, or overrode the mayor's authority
by royal patents and other expedients of a similar nature. In the
end, the stage succeeded in freeing itself from the grip of the city,
but found itself, ipso facto, more than ever dependent upon the
court, and under the particular sway of the master of the revels.
A detailed account of the struggle would be scarcely possible
in the present state of our knowledge—80 meagre, fragmentary
and tantalising is the evidence hitherto brought to light upon the
subject. The normal course of the controversy may, however,
be followed in the correspondence between the privy council and
1 Cf. as to these regulations, ante, chap. x; and see Hazlitt, op. cit. pp. 19, 21,
## p. 381 (#399) ############################################
The City and the Stage 381
the lord mayor, to be found in the council's register and in the
city archives known as Remembrancia! The letters are amusing
.
enough. The city's trump card, played with wearisome monotony,
was the plague, almost as inevitable in Shakespeare's London as
smoke is in ours. While the sickness raged, the privy council
was as ready to close the playhouses as was the corporation? But,
ordinarily, the plague was only a summer visitor. In the autumn,
therefore, the lord mayor would receive a letter from the council
reminding him that the queen must have her Christmas amuse-
ments, and requiring him to allow the actors an opportunity of
practising their art.
The city usually resisted these recommenda-
tions with all the power and ingenuity at its command.
Matters remaining in this constant state of tension, an occasional
crisis was inevitable; especially when an unusually severe epidemic
gave the lord mayor an excuse for attempting to suppress the
stage altogether. The documents at our disposal give us the
particulars of three such crises, two of which had an appreciable
influence upon the character and number of the tracts we are to
examine later. We even catch a glimpse of a possible fourth at
the time of the great plague in 1563, when Grindal, then bishop of
London, is found writing to Cecil to advise a year's inhibition of
all plays in the city and for three miles round, adding, significantly,
and if it were for ever it were not amiss' Our records, however,
do not begin till 1572 when, as Harrison tells us, with approval, in
his Chronologie", players were expelled because of the plague ;
and it seems that the lord mayor refused to re-admit them, if we
may judge from the letters of the privy council on their behalf
in 1573 and, again, in the spring of 1574. These letters, evidently,
were of no avail; for, on 7 May 1574, the court party found it
necessary to take out a royal patent in favour of the earl of
Leicester's company, giving it express permission to play within
the city notwithstanding any orders to the contrary, and eluding
the consequences of the proclamation of 1559 by stipulating
that its performances should be licensed by the master of the
revels. This is the beginning of the policy of subordinating the
9
i See Acts of the Privy Council, ed. Dasent, T. R. , and Malone Society Collections,
part 1, the latter of which gives all the letters from the Remembrancia and the
Burghley Papers, dealing with the stage. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the register
from June 1581 to Feb. 1586, and in the Remembrancia, from March 1584 to Jan. 1587.
2 Cf. ante, chap. x.
8 Remains of Grindal, Parker Soc. Publications, pp. 268, 269, Malone Society Col-
lections, part 1, p. 148.
* Furnivall, Harrison's Description of England, New Shaksp. Soc. part 1, p. liv.
cit. vol. VIII, pp. 131, 132, 215.
Hazlitt, op. cit. p. 25.
7
3 Acts, op.
6
## p. 382 (#400) ############################################
382 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
stage to the revels' office. Its immediate effect was to force the
city to open its gates; but, later in the same year, the lord mayor
retaliated by procuring an order of the common council re-
quiring that all playhouses, companies and plays should be
licensed by the corporation, and enumerating in a preamble all
the 'great disorders and inconvenyances' occasioned by the drama;
which proves beyond doubt that the city's attitude was largely
influenced by puritanical convictions? . At this juncture, our in-
formation becomes insufficient to follow the sequence of events.
But the upshot of the conflict is clear. Certain players, finding
the city obdurate and unwilling to submit to its severe regulations,
began to look about them for some means of carrying on their
business out of reach of the mayor's authority. Thus, while
the innyards of the city continued to be used for dramatic
purposes, in 1575, the foundations of the first permanent playhouse
in London were laid 'in the fields to the North of the City,' and,
in 1576, or the following year, the buildings were completed?
The puritan watched with horror the rise of these “houses of
purpose, built with great charges for the maintenance of them and
that without the liberties, as who shall say: there, let them say
what they will, we will play&'; but he could not do anything save
vent his rage in sermons and tracts.
The second crisis appears to have centred round the great
plague of 1582—3, though there are signs of its approach several
In 1578, we find Fleetwood, the city recorder,
referring to certain standing orders by Burghley for dealing with
plays * ; and, in the correspondence of 1580, it is evident that
a campaign is on foot for the abolition of the stage not only in
the city but also in the fields An earthquake in April that
year, celebrated in a contemporary ballad beginning:
Comme from the plaio, comme from the playe:
the house will fall so people saye:
the earth quakes lett us hast awaye 6,
probably did much to strengthen the city's cause, and the plague
came to its assistance in 1581, so that the playhouses were shut all
through the summer. Then began the customary struggle over the
years earlier.
:
1 Hazlitt, op. cit. p. 27; Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 175.
2 Cf. ante, chap. X.
3 Stockwood, Sermon, 1578, p. 134.
4 Wright, Elizabeth, vol. 11, p. 88; Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 157.
• Malone Society Collections, part I, pp. 46–49.
6 Arber, Stationers' Register, vol. 11, p. 167 b. Cf. passage from Gardniers' Doomes-
day Booke, 1606, quoted in Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. , Outlines, vol. I, p. 343, and
Stubbes's Anatomie, part 1, p. 180.
## p. 383 (#401) ############################################
The Crisis of 1582—3
383
players' re-admission. In December, we find the privy council, in
answer to a pitiful petition from the acting companies, obliged to
renew in a stronger form its usual reminder to the lord mayor that
the Christmas festivities were approaching? And, on 24 December,
the master of the revels was granted by royal patent certain wide,
if vague, powers over the whole stage which seem to have been
intended to counterbalance, if not to override, the powers of the
lord mayor? . It was probably this patent which called forth, as an
answer from the city, the famous undated act of common council
for the permanent prohibition of plays in the city which has been
usually, but, as has now been proved, erroneously, ascribed to the
year 15753. London had followed in the wake of Marseilles; the
filthy player had been expelled. At the beginning of 1582, the
privy council pleaded with the mayor to invoke his late 'in-
hibityon*,' but in vain, and further discussion was stopped for
that year by the plague.
It was not until the autumn of 1583 that the plague abated
sufficiently to allow of a renewal of the dispute. But, in the mean-
time, two events of great importance had taken place; the first prob-
ably doing more than a thousand learned treatises to stamp the stage
as an unholy institution. On Sunday 13 January 1583, great
crowds were gathered to watch the bearbaiting at Paris garden,
a pleasure resort outside the jurisdiction of the city, when a
wooden scaffold on which many were seated collapsed, killing
a few and injuring many more'. It seemed a direct fulfilment of
the prophecies of puritans, a 'judgment' which not even the
most abandoned playgoer could disregard. Yet the court hardened
its heart like Pharaoh, for, on 10 March, it once more stepped
in on the players' behalf. At Walsingham's suggestion and under
the direction of the master of the revels, 'a companie of players
for her Majestie' was formed. This, obviously, was intended as
a move against the lord mayor, though it led, also, to important
consequences for the stage. As in the case of the Leicester
1 Acts, vol. XIII, p. 269.
9 Chambers, Tudor Revels, pp. 62, 72, 75.
3 Orders appointed to be executed (Singleton), Art. 62. For the question of date,
v. Chambers, The Academy, 24 August 1895, and Malone Society Collections, part 1,
pp. 168–9.
• Malone Society Collections, part I, pp. 52—54; Acts, vol. XIII, p. 404. There is
evidently some confusion of dates here. The letter of the privy council is given
11 April in the Remembrancia and 25 April or May in Acts. These are not different
letters, as is stated in Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 54.
3 Malone Society Collections, part I, pp. 59, 61, 65, 159, 161, 171 for references to
this incident.
& Tudor Revels, p. 62.
## p. 384 (#402) ############################################
384 The Puritán Attack upon the Stage
company ten years before, the city was forced to yield for the
moment, and, by arrangement with the privy council, the royal
company was admitted into the city from the autumn of 1583 till
the following Shrovetide? When, however, her majesty's players
sought re-admission in the autumn of 1584, they were met with the
absolute refusal of the lord mayor. He had been tricked the season
before, for all the playhouses had been filled with men calling
themselves the queen's players. The company could do nothing
beyond appealing to the privy council. The text of this appeal,
together with a detailed answer from the city and certain other
documents connected with it, has been preserved for us among the
Burghley papers? ; but we are completely ignorant of the events that
followed. In much the same tantalising fashion, we catch a glimpse
of an attempt upon the Theater and the Curtain in the same year.
The lord mayor's letters of 1580 tell us that he was then already
preparing to stretch forth his hand against the impudent Jerichoes
in the fields; and, in 1583, we find him pleading with Walsingham
that they should be closed. In June 1584, he actually seems to
have accomplished his purpose ; for, apparently, by reason of a
brawl outside the Theater entirely unconnected with actors or
their craft, he managed to procure an order from the privy
council for the destruction of the houses. Again the curtain
falls at the most exciting point. We do not even know whether
the order was ever carried out.
The year 1584, evidently, was a very critical one in the history
of the English stage; yet we cannot doubt that the players suc-
cessfully weathered the storm. Certainly, plays did not cease to be
acted in London ; nor do the houses in the fields appear to have
suffered any material damage. Meanwhile, the stage drifted more
and more under the control of the revels' office, until, in 1592, we
find the lord mayor, apparently on the advice of archbishop
Whitgift, proposing that the master, Edmond Tilney, should be
bought over to the city's point of view by an annuity
The third, and, so far as we know, the last, serious crisis in the
relations between the city and the stage occurred in 1597. Thomas
Nashe, writing to a friend in 1596, complains that
i Malone Society Collections, part 1, pp. 66, 67.
Ibid. p. 168.
3 Ibid. pp. 1646. Cf, as to this brawl, ante, chap. x.
• Ibid. pp. 68-70; Tudor Revels, p. 78, for the skirmish between the authorities
and the stage, in 1589, which arose out of the Marprelate controversy, was nothing to
do with the matter in hand. See above, vol. m, of the present work, p. 392; Malone
Society Collections, part 11, p. 180; Acts, vol. XVIII, pp. 214—5; Collier, vol. 1,
pp. 275—7.
## p. 385 (#403) ############################################
The Crisis of 1597
385
the players . . . are piteously persecuted by the Lord Mayor and the Alder-
men; and however in their old Lord's time they thought their estate settled,
it is now so uncertain they cannot build upon it1.
The 'old Lord' here referred to was lord Hunsdon, lord chamber-
lain, a staunch supporter of the players' interests in the privy
council. He died on 22 July 1596 and was succeeded in office
by the puritanically minded lord Cobham? We do not know
to what measure of persecution in 1596 Nashe is here referring ;
but, on 28 July 1597, we find the lord mayor addressing an
interesting letter to the council and enclosing a statement
of the inconveniences that grow by stage playes,' which we
recognise as the basis of many earlier letters. The council was
desired to take measures ‘for the present staie and fynall sup-
pressinge' of plays both within and without the liberties, and it
immediately complied by sending an order to the justices of
Middlesex for the dismantling of the Theater and Curtain 'so
as they maie not be ymploied agayne to suche use". ' Once again,
however, we are left in the dark as to the fate of the houses in the
fields. As a matter of fact, the Theater was closed this very month
and year, but the cause appears to have been nothing more
serious than a difficulty in renewing the lease. Perhaps, the death
of lord Cobham and the influence of the new lord chamberlain,
another lord Hunsdon, may have weakened the force of the
order. In any case, the civic authorities do not seem to have
gained much from a fight of over a quarter of a century. Sunday
performances were abolished, at least in theory; playing was
forbidden in Lent; and certain other restrictions were placed
upon the freedom of the actor. But the enemies of the stage had
aimed at abolition, not regulation
It is now time to turn to the literary side of the puritan
campaign and to speak of the bombardment which the pam-
phleteers kept up, while the city fathers made their repeated
assaults upon the stage. It will be remembered how the players
had nonplussed the corporation by setting up their houses outside
the walls of the city. The question was now as to what could be
| Fleay's Chronicle of Stage, p. 157 ; Collier, vol. I, pp. 292—4.
? Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 39.
3 Ibid. pp. 78–80.
4 Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. , Outlines (7th ed. ), vol. I, p. 356 ; Acts, vol. xxvii, p. 313.
5 For the order against the theatres in 1600, which, curiously enough, the city
did not carry out, perhaps because it had some reference to the Essex rising, perhaps
because the lord mayor of the year seems to have been himself in favour of plays, see
Simpson, New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. , 1874, vol. 11, pp. 386–9; Lee, Life of Shakespeare,
pp. 174—6, 212—3; Fleay's Chronicle of Stage, p. 161; Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. ,
Outlines, vol. I, pp. 307–9.
E. L. VI. CH. XIV.
25
## p. 386 (#404) ############################################
386 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
accomplished by the voice of the preacher and the pen of the
pamphleteer. The erection of the Theater and the Curtain in
1576 and 1577 acted at once upon the already highly charged
atmosphere and called down a veritable hail of sermons and tracts.
Of the former, only one or two, which are preserved for our
edification in book form, need here be noticed. There is, for
example, the sermon of one Thomas White, delivered at Paul's
cross on 9 December 1576 and, apparently, repeated on 3 November
in the following year, to which we are indebted for the syllogistic
statement of the plague argument already quoted, and which, by
its reference to the sumptuous Theatre houses, a continuall
monument of London's prodigalitie and folly' helps us to deter-
mine the date of their establishment. Another divine who, by
publication, sought a larger congregation than had assembled to
hear him at Paul's cross was John Stockwood; his sermon,
dated 24 August 1578, laments the immorality of playhouses
and the immense gains of players, and gives a very forcible
expression to that feeling of rivalry between stage and pulpit to
which we have referred.
From the printed sermon to the godly treatise is no great step.
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.
## p. 378 (#396) ############################################
378 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
before the attack began in England, exercised an appreciable
influence upon Northbrooke and was read and quoted by the
author of the Third Blast. Other examples, also, might be added
to our list, such as a translation from Petrarch by Francis
Twynne', who introduces into his original an unfavourable comment
upon the newly erected Theater and Curtain.
The puritan opposition to the English stage did not burst forth
in any violence until about 1576; but there are indications of its
existence, apart from the translations just noticed, long before
this date. English humanism, for example, though, for reasons
already given, inclined to look favourably upon the drama, was in
this as in many other respects laying down the lines upon which
puritanism developed later. Roger Ascham was no puritan;
yet his famous outburst against the popular romances of the
day is remarkably similar in tone and feeling to the invectives
launched by subsequent writers against plays which, to a large
extent, were nothing but dramatised versions of these very
romances. The connection between the humanistic attack upon
the Italian novel and the puritan attack upon the romantic drama
comes out most clearly in the case of William Alley, bishop
of Exeter, whose condemnation of Wanton Bookes' in The
Poore Man's Librarie (1565) expressly embraces plays. Alley
appears to have been the first in England, since Lollard days,
to take up the pen against the stage; he was the first English-
man, also, to cite with approbation the example of the ancient
city of Marseilles, which ‘kept so greate gravitie' that it would
never allow a player within its walls. A classical precedent
of this kind was so well adapted to the case of the city of
London that it was eagerly seized upon by later writers and
reappears in almost every pamphlet written against the stage.
Another remarkable indication of the prevalence of the anti-
dramatic spirit at this comparatively early period is to be
found in the prologue of Lewis Wager's Life and Repentance
of Marie Magdalene, first printed in 1566 but probably acted
considerably earlier, which shows us a dramatist not only already
on the defensive but employing the same arguments as were used,
afterwards, by Lodge, Gager and Heywood. But perhaps the most
tangible proof of the rising puritan flood was the quiet but
persistent suppression by bishop, preacher and zealous mayor of
local plays and pageants throughout England during the middle
years of the sixteenth century, as no longer seemly in this happie
1 Phisicke against Fortune (v. bibliography).
## p. 379 (#397) ############################################
General Attitude of the Authorities 379
time of the gospell\' London, almost the only city in the kingdom
with its own stage when the cleansing process was completed, was
to be the scene of the great struggle between puritan and player.
The puritan forces advanced against the London stage in three
lines : preachers, pamphleteers and civic authorities. In the
nature of the case, it is impossible to do more than indicate here
the incessant denunciation of the stage from the pulpits, and
especially from the famous rostrum at Paul's cross. The work of
the preachers was to sound the note for battle and to urge the
godly forward in the war; but, save for one or two sermons
which have found their way into print, few traces of their contri-
bution to the controversy have come down to our day. With the
pamphleteer it was different; his weapon was the book, and the
book has a tendency to endure. It will be well, however, to
defer our consideration of this aspect of the campaign until we
have examined the efforts of the corporation of London to drive
players out of the city; for, in its opening phases at any rate,
the literary attack was of secondary importance as compared with
the administrative. Indeed, to some extent, it seems to have been
prompted and controlled by the lord mayor himself.
The city merchant had reasons, other than those already
mentioned, for hating the player. The customary processions
through the streets, before playing, interfered with traffic. Public
performances were a possible source of disturbance. As for the
actor himself, he and his like, as the lord mayor informed the
privy council upon one occasion, were 'a very superfluous sort
of men? ' He was either the retainer of some nobleman, in which
case he was supported by his master, instead of being left to make
his living at the public expense, or he was by law a rogue
and a vagabond and ought to be dealt with accordingly. He
lived for and by pleasure alone, grew rich by beguiling the simple
poor of their money and, hereupon, aped the manners and habits
of gentlefolk, swaggering about the city in dress so extravagant
and costly as to be positively offensive to the eye'. In short,
his profession, as it seemed to the civic mind, represented a definite
and constant drain on the national resources. In the language
of the day, he was a caterpillar of the commonwealth. '
The player, therefore, could expect no mercy from the city
authorities ; but, fortunately for the development of the English
i Chambers, op. cit. vol. 81, pp. 110-113; Laneham's letter, Furnivall, pp. 26–28.
2 Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 46.
3 A Second and Third Blast, Hazlitt, op. cit. p. 133.
• Schoole of Abuse, Arber, p. 39. Anatomy of Abuses, Furnivall, p. 146.
>
## p. 380 (#398) ############################################
380 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
а
romantic drama, he found a rock of defence in the queen and her
courtiers Elizabeth liked to be provided every Christmas with
theatrical amusements, but refused to be responsible for the entire
maintenance of a special company. The privy council, accordingly,
was instructed to satisfy both her love of pleasure and her passion
for economy by seeing that the common players' were allowed
full opportunity, not merely of practising for Christmas festivities,
but of earning sufficient to maintain themselves at other seasons.
The privy council was not sorry to have an excuse for interfering
with the city's internal policy; but there was no reason why
without special royal injunctions, it should have lifted a finger
to succour the stage. Throughout its whole career, the Elizabethan
theatre, though essentially popular in origin and character,
depended for its very existence, upon the patronage of the court,
and the quarrel which we are now to consider was an early
trial of strength between the same forces which, later, broke
up England into two hostile camps. Apart from other considera-
tions, the legal status of the actor would have been sufficient of
itself to produce a conflict. It was defined by two regulations :
the proclamation of 16 May 1559, issued to prevent the handling
of religious and political questions upon the stage, which forbade
performances in any town without a licence from the mayor; and
the statute of 1572, which imposed the penalties of vagrancy upon
any player not in the service of some nobleman? . In other words,
acting companies, while placed under the direct protection of
great lords at court, were not allowed to produce plays without
the express permission of the lord mayor. Thus, the stage was
subject to two authorities, not only different in character but
rivals in policy and interest. The lord mayor was perpetually
trying to put his legal powers into force and so to clear the city of
actors; the court party, on the other hand, as perpetually inter-
vened through the privy council, or overrode the mayor's authority
by royal patents and other expedients of a similar nature. In the
end, the stage succeeded in freeing itself from the grip of the city,
but found itself, ipso facto, more than ever dependent upon the
court, and under the particular sway of the master of the revels.
A detailed account of the struggle would be scarcely possible
in the present state of our knowledge—80 meagre, fragmentary
and tantalising is the evidence hitherto brought to light upon the
subject. The normal course of the controversy may, however,
be followed in the correspondence between the privy council and
1 Cf. as to these regulations, ante, chap. x; and see Hazlitt, op. cit. pp. 19, 21,
## p. 381 (#399) ############################################
The City and the Stage 381
the lord mayor, to be found in the council's register and in the
city archives known as Remembrancia! The letters are amusing
.
enough. The city's trump card, played with wearisome monotony,
was the plague, almost as inevitable in Shakespeare's London as
smoke is in ours. While the sickness raged, the privy council
was as ready to close the playhouses as was the corporation? But,
ordinarily, the plague was only a summer visitor. In the autumn,
therefore, the lord mayor would receive a letter from the council
reminding him that the queen must have her Christmas amuse-
ments, and requiring him to allow the actors an opportunity of
practising their art.
The city usually resisted these recommenda-
tions with all the power and ingenuity at its command.
Matters remaining in this constant state of tension, an occasional
crisis was inevitable; especially when an unusually severe epidemic
gave the lord mayor an excuse for attempting to suppress the
stage altogether. The documents at our disposal give us the
particulars of three such crises, two of which had an appreciable
influence upon the character and number of the tracts we are to
examine later. We even catch a glimpse of a possible fourth at
the time of the great plague in 1563, when Grindal, then bishop of
London, is found writing to Cecil to advise a year's inhibition of
all plays in the city and for three miles round, adding, significantly,
and if it were for ever it were not amiss' Our records, however,
do not begin till 1572 when, as Harrison tells us, with approval, in
his Chronologie", players were expelled because of the plague ;
and it seems that the lord mayor refused to re-admit them, if we
may judge from the letters of the privy council on their behalf
in 1573 and, again, in the spring of 1574. These letters, evidently,
were of no avail; for, on 7 May 1574, the court party found it
necessary to take out a royal patent in favour of the earl of
Leicester's company, giving it express permission to play within
the city notwithstanding any orders to the contrary, and eluding
the consequences of the proclamation of 1559 by stipulating
that its performances should be licensed by the master of the
revels. This is the beginning of the policy of subordinating the
9
i See Acts of the Privy Council, ed. Dasent, T. R. , and Malone Society Collections,
part 1, the latter of which gives all the letters from the Remembrancia and the
Burghley Papers, dealing with the stage. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the register
from June 1581 to Feb. 1586, and in the Remembrancia, from March 1584 to Jan. 1587.
2 Cf. ante, chap. x.
8 Remains of Grindal, Parker Soc. Publications, pp. 268, 269, Malone Society Col-
lections, part 1, p. 148.
* Furnivall, Harrison's Description of England, New Shaksp. Soc. part 1, p. liv.
cit. vol. VIII, pp. 131, 132, 215.
Hazlitt, op. cit. p. 25.
7
3 Acts, op.
6
## p. 382 (#400) ############################################
382 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
stage to the revels' office. Its immediate effect was to force the
city to open its gates; but, later in the same year, the lord mayor
retaliated by procuring an order of the common council re-
quiring that all playhouses, companies and plays should be
licensed by the corporation, and enumerating in a preamble all
the 'great disorders and inconvenyances' occasioned by the drama;
which proves beyond doubt that the city's attitude was largely
influenced by puritanical convictions? . At this juncture, our in-
formation becomes insufficient to follow the sequence of events.
But the upshot of the conflict is clear. Certain players, finding
the city obdurate and unwilling to submit to its severe regulations,
began to look about them for some means of carrying on their
business out of reach of the mayor's authority. Thus, while
the innyards of the city continued to be used for dramatic
purposes, in 1575, the foundations of the first permanent playhouse
in London were laid 'in the fields to the North of the City,' and,
in 1576, or the following year, the buildings were completed?
The puritan watched with horror the rise of these “houses of
purpose, built with great charges for the maintenance of them and
that without the liberties, as who shall say: there, let them say
what they will, we will play&'; but he could not do anything save
vent his rage in sermons and tracts.
The second crisis appears to have centred round the great
plague of 1582—3, though there are signs of its approach several
In 1578, we find Fleetwood, the city recorder,
referring to certain standing orders by Burghley for dealing with
plays * ; and, in the correspondence of 1580, it is evident that
a campaign is on foot for the abolition of the stage not only in
the city but also in the fields An earthquake in April that
year, celebrated in a contemporary ballad beginning:
Comme from the plaio, comme from the playe:
the house will fall so people saye:
the earth quakes lett us hast awaye 6,
probably did much to strengthen the city's cause, and the plague
came to its assistance in 1581, so that the playhouses were shut all
through the summer. Then began the customary struggle over the
years earlier.
:
1 Hazlitt, op. cit. p. 27; Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 175.
2 Cf. ante, chap. X.
3 Stockwood, Sermon, 1578, p. 134.
4 Wright, Elizabeth, vol. 11, p. 88; Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 157.
• Malone Society Collections, part I, pp. 46–49.
6 Arber, Stationers' Register, vol. 11, p. 167 b. Cf. passage from Gardniers' Doomes-
day Booke, 1606, quoted in Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. , Outlines, vol. I, p. 343, and
Stubbes's Anatomie, part 1, p. 180.
## p. 383 (#401) ############################################
The Crisis of 1582—3
383
players' re-admission. In December, we find the privy council, in
answer to a pitiful petition from the acting companies, obliged to
renew in a stronger form its usual reminder to the lord mayor that
the Christmas festivities were approaching? And, on 24 December,
the master of the revels was granted by royal patent certain wide,
if vague, powers over the whole stage which seem to have been
intended to counterbalance, if not to override, the powers of the
lord mayor? . It was probably this patent which called forth, as an
answer from the city, the famous undated act of common council
for the permanent prohibition of plays in the city which has been
usually, but, as has now been proved, erroneously, ascribed to the
year 15753. London had followed in the wake of Marseilles; the
filthy player had been expelled. At the beginning of 1582, the
privy council pleaded with the mayor to invoke his late 'in-
hibityon*,' but in vain, and further discussion was stopped for
that year by the plague.
It was not until the autumn of 1583 that the plague abated
sufficiently to allow of a renewal of the dispute. But, in the mean-
time, two events of great importance had taken place; the first prob-
ably doing more than a thousand learned treatises to stamp the stage
as an unholy institution. On Sunday 13 January 1583, great
crowds were gathered to watch the bearbaiting at Paris garden,
a pleasure resort outside the jurisdiction of the city, when a
wooden scaffold on which many were seated collapsed, killing
a few and injuring many more'. It seemed a direct fulfilment of
the prophecies of puritans, a 'judgment' which not even the
most abandoned playgoer could disregard. Yet the court hardened
its heart like Pharaoh, for, on 10 March, it once more stepped
in on the players' behalf. At Walsingham's suggestion and under
the direction of the master of the revels, 'a companie of players
for her Majestie' was formed. This, obviously, was intended as
a move against the lord mayor, though it led, also, to important
consequences for the stage. As in the case of the Leicester
1 Acts, vol. XIII, p. 269.
9 Chambers, Tudor Revels, pp. 62, 72, 75.
3 Orders appointed to be executed (Singleton), Art. 62. For the question of date,
v. Chambers, The Academy, 24 August 1895, and Malone Society Collections, part 1,
pp. 168–9.
• Malone Society Collections, part I, pp. 52—54; Acts, vol. XIII, p. 404. There is
evidently some confusion of dates here. The letter of the privy council is given
11 April in the Remembrancia and 25 April or May in Acts. These are not different
letters, as is stated in Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 54.
3 Malone Society Collections, part I, pp. 59, 61, 65, 159, 161, 171 for references to
this incident.
& Tudor Revels, p. 62.
## p. 384 (#402) ############################################
384 The Puritán Attack upon the Stage
company ten years before, the city was forced to yield for the
moment, and, by arrangement with the privy council, the royal
company was admitted into the city from the autumn of 1583 till
the following Shrovetide? When, however, her majesty's players
sought re-admission in the autumn of 1584, they were met with the
absolute refusal of the lord mayor. He had been tricked the season
before, for all the playhouses had been filled with men calling
themselves the queen's players. The company could do nothing
beyond appealing to the privy council. The text of this appeal,
together with a detailed answer from the city and certain other
documents connected with it, has been preserved for us among the
Burghley papers? ; but we are completely ignorant of the events that
followed. In much the same tantalising fashion, we catch a glimpse
of an attempt upon the Theater and the Curtain in the same year.
The lord mayor's letters of 1580 tell us that he was then already
preparing to stretch forth his hand against the impudent Jerichoes
in the fields; and, in 1583, we find him pleading with Walsingham
that they should be closed. In June 1584, he actually seems to
have accomplished his purpose ; for, apparently, by reason of a
brawl outside the Theater entirely unconnected with actors or
their craft, he managed to procure an order from the privy
council for the destruction of the houses. Again the curtain
falls at the most exciting point. We do not even know whether
the order was ever carried out.
The year 1584, evidently, was a very critical one in the history
of the English stage; yet we cannot doubt that the players suc-
cessfully weathered the storm. Certainly, plays did not cease to be
acted in London ; nor do the houses in the fields appear to have
suffered any material damage. Meanwhile, the stage drifted more
and more under the control of the revels' office, until, in 1592, we
find the lord mayor, apparently on the advice of archbishop
Whitgift, proposing that the master, Edmond Tilney, should be
bought over to the city's point of view by an annuity
The third, and, so far as we know, the last, serious crisis in the
relations between the city and the stage occurred in 1597. Thomas
Nashe, writing to a friend in 1596, complains that
i Malone Society Collections, part 1, pp. 66, 67.
Ibid. p. 168.
3 Ibid. pp. 1646. Cf, as to this brawl, ante, chap. x.
• Ibid. pp. 68-70; Tudor Revels, p. 78, for the skirmish between the authorities
and the stage, in 1589, which arose out of the Marprelate controversy, was nothing to
do with the matter in hand. See above, vol. m, of the present work, p. 392; Malone
Society Collections, part 11, p. 180; Acts, vol. XVIII, pp. 214—5; Collier, vol. 1,
pp. 275—7.
## p. 385 (#403) ############################################
The Crisis of 1597
385
the players . . . are piteously persecuted by the Lord Mayor and the Alder-
men; and however in their old Lord's time they thought their estate settled,
it is now so uncertain they cannot build upon it1.
The 'old Lord' here referred to was lord Hunsdon, lord chamber-
lain, a staunch supporter of the players' interests in the privy
council. He died on 22 July 1596 and was succeeded in office
by the puritanically minded lord Cobham? We do not know
to what measure of persecution in 1596 Nashe is here referring ;
but, on 28 July 1597, we find the lord mayor addressing an
interesting letter to the council and enclosing a statement
of the inconveniences that grow by stage playes,' which we
recognise as the basis of many earlier letters. The council was
desired to take measures ‘for the present staie and fynall sup-
pressinge' of plays both within and without the liberties, and it
immediately complied by sending an order to the justices of
Middlesex for the dismantling of the Theater and Curtain 'so
as they maie not be ymploied agayne to suche use". ' Once again,
however, we are left in the dark as to the fate of the houses in the
fields. As a matter of fact, the Theater was closed this very month
and year, but the cause appears to have been nothing more
serious than a difficulty in renewing the lease. Perhaps, the death
of lord Cobham and the influence of the new lord chamberlain,
another lord Hunsdon, may have weakened the force of the
order. In any case, the civic authorities do not seem to have
gained much from a fight of over a quarter of a century. Sunday
performances were abolished, at least in theory; playing was
forbidden in Lent; and certain other restrictions were placed
upon the freedom of the actor. But the enemies of the stage had
aimed at abolition, not regulation
It is now time to turn to the literary side of the puritan
campaign and to speak of the bombardment which the pam-
phleteers kept up, while the city fathers made their repeated
assaults upon the stage. It will be remembered how the players
had nonplussed the corporation by setting up their houses outside
the walls of the city. The question was now as to what could be
| Fleay's Chronicle of Stage, p. 157 ; Collier, vol. I, pp. 292—4.
? Malone Society Collections, part 1, p. 39.
3 Ibid. pp. 78–80.
4 Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. , Outlines (7th ed. ), vol. I, p. 356 ; Acts, vol. xxvii, p. 313.
5 For the order against the theatres in 1600, which, curiously enough, the city
did not carry out, perhaps because it had some reference to the Essex rising, perhaps
because the lord mayor of the year seems to have been himself in favour of plays, see
Simpson, New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. , 1874, vol. 11, pp. 386–9; Lee, Life of Shakespeare,
pp. 174—6, 212—3; Fleay's Chronicle of Stage, p. 161; Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. ,
Outlines, vol. I, pp. 307–9.
E. L. VI. CH. XIV.
25
## p. 386 (#404) ############################################
386 The Puritan Attack upon the Stage
accomplished by the voice of the preacher and the pen of the
pamphleteer. The erection of the Theater and the Curtain in
1576 and 1577 acted at once upon the already highly charged
atmosphere and called down a veritable hail of sermons and tracts.
Of the former, only one or two, which are preserved for our
edification in book form, need here be noticed. There is, for
example, the sermon of one Thomas White, delivered at Paul's
cross on 9 December 1576 and, apparently, repeated on 3 November
in the following year, to which we are indebted for the syllogistic
statement of the plague argument already quoted, and which, by
its reference to the sumptuous Theatre houses, a continuall
monument of London's prodigalitie and folly' helps us to deter-
mine the date of their establishment. Another divine who, by
publication, sought a larger congregation than had assembled to
hear him at Paul's cross was John Stockwood; his sermon,
dated 24 August 1578, laments the immorality of playhouses
and the immense gains of players, and gives a very forcible
expression to that feeling of rivalry between stage and pulpit to
which we have referred.
From the printed sermon to the godly treatise is no great step.
