Plays and Puritans. Charles Kingsley

The Act of 1 Jacobi seems even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which, in Elizabeth’s reign, had allowed companies of players the protection of a ‘baron or honourable person of greater degree,’ who might ‘authorise them to play under his hand and seal of arms.’  So that the Puritans were only demanding of the sovereigns that they should enforce the very laws which they themselves had made, and which they and their nobles were setting at defiance.  Whether the plays ought to have been put down, and whether the laws were necessary, is a different question; but certainly the court and the aristocracy stood in the questionable, though too common, position of men who made laws which prohibited to the poor amusements in which they themselves indulged without restraint.

      But were these plays objectionable?  As far as the comedies are concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery?  Now, we cannot but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject for comedy at all.  It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never.  It is a sin; not merely theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the parent of seven other sins,—of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a whole bevy of devils.  The prevalence of adultery in any country has always been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and revolution; where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light thing, that people has been always careless, base, selfish, cowardly,—ripe for slavery.  And we must say that either the courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles the First were in that state, or that the poets were doing their best to make them so.

      We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century, with the exception of Shakspeare’s, in which adultery is not introduced as a subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the whole plot.  The seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a ‘handsome gentleman’; the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of which we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn and ridicule.  In this latter habit (common to most European nations) there is a sort of justice.  A man can generally retain his wife’s affections if he will behave himself like a man; and ‘injured husbands’ have for the most part no one to blame but themselves.  But the matter is not a subject for comedy; not even in that case which has been always too common in France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to have been painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a mariage de convenance, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a decrepit old man.  Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry.  Therefore the men who look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked are not good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when they erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity, pointing ‘Eastward Ho!’ i.e. to the city of London, as the quarter where court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions amid the fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens.  If the citizens drove the players out of London, the playwrights took good care to have their revenge.  The citizen is their standard butt.  These shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them.  Sad it is to see in Shirley’s ‘Gamester,’ Charles the First’s favourite play, a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow-merchants.  Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of having given those base words his royal warrant and approbation.

      The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as questionable as the comedies.  That there are noble plays among them here and there, no one denies—any more than that there are exquisitely amusing plays among the comedies; but as the staple interest of the comedies is dirt, so the staple interest of the tragedies is crime.  Revenge, hatred, villany, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant themes, and (with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience, and of displaying their own power of delineation in a way which makes one but too ready to believe the accusations of the Puritans (supported as they are by many ugly anecdotes) that the play-writers and actors were mostly men of fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch.  This is notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern ‘Literature of Horror,’ and the two literatures are morally identical.  We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought against the School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars.

      This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so greedily, tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon them (and not undeservedly) heavy odium.

      One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as against Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from Italy.  We must fairly put ourselves into the position of an honest Englishman of the seventeenth century before we can appreciate the huge præjudicium which must needs have arisen in his mind against anything which could claim a Transalpine parentage.  Italy was then not merely the stronghold of Popery.  That in itself would have been a fair reason for others beside Puritans saying, ‘If the root be corrupt, the fruit will be also: any expression of Italian thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome while her vitals are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only half believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher classes, even those of the priesthood; but only kept up for their private aggrandisement.’  But there was more than hypothesis in favour of the men who might say this; there was universal, notorious, shocking fact.  It was a fact that Italy was the centre where sins were invented worthy of the doom of the Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all nations who had connection with her.  We dare give no proof of this assertion.  The Italian morals and the Italian lighter literature of the sixteenth and of the beginning of the seventeenth century were such, that one is almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them, although the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes to understand either the European society of the time or the Puritan hatred of the drama.  Non ragionam di lor: ma guarda è passa.

      It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into England by the young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish, travelled to Italy.  From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, this foul tide had begun to set toward England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in passing through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its course hitherward; till, to judge by Marston’s ‘Satires,’ certain members of the higher classes had, by the beginning of James’s reign, learnt nearly all which the Italians had to teach them.  Marston writes in a rage, it is true; foaming, stamping, and vapouring too much to escape the suspicion of exaggeration; yet he dared not have published the things which he does, had he not fair ground for some at least of his assertions.  And Marston, be it remembered, was no Puritan, but a playwright, and Ben Jonson’s friend.

      Bishop Hall, in his ‘Satires,’ describes things bad enough, though not so bad as Marston does; but what is even more to the purpose, he wrote, and dedicated to James, a long dissuasive against the fashion of running abroad.  Whatever may be thought of the arguments of ‘Quo vadis?—a Censure of Travel,’ its main drift is clear enough.  Young gentlemen, by going to Italy, learnt to be fops and profligates, and probably Papists into the bargain.  These assertions there is no denying.  Since the days of Lord Oxford, most of the ridiculous and expensive fashions in dress had come from Italy, as well as the newest modes of sin; and the playwrights themselves make no secret of the fact.  There is no need to quote instances; they are innumerable; and the most serious are not fit to be quoted, scarcely the titles of the plays in which they occur; but they justify almost every line of Bishop Hall’s questions (of which some of the strongest expressions have necessarily been omitted):—

      ‘What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed?

      ‘To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had