and Gosson. The plays were an insult to the Deity, a curse to man. They were reminiscences in vivid form of heathen morality and idolatry that instigated evil and discouraged virtue. "But marke the flocking and running to Theatres and curtens, daylie and hourly, night and daye, tyme and tyde, to see Playes and Interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdie speaches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, Suche winchinge and glancinge of wanton eyes and the like, is used, as is wonderfull to behold." There is a singular and ineluctable similarity of phrase as well as spirit about all of these puritan downcries against the stage, with its caress and carouse, its gallantry and gaudiness. Described as a "bitter, narrow-souled Puritan," by Nash, it was not until Furnivall arrived on the critical scene that Stubbes won a modern defender.

There was a bewildering mass, almost an infinitude, of such treatises written, one more ardent, fanatical, and flatulent than the other in its puritanic motivation. Some like those of Munday, Whetstone and Rankins may have been guilty, as Fleay contends, of insincerity if not flagrant exaggeration and duplicity. Sidney's Apology for Poetry was characterized by a lucidity of style and analysis and an uncontroversial placidity of expression, notwithstanding its partial purpose of being a reply to Gosson's School of Abuse. Webbe, Put

tenham and Harrington at least hoped that the drama might be turned eventually into a thing of moral edification. Rainholdes' repugnance to all things Thespian was illustrated most curiously and strikingly in his literary combat with Gager, which also involved Gentili, an authority on international law. Rainholdes deprecated in no restrained language the use of female apparel by male actors, urging that the Jewish law against change of apparel remained firm, and that since Christ had not denied its validity, violation of it by man must be irreparable sacrilege. From the pulpit, wherever puritan sentiment breathed, there poured the scorching lava of theological condemnation. Thomas White, John Stockwood, Spark, Daniel Dyke, Thomas Beard and later John Downham fell upon the plays with a vindictiveness and hatred that were wellnigh maniacal in their extremity of expression. Even some of the actors and dramatists were moved by the denunciatory pyrotechnics of the puritan clergy. Greene in Neuer to Hate admitted much of the disesteem into which the stage had slipped, and in his Repentance he regretted that the theater had tempted him from the ways of God and rendered him a "child of perdition." In other plays of the time such as Anthony Babington's Complaint, Nashe's Pierce Penilesse and the Return from Parnassus the influence of the plaguing puritan asceticism is to be discovered.

The force of the puritan attack was strengthened and multiplied by a series of casualties, the catastrophe at the Bear Garden, the fall of the theater at a puppet play in 1599, the great earthquake of the period-all these were cited by the bourgeois clerics as manifestations of God's wrath evoked by the performance of godless plays.

The battle between the players, who, in the words of Dr. Thompson, "sided almost to a man with the other party (the aristocracy)," and the Puritans is one of the most noteworthy and forceful examples of a conflict between opposing class ethics and esthetics that history projects. To trace it in further detail, with discussion of Heywood's Apology for Actors; Greene's Refutation of the Apology for Actors; Peele's and Marston's Histrio-Mastix, and later Prynne's famous and scholarly Histrio-Mastix, the Players' Scourge," and ending in 1642 with the suppression of the theaters by order of the Puritan Parliament, would result in description guilty of the tedium of academic treatises and tracts. The revolt of the actors even after this mandate was so vivid and vigorous that again in 1647

10

10 Laud averred that the book was so opulent in erudition that to read the works cited by Prynne would consume threescore years of a man's life. It is significant to observe here also that Prynne, one of the fuglemen in the puritan protest was vehement in his attack upon the doctrine of divorce so anachronistically advocated by Milton, who too often in this particular is misunderstandingly pictured as an exemplar of the Puritan mind and motive.

and still again in 1648 the order had to be renewed. With the régime in full swing, however, the bourgeois dominancy unchallenged, during the fifth decade of the century, the battle temporarily ceased.

The catastrophic contrast between the two class moralities at the time, the aristocratic and the bourgeois, is illustrated with force and clarity in Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband, one of the leading Puritans of the era:

"Every great house... became a sty of uncleanliness. To keep the people in their deplorable security, till vengeance overtook them, they were entertained with masks, stage plays and sorts of ruder sports. Then began murder, incest, adultery, drunkedness, swearing, fornication and all sorts of ribaldry, to be concealed but countenanced vices, because they held such conformity with the court example."

The court had not only sanctioned the plays, but fostered them. Yielding to the puritan phase of public opinion in forbidding their being staged on Sunday, it, nevertheless, defended its ethic by having the Book of Sports read in the churches and The Declaration of Lawful Sports made authoritative in the realm. Because they expressed the attitude of the aristocracy, the dramatists reduced the Puritan to a microcosm of ridicule. As we indicated in the first chapter, few

dramatists left the Puritan unmentioned or unscathed. Lyly in The Woman in the Moone and Mucedorus, Chapman in An Humorous Day's Mirth, Beaumont and Fletcher in The Puritan, or Widow of Watling Street, Ben Jonson in The Silent Woman and Cynthia's Revels, Jasper Mayne in The City Match, Dekker in The Honest Whore, Shirley in A Bird in Cage, Middleton in Mayor of Quinborough, and Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Randolph in Muses' Looking Glass, Strode in his Floating Island presented before King Charles himself, Brome and Cartwright in many of their plays, all scorned and satirized the habits and lives of the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie in turn fought the art that opposed and ridiculed its life. Finally, when victory smiled with bloody gesture upon its revolt, this art was annihilated. The theater was closed, the dramatist ostracized. The pageantry of Elizabethan art was superseded by the pallor of puritan esthetics. A total transvaluation of values was effected.

The free flowing sex expression in cavalier literature was blotted into a forbidden memory. Maypole processions and horse-racing were driven to precocious flight. Tobacco-smoking became a sinful practice. Gaudiness of attire was outlawed and extravagance of domestic decoration eclipsed. Profanity was trans