Books: Plays and Puritans
C >>
Charles Kingsley >> Plays and Puritans
*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END*
This etext was produced from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. "Plays and
Puritans and Other Historical Essays" edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
PLAYS AND PURITANS {1}
by Charles Kingsley
The British Isles have been ringing for the last few years with the
word 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,'
'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and
every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something
about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic'
treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares
very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation
of 'bad taste.' Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our
poetry is dying; our music, like our architecture, only reproduces
the past; our painting is only first-rate when it handles landscapes
and animals, and seems likely so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody
cares. Some of the deepest and most earnest minds vote the question,
in general, a 'sham and a snare,' and whisper to each other
confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a 'bore,' and that
Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all; while the
middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a pretty
toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think,
apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is
merely used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to
mention that, if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand
down to posterity likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family. But
when 'Art' dares to be in earnest, and to mean something, much more
to connect itself with religion, Smith's tone alters. He will teach
'Art' to keep in what he considers its place, and if it refuses, take
the law of it, and put it into the Ecclesiastical Court. So he says,
and what is more, he means what he says; and as all the world, from
Hindostan to Canada, knows by most practical proof, what he means, he
sooner or later does, perhaps not always in the wisest way, but still
he does it.
Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward 'Art' is
simply that of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and widened, but
only enough so as to permit Art, not to encourage it.
Some men's thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form
of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency
of the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,' and ending--who can
tell where? But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any
skill in the scientia scientiarum, or say, 'The Lord possessed me in
the beginning of His way, before His works of old. When He prepared
the heavens, I was there, when He set a compass upon the face of the
deep;' we shall leave aesthetic science to those who think that they
comprehend it; we shall, as simple disciples of Bacon, deal with
facts and with history as 'the will of God revealed in facts.' We
will leave those who choose to settle what ought to be, and ourselves
look patiently at that which actually was once, and which may be
again; that so out of the conduct of our old Puritan forefathers
(right or wrong), and their long war against 'Art,' we may learn a
wholesome lesson; as we doubtless shall, if we believe firmly that
our history is neither more nor less than what the old Hebrew
prophets called 'God's gracious dealings with his people,' and not
say in our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings Jacobite
ballads (written forty years ago by men who cared no more for the
Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off
George the Fourth's feet at his visit to Edinburgh)--'Victrix causa
Diis placuit, sed victa puellis.'
The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and
invidious task. For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases,
arise not merely from the crimes of a few great men, but from a
general viciousness and decay of the whole, or the majority, of the
nation; and that viciousness is certain to be made up, in great part,
of a loosening of domestic ties, of breaches of the Seventh
Commandment, and of sins connected with them, which a writer is now
hardly permitted to mention. An 'evil and adulterous generation' has
been in all ages and countries the one marked out for intestine and
internecine strife. That description is always applicable to a
revolutionary generation; whether or not it also comes under the
class of a superstitious one, 'seeking after a sign from heaven,'
only half believing its own creed, and, therefore, on tiptoe for
miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely
persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems
about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from
sinking into the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian
lies under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually
too strong for him to state it. If he tells the whole truth, the
easy-going and respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable
days like these, will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful
facts, or reject them as incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find
similar horrors and abominations among people of their own rank, of
whom they are naturally inclined to judge by their own standard of
civilisation. Thus if any one, in justification of the Reformation
and the British hatred of Popery during the sixteenth century, should
dare to detail the undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and to comment
on them dramatically enough to make his readers feel about them what
men who witnessed them felt, he would be accused of a 'morbid love of
horrors.' If any one, in order to show how the French Revolution of
1793 was really God's judgment on the profligacy of the ancien
regirne, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the ancien
regime unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would have
a right to demand, 'How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts
from their merited oblivion?' Those, again, who are really
acquainted with the history of Henry the Eighth's marriages, are well
aware of facts which prove him to have been, not a man of violent and
lawless passions, but of a cold temperament and a scrupulous
conscience; but which cannot be stated in print, save in the most
delicate and passing hints, to be taken only by those who at once
understand such matters, and really wish to know the truth; while
young ladies in general will still look on Henry as a monster in
human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, to undeceive them
by anything beyond bare assertion without proof.
'But what does it matter,' some one may say, 'what young ladies think
about history?' This it matters; that these young ladies will some
day be mothers, and as such will teach their children their own
notions of modern history; and that, as long as men confine
themselves to the teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the
history of their own country to be handled exclusively by their
unmarried sisters, so long will slanders, superstitions, and false
political principles be perpetuated in the minds of our boys and
girls.
But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the historian's case
is often too strong to be stated. There is always a reactionary
party, or one at least which lingers sentimentally over the dream of
past golden ages, such as that of which Cowley says, with a sort of
naive blasphemy, at which one knows not whether to smile or sigh -
'When God, the cause to me and men unknown,
Forsook the royal houses, and his own.'
These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the defeated
system; but the historian has no such liberty to state the case
against it. If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare
not state them, he is at once met with a praejudicium. The mere fact
of his having ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in
a sort of prudish cant. 'What a very improper person he must be to
like to dabble in such improper books that they must not even be
quoted.' If in self-defence he desperately gives his facts, he only
increases the feeling against him, whilst the reactionists, hiding
their blushing faces, find in their modesty an excuse for avoiding
the truth; if, on the other hand, he content himself with bare
assertion, and with indicating the sources from whence his
conclusions are drawn, what care the reactionists? They know well
that the public will not take the trouble to consult manuscripts,
State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but will content
themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on
unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after
she has been painfully haled up to the well's mouth, to tumble
miserably to the bottom of it again.
In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of
the great cause, Puritans v. Players, before our readers, trusting to
find some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common
notions on the point to form a fair decision.
What those notions are is well known. Very many of her Majesty's
subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth
century (if the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the
most beautiful period of the English nation's life; that in it the
chivalry and ardent piety of the Middle Age were happily combined
with modern art and civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the
Court, of stage-plays, of the fashions of the time, was only 'a
scrupulous and fantastical niceness'; barbaric and tasteless, if
sincere; if insincere, the basest hypocrisy; that the stage-plays,
though coarse, were no worse than Shakspeare, whom everybody reads;
and that if the Stuarts patronised the stage they also raised it, and
exercised a purifying censorship. And many more who do not go all
these lengths with the reactionists, and cannot make up their mind to
look to the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen or model
courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan 'preciseness,'
and to say lazily, that though, of course, something may have been
wrong, yet there was no need to make such a fuss about the matter;
and that at all events the Puritans were men of very bad taste.
Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger's plays (1813), was
probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a great
part of this generation also, when he informs us, that 'with
Massinger terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry; indeed, the
stage itself survived him but a short time. The nation was convulsed
to its centre by contending factions, and a set of austere and gloomy
fanatics, enemies to every elegant amusement and every social
relaxation, rose upon the ruins of the State. Exasperated by the
ridicule with which they had long been covered by the stage, they
persecuted the actors with unrelenting severity, and consigned them,
together with the writers, to hopeless obscurity and wretchedness.
Taylor died in the extreme of poverty, Shirley opened a little school
at Brentford, and Downe, the boast of the stage, kept an ale-house at
Brentford. Others, and those the far greater number, joined the
royal standard, and exerted themselves with more gallantry than good
fortune in the service of their old and indulgent master.'
'We have not yet, perhaps, fully estimated, and certainly not yet
fully recovered, what was lost in that unfortunate struggle. The
arts were rapidly advancing to perfection under the fostering wing of
a monarch who united in himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake,
and munificence to reward. Architecture, painting, and poetry were
by turns the objects of his paternal care. Shakspeare was his
"closet companion," Jonson his poet, and in conjunction with Inigo
Jones, his favoured architect, produced those magnificent
entertainments,' etc.
* * *
He then goes on to account for the supposed sudden fall of dramatic
art at the Restoration, by the somewhat far-fetched theory that -
'Such was the horror created in the general mind by the perverse and
unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, that
the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and, with
Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and "his
fellows." Instead, therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it
abruptly ceased in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it
were, a manner of their own, or fetched it from the heavy monotony of
their continental neighbours.'
So is history written, and, what is more, believed. The amount of
misrepresentation in this passage (which would probably pass current
with most readers in the present day) is quite ludicrous. In the
first place, it will hardly be believed that these words occur in an
essay which, after extolling Massinger as one of the greatest poets
of his age, second, indeed, only to Shakspeare, also informs us (and,
it seems, quite truly) that, so far from having been really
appreciated or patronised, he maintained a constant struggle with
adversity,--'that even the bounty of his particular friends, on which
he chiefly relied, left him in a state of absolute dependence,'--that
while 'other writers for the stage had their periods of good fortune,
Massinger seems to have enjoyed no gleam of sunshine; his life was
all one misty day, and "shadows, clouds, and darkness rested on it."'
So much for Charles's patronage of a really great poet. What sort of
men he did patronise, practically and in earnest, we shall see
hereafter, when we come to speak of Mr. Shirley.
But Mr. Gifford must needs give an instance to prove that Charles was
'not inattentive to the success of Massinger,' and a curious one it
is; of the same class, unfortunately, as that with the man in the old
story, who recorded with pride that the King had spoken to him, and--
had told him to get out of the way.
Massinger in his 'King and the Subject' had introduced Don Pedro of
Spain thus speaking -
'Monies! We'll raise supplies which way we please,
And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which
We'll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Caesars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no law
But what their swords did ratify, the wives
And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their will, as deities,' etc.
Against which passage Charles, reading over the play before he
allowed of it, had written, 'This is too insolent, and not to be
printed.' Too insolent it certainly was, considering the state of
public matters in the year 1638. It would be interesting enough to
analyse the reasons which made Charles dislike in the mouth of Pedro
sentiments so very like his own; but we must proceed, only pointing
out the way in which men, determined to repeat the traditional clap-
trap about the Stuarts, are actually blind to the meaning of the very
facts which they themselves quote.
Where, then, do the facts of history contradict Mr. Gifford?
We believe that, so far from the triumph of dramatic poetry
terminating with Massinger, dramatic art had been steadily growing
worse from the first years of James; that instead of the arts
advancing to perfection under Charles the First, they steadily
deteriorated in quality, though the supply became more abundant; that
so far from there having been a sudden change for the worse in the
drama after the Restoration, the taste of the courts of Charles the
First and of Charles the Second are indistinguishable; that the court
poets, and probably the actors also, of the early part of Charles the
Second's reign had many of them belonged to the court of Charles the
First, as did Davenant, the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, Fanshaw,
and Shirley himself; that the common notion of a 'new manner' having
been introduced from France after the Restoration, or indeed having
come in at all, is not founded on fact, the only change being that
the plays of Charles the Second's time were somewhat more stupid, and
that while five of the seven deadly sins had always had free licence
on the stage, blasphemy and profane swearing were now enfranchised to
fill up the seven. As for the assertion that the new manner
(supposing it to have existed) was imported from France, there is far
more reason to believe that the French copied us than we them, and
that if they did not learn from Charles the First's poets the
superstition of 'the three unities,' they at least learnt to make
ancient kings and heroes talk and act like seventeenth century
courtiers, and to exchange their old clumsy masques and translations
of Italian and Spanish farces for a comedy depicting native
scoundrelism. Probably enough, indeed, the great and sudden
development of the French stage, which took place in the middle of
the seventeenth century under Corneille and Moliere, was excited by
the English cavalier playwrights who took refuge in France.
No doubt, as Mr. Gifford says, the Puritans were exasperated against
the stage-players by the insults heaped on them; but the cause of
quarrel lay far deeper than any such personal soreness. The Puritans
had attacked the players before the players meddled with them, and
that on principle; with what justification must be considered
hereafter. But the fact is (and this seems to have been, like many
other facts, conveniently forgotten), that the Puritans were by no
means alone in their protest against the stage, and that the war was
not begun exclusively by them. As early as the latter half of the
sixteenth century, not merely Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and
Reynolds had lifted up their voices against them, but Archbishop
Parker, Bishop Babington, Bishop Hall, and the author of the Mirror
for Magistrates. The University of Oxford, in 1584, had passed a
statute forbidding common plays and players in the university, on the
very same moral grounds on which the Puritans objected to them. The
city of London, in 1580, had obtained from the Queen the suppression
of plays on Sundays; and not long after, 'considering that play-
houses and dicing-houses were traps for young gentlemen and others,'
obtained leave from the Queen and Privy Council to thrust the players
out of the city, and to pull down the play-houses, five in number;
and, paradoxical as it may seem, there is little doubt that, by the
letter of the law, 'stage plays and enterludes' were, even to the end
of Charles the First's reign, 'unlawful pastime,' being forbidden by
14 Eliz., 39 Eliz., 1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1 Caroli, and the players
subject to severe punishment as 'rogues and vagabonds.' The Act of 1
Jacobi seems even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which,
in Elizabeth's reign, had allowed companies of players the protection
of a 'baron or honourable person of greater degree,' who might
'authorise them to play under his hand and seal of arms.' So that
the Puritans were only demanding of the sovereigns that they should
enforce the very laws which they themselves had made, and which they
and their nobles were setting at defiance. Whether the plays ought
to have been put down, and whether the laws were necessary, 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 praejudicium
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.