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Charles Kingsley >> Plays and Puritans
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 e 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 the variety of
our vain disguises? As if we had not wit enough to be foolish unless
we were taught it. These dresses, being constant in their
mutability, show us our masters. What is it that we have not learned
of our neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap? whom would it
not vex to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks
and monsters of themselves? Whence come their (absurd fashions); but
the one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the
worse-minded courtesans of Italy? Whence else learned they to daub
these mud-walls with apothecaries' mortar; and those high washes,
which are so cunningly licked on that the wet napkin of Phryne should
he deceived? Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their
borrowed hair? As if they were ashamed of the head of God's making,
and proud of the tire-woman's. Where learned we that devilish art
and practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are
taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men? Where had we
that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the nose is no less
pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than either? wherein the
piles of dishes make barricadoes against the appetite, and with a
pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry guest. Where those forms of
ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make gods of
others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason while they
pretend to do reason? Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a
wild tongue, that runs, with reins on the neck, through the
bedchambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and
spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred
out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness? Where the
change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some
few butterflies? Where the art of dishonesty in practical
Machiavelism, in false equivocations? Where the slight account of
that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as
not unnecessary? Where the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy
in those formal compliments which do neither expect belief from
others nor carry any from ourselves? Where' (and here Bishop Hall
begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of
matters notorious and undeniable.) 'Where that close Atheism, which
secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe,
wisdom to profess any religion? Where the bloody and tragical
science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and
rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation
hath endangered the infection of our peace?'--Bishop Hall's 'Quo
Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,' vol xii. sect. 22.
Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of
the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since
the beginning of the sixteenth century. However much truth there may
be in the common assertion that the old 'miracle plays' and
'mysteries' were the parents of the English drama (as they certainly
were of the Spanish and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much
our stage owed, from its first rise under Elizabeth, to direct
importations from Italy. This is merely thrown out as a suggestion;
to establish the fact would require a wide acquaintance with the
early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due
weight. The names of the characters in most of our early regular
comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes, are the
manners, at least they profess to be so. Next, the plots of many of
the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if
Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where
others found poison) went to Cinthio for 'Othello' and 'Measure for
Measure,' to Bandello for 'Romeo and Juliet,' and to Boccaccio for
'Cymbeline,' there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to
the same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these
profligate writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts
adultery into a virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a
duty; which revels in the horrible as freely as any French novelist
of the romantic school; and whose only value is its pitiless exposure
of the profligacy of the Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be
valuable which makes a mock equally of things truly and falsely
sacred, and leaves on the reader's mind the fear that the writer saw
nothing in heaven or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self-
sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.
Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to judge from
their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to assert, were
drawn from life, and for which they give names, places, and all
details which might amuse the noble gentlemen and ladies to whom
these stories are dedicated), this had been the morality of Italy for
some centuries past. This, also, is the general morality of the
English stage in the seventeenth century. Can we wonder that
thinking men should have seen a connection between Italy and the
stage? Certainly the playwrights put themselves between the horns of
an ugly dilemma. Either the vices which they depicted were those of
general English society, and of themselves also (for they lived in
the very heart of town and court foppery); or else they were the
vices of a foreign country, with which the English were comparatively
unacquainted. In the first case, we can only say that the Stuart age
in England was one which deserved purgation of the most terrible
kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal measures
would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the experience
of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never have
been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines.
In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds
of the people, and, instead of 'holding up a mirror to vice,'
instructing frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and
fully justifying old Prynne's indignant complaint -
'The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies
on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the
spectators' minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them,
till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed
no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill
spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce
them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill-
serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic interlude.'
That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police
reports will sufficiently prove. It is notorious that the
representation in our own days of 'Tom and Jerry' and of 'Jack
Sheppard' did excite dozens of young lads to imitate the heroes of
those dramas; and such must have been the effect of similar and worse
representations in the Stuart age. No rational man will need the
authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor Leighton, Archbishop Parker,
Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any one else, Churchman or
Puritan, prelate or 'penitent reclaimed play-poet,' like Stephen
Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert, citizens' wives (who
are generally represented as the proper subjects for seduction)
'have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they have
received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned
their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women,
light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt,
their children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault
of a dangerous state;' or that 'The devices of carrying and re-
carrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport
their tokens by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other
kinds of policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of
their wives, guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants,
were aptly taught in these schools of abuse.' {2}
The matter is simple enough. We should not allow these plays to be
acted in our own day, because we know that they would produce their
effects. We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or
his servants to see such representations. {3} Why, in all fairness,
were the Puritans wrong in condemning that which we now have
absolutely forbidden?
We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the
old play-houses. Gosson and his colleague the anonymous Penitent
assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but
antechambers to houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned
in the pit were only not practised also in the pit. What reason have
we to doubt it, who know that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical
reformation of this abuse, for which his name will be ever respected,
our own comparatively purified stage was just the same? Let any one
who remembers the saloons of Drury Lane and Covent Garden thirty
years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the Globe or the
Fortune must have been, in days when players were allowed to talk
inside as freely as the public behaved outside.
Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of
demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting
them. We will lay on them the blame of no special malus animus:
but, at the same time, we must treat their fine words about 'holding
a mirror up to vice,' and 'showing the age its own deformity,' as
mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek.
It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two
generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth
of Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show vice its own
deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does)
as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of
moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice. The only
condition which can excuse the representation of evil is omitted.
The simple fact is that the poets wanted to draw a house; that this
could most easily be done by the coarsest and most violent means; and
that not being often able to find stories exciting enough in the past
records of sober English society, they went to Italy and Spain for
the violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments,
excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough
to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control, its victims.
Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange
mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the
immoral playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward
savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation
brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of
themselves in their worst moments, such as no 'Mystery of Cain' or
'Tragedy of Prometheus' can give.
Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama
for its lessons in human nature? On that special point something
must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century
poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism;
one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who
so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only
to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to
'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the
average morality of his contemporary playwrights:-
'For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices
and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the
impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a
good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good
discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in
their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood,
recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the
interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less
than human, a master in manners and can alone (or with a few) effect
the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride
and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But it will
here be hastily answered that the writers of these days are other
things, that not only their manners but their natures are inverted,
and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of poet but the abused
name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick,
or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation,
blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised.
I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not),
because in some men's abortive features (and would God they had never
seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold
adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a
more malicious slander. For every particular I can (and from a most
clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward
the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of such foul and
unwashed . . . [his expression is too strong for quotation] as is now
made the food of the scene.'
It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty
ideal of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints
against the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger sentence
occurs:-
'The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present
trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal
soul doth not abhor? Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered,
and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms,
such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with
(indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn
the blood of a Christian to water.'
So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a
peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company.
After him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant
matter ought to be necessary. He may have been morose, fanatical,
exaggerative; but his bitter words suggest at least this dilemma.
Either they are true, and the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says
it was) that of Gehenna: or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of
spite and envy against more successful poets. And what does that
latter prove, but that the greatest poet of his age (after Shakspeare
has gone) was not as much esteemed as some poets whom we know to have
been more filthy and more horrible than he? which, indeed, is the
main complaint of Jonson himself. It will be rejoined, of course,
that he was an altogether envious man; that he envied Shakspeare,
girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at 'The Winter's Tale' and
'The Tempest,' in the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour'; and,
indeed, Jonson's writings, and those of many other playwrights, leave
little doubt that stage rivalry called out the bitterest hatred and
the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare's great soul was
giving way to the pettiest passions, when in 'Hamlet' he had his
fling at the 'aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the
top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for 't.' It may
be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that
'their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own
succession,' i.e. against themselves, when 'grown to common players.'
Be that as it may. Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only
less great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly
is not so in all his charges. Some of the faults which he attributes
to Shakspeare are really faults.
At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his
contemporaries, by the evidence of the men's own plays. We know that
the decadence of the stage of which he complains went on
uninterruptedly after his time, and in the very direction which he
pointed out.
On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of poetry 'made
a wall in our father's house, and the bricks are alive to testify
unto this day.' So that we cannot do better than give a few samples
thereof, at least samples decent enough for modern readers, and let
us begin, not with a hodman, but with Jonson himself.
Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was a very
great genius, immaculate or not; 'Rare Ben,' with all his faults.
One can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of
that rich free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance
and pride which brood upon the lip and eyebrow,
'Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.'
A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one
fancies, never could. One ought to have, too, a sort of delicacy
about saying much against him; for he is dead, and can make, for the
time being at least, no rejoinder. There are dead men whom one is
not much ashamed to 'upset' after their death, because one would not
have been much afraid of doing so when they were alive. But 'Rare
Ben' had terrible teeth, and used them too. A man would have thought
twice ere he snapt at him living, and therefore it seems somewhat a
cowardly trick to bark securely at his ghost. Nevertheless it is no
unfair question to ask--Do not his own words justify the Puritan
complaints? But if so, why does he rail at the Puritans for making
their complaints? His answer would have been that they railed in
ignorance, not merely at low art, as we call it now, but at high art
and all art. Be it so. Here was their fault, if fault it was in
those days. For to discriminate between high art and low art they
must have seen both. And for Jonson's wrath to be fair and just he
must have shown them both. Let us see what the pure drama is like
which he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his
contemporaries; and, to bring the matter nearer home, let us take one
of the plays in which he hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely
the 'Alchemist,' said to have been first acted in 1610 'by the king's
majesty's servants.' Look, then, at this well-known play, and take
Jonson at his word. Allow that Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome
are, as they very probably are, fair portraits of a class among the
sectaries of the day: but bear in mind, too, that if this be
allowed, the other characters shall be held as fair portraits also.
Otherwise, all must he held to be caricature; and then the onslaught
on the Puritans vanishes into nothing, or worse. Now in either case,
Ananias and Tribulation are the best men in the play. They palter
with their consciences, no doubt: but they have consciences, which
no one else in the play has, except poor Surly; and he, be it
remembered, comes to shame, is made a laughing-stock, and 'cheats
himself,' as he complains at last, 'by that same foolish vice of
honesty': while in all the rest what have we but every form of human
baseness? Lovell, the master, if he is to be considered a negative
character as doing no wrong, has, at all events, no more recorded of
him than the noble act of marrying by deceit a young widow for the
sake of her money, the philosopher's stone, by the bye, and highest
object of most of the seventeenth century dramatists. If most of the
rascals meet with due disgrace, none of them is punished; and the
greatest rascal of all, who, when escape is impossible, turns
traitor, and after deserving the cart and pillory a dozen times for
his last and most utter baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the
honour of addressing the audience at the play's end in the most smug
and self-satisfied tone, and of 'putting himself on you that are my
country,' not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair
majority who would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of all
imitation.
Now is this play a moral or an immoral one? Of its coarseness we say
nothing. We should not endure it, of course, nowadays; and on that
point something must be said hereafter: but if we were to endure
plain speaking as the only method of properly exposing vice, should
we endure the moral which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it?
And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among the
Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch? What but a background of
profligacy and frivolity?
A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the age may be
found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself. Howsoever pure and
lofty the ideal which he laid down for himself (and no doubt
honestly) in the Preface to 'Volpone,' he found it impossible to keep
up to it. Nine years afterwards we find him, in his 'Bartholomew
Fair,' catering to the low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at
which, if one must needs laugh--as who that was not more than man
could help doing over that scene between Rabbi Busy and the puppets?-
-shallow and untrue as the gist of the humour is, one feels the next
moment as if one had been indulging in unholy mirth at the expense of
some grand old Noah who has come to shame in his cups.
But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the 'Gipsies
Metamorphosed,' presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson was forty-
seven; old enough, one would have thought, to know better. It is not
merely the insincere and all but blasphemous adulation which is
shocking,--that was but the fashion of the times: but the treating
these gipsies and beggars, and their 'thieves' Latin' dialect, their
filthiness and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely as themes
for immoral and inhuman laughter. Jonson was by no means the only
poet of that day to whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads
which infested England were only a comical phase of humanity, instead
of being, as they would be now, objects of national shame and sorrow,
of pity and love, which would call out in the attempt to redeem them
the talents and energies of good men. But Jonson certainly sins more
in this respect than any of his contemporaries. He takes a low
pleasure in parading his intimate acquaintance with these poor
creatures' foul slang and barbaric laws; and is, we should say, the
natural father of that lowest form of all literature, which has since
amused the herd, though in a form greatly purified, in the form of
'Beggars' Operas,' 'Dick Turpins,' and 'Jack Sheppards.' Everything
which is objectionable in such modern publications as these was
exhibited, in far grosser forms, by one of the greatest poets who
ever lived, for the amusement of a king of England; and yet the world
still is at a loss to know why sober and God-fearing men detested
both the poet and the king.