VIII
HUMANISM AND PURITANISM
[Bibliographical Note.—Most of the material for the present chapter, including extracts from a few pre-Elizabethan writers, is collected in Appendix C; the more official documents in Appendix D are occasionally drawn upon. The Puritan controversy has been studied by C. H. Herford, A Sketch of the History of the English Drama in its Social Aspects (1881), and E. N. S. Thompson, The Controversy between the Puritans and the Stage (1903), from the academic point of view in F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (1914), and in relation to the theory of dramatic criticism by H. S. Symmes, Les Débuts de la Critique dramatique en Angleterre jusqu'à la Mort de Shakespeare (1903), and Renaissance criticism in general by J. E. Spingarn, History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1899), and G. Saintsbury, History of Criticism, vol. ii (1902). Useful collections of contemporary treatises are G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904), and J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (1908).]
The investigations of my opening book have shown clearly enough that in the Tudor, as in the mediaeval, scheme of things there was ample room for the stage and its players. The revelling instinct survived, and the old native love of mimesis and spectacle had been reinforced by a literary delight in the revival of classical drama and in every form of the give and take of dialogue. Nor was the appreciation of the folk for the ruder forms of sensational and farcical entertainment less keen; and a period of general acceptance of the stage as an element in social life might have been anticipated, in which it stood greatly to gain by the more settled and less migratory habits of the royal household and the possibilities of building up a permanent head-quarters for itself in London which resulted from the change. Unfortunately, however, events moved otherwise. A new factor emerged, which militated against anything like general acceptance; and the period of the greatest literary vitality in the development of the English drama proved to be also a period of embittered conflict with widespread ethical and religious tendencies, which in fact ranged over the whole of social life and was
