Elizabethan popular drama was but of short duration need not be regarded as invalidated by the fact that plays of distinctly Protestant type continued to be published until at least the third decade of the reign. There is no very obvious proof that these plays were performed at all, and certainly none that they belonged to the popular rather than the academic stage. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the dates of composition fell anywhere near the dates of publication, and in some cases such evidence as is available points to a period very shortly after Elizabeth's accession. Several Protestant plays of Edwardian or earlier origin were apparently revived by publishers at about the same time.[1] In some of these the closing prayers have been altered so as to apply to Elizabeth, and a similar revision has taken place in the text, extant only in manuscript, of Bale's Kinge Johan. This seems to be evidence, perhaps more certainly as regards the manuscript than as regards the prints, of actual performance during the new reign.
If, then, what might have been the natural attitude of the earlier English Protestantism to the popular stage was deflected by something of an accident, it is also not quite true to suppose that Calvinism was always and everywhere uncompromisingly opposed to the drama in its more respectable forms. Calvin himself was not unaffected by humanist influences, and more than one of his near associates, notably Theodore Beza, his successor at Geneva, are to be reckoned amongst academic playwrights. The annals of stage-history at Geneva throw a valuable light upon the order of ideas from which the Puritans started. During the later Middle Ages the city had taken its full delight in spectacula of many kinds. The abuses connected with these had formed the subject of constant ecclesiastical prohibitions, the tradition of which had only been continued by the reformers.[2] Calvin's principal forerunner, William Farel, had published theses at Bâle in 1524, in which he laid down abstinence from disguisings as a counsel of perfection.[3] But he did not succeed
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxii.
- ↑ Calvin, Opera, xxi. 207 (Annales Calviniani), gives prohibitions made under Farel's influence in 1537; for earlier records, cf. E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin, iii. 579; H. D. Foster, Geneva before Calvin in American Hist. Review, viii. 231.
- ↑ A. L. Herminjard, Correspondance des Réformateurs dans les pays de langue française, i. 195, 'Christianum alienum oportet a bachanalibus quae gentium more celebrantur, et ab hypocrisi Iudaica in ieiuniis et aliis quae non directore spiritu fiunt: ac cavere oportet a simulachris quam maxime.' Possibly, however, 'simulachra' means 'images' rather than 'disguisings'.
