antiquity, and they give a lively picture of antiquity itself. They teach experience of things and of the human heart, and afford training—it is the scenae trigemina corona—in the management of the voice, the features, the gestures. All this is, of course, in the traditional humanist vein. Some of the current criticisms of the drama are quoted, only to be refuted. It is not necessarily indecorum for a man to wear the dress of a harlot on the stage, if his object is to expose the vices of harlotry, 'non est enim monstrum vestes sed mores meretricis induere'. It is true that the Fathers condemned plays, but they had in mind the abuses of plays and in particular the devotion of plays to the service of idols. It is ridiculous to hold that the dignity of kingship is offended if it is impersonated by an actor. The offence is no more than when the outlines of a king are represented in a picture. No doubt Case has the academic drama almost wholly in his mind, and would have been inclined to dismiss the professional stage contemptuously enough as scurrilitas.[1] He is certainly careful to make it clear that the plays of which he approves are not 'inanes et histrionicae fabulae, Veneris illecebrae', but witty comedies and magnificent tragedies 'in quibus expressa imago vitae morumque cernitur'. He did not convince John Rainolds; it is just possible that the ninepin arguments, which in true scholastic fashion he set up and knocked down again, were hardly to be accepted as an adequate statement of the Puritan position. Rainolds evidently acquired a reputation in the University for 'preciseness' as regards the drama; and the time came when the academic playwrights thought it well to challenge him in public. Their champion was Dr. William Gager of Christ Church, two of whose plays, Ulysses Redux and Rivales, were down for performance by the Christ Church students during the Christmas of 1591-2. Rainolds was invited by one Thomas Thornton to see the Ulysses Redux. He refused and being pressed gave his reasons. It was not therefore unnatural that when Gager appended to the Hippolytus, which was also given, a new apologetical epilogue in which arguments against the stage, very similar to those of Rainolds, were put into the mouth of one Momus, our theologian should infer that by Momus none other was intended than himself. He must have cried 'Touché', and thereby gave Gager an opportunity of sending him a printed
- ↑ I am not writing the history of the Oxford stage, but it is pertinent to note that a statute of 1584, just as Case was writing, had excluded common stage-plays from the University, both on grounds of health and economy, and that 'the younger sort . . . may not be spectatours of so many lewde and evill sports as in them are practised' (Boas, 225).
