Whatever weight such abstract reasonings may have carried, they were after all but the fringes and trimmings of the controversy. The main burden of the complaints raised by the Puritans rested neither on theology nor on history, but on the character of the London plays as they knew them, and on the actual conditions under which representations were given. In a stage from which Protestant polemic was now banned, they found nothing but scurrilitas. They resented the impurity of speech and gesture. They resented the scoffs at virtue and religion, especially when these were interlaced with themes taken, as dramatic themes were still often taken, from the Scriptures.[1] And their disapproval was hardly less when the plays were wholly secular, for in tragedies they could discern nothing but examples to honest citizens of murders, treacheries, and rebellions, and in comedies nothing but demoralizing pictures of intrigues and wantonness. Plays, they declared, are the snares of the devil set to catch souls. By plays the imagination of youth is corrupted, and matronly chastity first turned to thoughts of sin. With their ready touch upon vituperative rhetoric, they found for the theatre a string of nicknames of which Gosson's 'the school of abuse' was the model, and 'the school of bawdery', 'the nest of the devil', 'the consultorie of Satan', may serve as further samples. And what the plays began, they held that the surroundings of the playhouses were only too well adapted to finish. In them was focused all the sin of the city. Here men came, not merely to waste their time and their money, but to meet wantons, and to whisper dishonourable proposals in the ears of any respectable women with whom they found themselves in company. The constant presence of harlots amongst the audience, the dallying with them in the front of the galleries, the manning of them home afterwards, even if the buildings adjacent to the stage did not themselves afford a convenient shelter for ill-doing, are dwelt upon with a vigour of description which perhaps testifies to the horror wherewith this connexion of the stage with sexual immorality had affected the Puritan mind.[2]
Above all, there was Sabbatarianism to be taken into account. During the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, Sunday was the usual day for plays. The trumpets blew for the performances just as the bells were tolling for afternoon prayer; and writer after writer bears testimony to the fact that too often the yards and galleries were filled with an appreciative crowd, while the preacher's sermon was unfre-*
