- quented.[1] Thus a touch of professional amour propre gave
its sting to the conflict, and there is no one point that is more insisted upon in sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet than the desecration of the Lord's Day which the attendance at theatres directly entailed. The preachers did not disdain an appeal to popular superstitions which they probably themselves shared, and the visitations of plague from which Elizabethan London regularly suffered,[2] no less than such events as earthquakes[3] or the fall of ruinous buildings,[4] were interpreted as tokens of divine wrath at the wickedness of plays and in particular at the breach of the Fourth Commandment. A curious legend was whispered abroad in various forms, to the effect that the devil himself had been known on occasion to take an unrehearsed part in this or that godless piece.[5]
The playwright, no less than the theologian, has a ready pen, and the Puritan attacks naturally provoked a counter-literature of apology. This first took shape in critical prefaces attached to such contemporary plays, mainly of literary rather than stage origin, as reached the honours of print.[6] Gosson's Schoole of Abuse, a treacherous performance from the point of view of his former colleagues, called for a more elaborate reply. More than one pamphlet was written, of which the Honest Excuses (c. 1579) Thomas Lodge has alone come down to us. The serious argument of this, as well as of the prefaces which preceded it, continues the main humanist tradition. Against the denunciations of the Fathers and of certain pagan moralists, the apologists set the antiquity of plays and the honour in which after all they were held in the palmy days of Greece and Rome. The examples of violence and wantonness in tragedy and comedy they justify by the moral end of drama. Decorum—the literary sense of
- ↑ Northbrooke, 92; Stockwood, 23; Munday, 128; Field, Epistle.
- ↑ White, 46; Gosson, P. C. 215.
- ↑ Stubbes, 180, speaks of serious accidents at theatres due to panic at an earthquake, which must be that of 6 April 1580; but the account published at the time (cf. App. C, No. xxv) makes no reference to theatres, although it does, oddly enough, record that the only deaths were those of two children who were listening to a sermon in Christ Church, Newgate.
- ↑ The fall of the Paris Garden bear-baiting house on 13 January 1583 led John Field, in his A Godly Exhortation (1583) on that event, which is closely related to the anti-stage literature, to anticipate a similar fate for the theatres. The Puritans should have taken to heart the wise comment of Sir Thomas More on a similar occasion (cf. ch. xvi, s.v. Hope).
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Marlowe, Dr. Faustus.
- ↑ Cf. App. C, Nos. iv, ix, x, xiv, xix. Something might be added from the prefaces of the Senecan translators (cf. ch. xxiii).
