been playwrights, and having presumably suffered at the hands of their masters, pay off old scores with another argument. If plays had really a moral influence, would not this be apparent in the lives of those who are most conversant with them, the players themselves. Yet the players are not only extremely insolent and swaggering persons, but notoriously practise in real life the very vices which they represent on the stage. Moreover, they take young boys and bring them up in shamelessness. How can it be expected that good shall be done, where there is no will in the agent to do good?[1] The inconclusiveness of the discussion was of course largely due to the fact that the Puritan and the humanist disputants were not talking about quite the same thing. Obviously the influence of a play, if any, upon conduct must depend on the manner of handling and on the dramatic idea involved; and it may be taken for granted that the ideal comedy and tragedy, which the humanists praised and which some of them tried to realize, were often very imperfectly represented by the actual pieces put before a London audience. This is to some extent admitted on both sides. Sidney is frankly contemptuous of the popular stage. Whetstone speaks of his 'commendable exercise' as 'discredited with the tryfels of yonge, unadvised, and rashe witted wryters'. Lodge and the author of The Play of Plays are fully conscious of abuses, which must be remedied if the drama is to take the place assigned to it in the humanist scheme of things. On the other hand, Gosson is fair-minded enough to admit that certain plays, principally his own, are beyond reproach; and even that, as compared with an earlier period than that of which he wrote, there had been some purging of the language used on the boards.[2] Yet, when all allowance has been made on this score, it would seem that there must still remain some fundamental incompatibility between the views of the Puritans and those of the humanists as regards the psychological effects of the drama upon conduct. Perhaps this is hardly to be wondered at. After all, the psychological effect of a drama, or of any other work of art, is not a simple thing, but depends upon an incalculable relation between what the artist puts into his work and what the spectator brings to the contemplation of it. And it may fairly be assumed that what a Sidney brought and what a limb of Limehouse brought were sufficiently different things. Were this a philosophic work on the drama and not merely a history of the stage, it might be appropriate to dwell upon the fact that, however much the Puritans and the humanists might disagree, they
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