firstly the Martin Marprelate controversy, which for a while absorbed much ink and paper, and secondly, the persecution which recusants had to undergo at the hands of the dominant party in Church and State. Aggressive at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, by its close Puritanism had to stand on its defence. A corresponding change in its relations with the stage was inevitable. From an assailant, it became an object of assault. The players had never been disposed to endure criticism without hitting back. Lewis Wager, as early as 1566, has his word against the hypocrites, who slander plays from fear lest their own wickedness should be revealed in public; and one may be sure that the actor's side of the question was as remorselessly pressed from the scaffold as that of the Puritan from the pulpit. This tendency can only have gathered impetus from the official encouragement given for a time to the players to intervene against Martin Marprelate.[1] The tone of the later apologists for the stage has become insolent rather than deprecatory. Nashe, always ready to carry any war into the enemy's quarter, boldly ascribes the attacks upon plays to the envy felt by vintners, alewives, and victuallers for more respectable places of entertainment than their own, and to the indifference to greatness of avaricious citizens, who 'know when they are dead they shall not be brought upon the stage for any goodness, but in a merriment of the Usurer and the Diuel, or buying Armes of the Herald'. So, too, Henry Chettle, in his Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), puts into the mouth of the ghost of Tarleton, not only the usual serious defence of the moral value of plays and an appeal to the youth of the city not to disturb the peace of the theatres, but also a mock protest from the keepers of bowling-alleys, dicing-houses, and brothels against the competition of actors with their trades, and the discovery in jig and jest of 'our crosse-biting, our conny-catching, our traines, our traps, our gins, our snares, our subtilties'. Nashe and Chettle are perhaps tilting rather at some of the civic allies of the Puritans, than at the Puritans themselves. But the latter had to bear their full share of the stage's revengeful triumph. The printer of Th' Overthrow of Stage Playes in 1599 notes in his preface how some 'haue not bene afraied of late dayes to bring vpon the stage the very sober countenances, graue attire, modest and matronelike gestures & speaches of men & women to be laughed at as a scorne and reproch to the world'. A detailed analysis of the satire of Puritanism in later Elizabethan and in Jacobean comedy would pass beyond the limits of this study. For a sample
- ↑ Cf. ch. ix and App. C, No. xl.
