may be taken the figure of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614). Busy has a scruple against eating pig at the fair, 'for the very calling it a Bartholmew-pigge, and to eat it so, is a spice of Idolatry, and you make the Fayre, no better than one of the high Places'. But the lust of the flesh overcomes him, and he eats 'two and a half to his share' and drinks 'a pailefull'. This, however, does not dispose him to be lenient to the pride of the eyes at the fair. He condemns a doll with 'See you not Goldylocks, the purple strumpet, there? in her yellow gowne, and greene sleeues?' and pulls down a pile of gingerbread cakes as 'this idolatrous groue of images, this flasket of idols'. Naturally, his extreme wrath is against the puppet, which he calls Dagon, and 'a beame in the eye of the brethren; a very great beame, an exceeding great beame; such as are your Stage-players, Rimers, and Morrise-dancers, who have walked hand in hand, in contempt of the Brethren, and the Cause'. He disputes with the puppet, and produces the 'old stale argument' of the male putting on the apparel of the female and the female of the male, and is finally refuted when the puppet 'takes up his garment', and reveals that it has no sex.[1]
When Puritanism gathered head again under James, it was the sting of caricature which directly led to the renewal of the old controversy. Two hypocrites in The Puritan (c. 1606) had been christened after the churches of St. Antholin and St. Mary Overies, which were known to be the principal centres in London of Puritan faith and practice. William Crashaw, the father of the poet, protested in a sermon at Paul's Cross. Two years later, he again rebuked the players for their opposition to the Virginian expedition, which he declared to be due to pique at the godly determination of the adventurers to take no company to their plantation. There were other 'seditious sectists' at work, and a leading actor of the Queen's men, who was also a prolific dramatist, Thomas Heywood, took up the cudgels for his 'quality' against these 'over-curious heads' in an elaborate Apology for Actors, which must have been written about 1608, but was not published until 1612. This resumes, effectively enough, most of the arguments both of the humanists and of popular disputants such as Nashe, but does not contribute anything very novel upon a subject as to which, indeed, little novel remained to be said, with the exception of a
- ↑ B. Fair, i. 2, 3, 6; iii. 2, 6; iv. 1, 6; v. 5; cf. Jonson's Epigr. lxxv. On Lippe the Teacher. I suppose that the treatise on the question of sex-apparel which Selden sent to Jonson in 1616 (App. C, No. lxii) was meant to furnish annotations for B. Fair.
