reminder to the preachers that, whatever the Fathers may have thought about the Roman ludi, nothing had been said against them by either Christ or his Apostles.[1] Heywood dwells, of course, upon the established position to which by his time actors had attained in the favour both of English and of foreign sovereigns. But he is not blind to the abuses of his profession, and while lauding many of his fellows as men 'of substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-keepers, and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', regrets the licentiousness of others, as well as a growing tendency to inveigh upon the stage both against 'the state, the court, the law, the citty', and against 'private men's humors'.[2] Heywood was answered by one I. G. in A Refutation of the Apologie for Actors (1615), which in its turn covered much ground already trod; and a year later another actor, Nathan Field, was moved to a Remonstrance by some personal attacks levelled at himself and the rest of the King's men by Thomas Sutton, minister of St. Mary Overies. This brings us to the limit of the Shakespearian period, and in the distance still lie the final and portentous presentation of the whole Puritan case in Prynne's Histriomastix (1633), the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament, and the reaction of the Restoration under which men looked back to the stage of James and Charles as a model of decency and order.[3]
There is one clear heritage of English Puritanism from the Genevan theocracy, and that is the claim of the ministers, not only to direct the consciences of their flocks, but also to call upon the municipal authorities to put down with the might of the secular arm whatever in the life of the community did not conform to the religious and ethical standards which they preached. Most of the sermons and pamphlets of 1576-83 are quite deliberately addressed to the 'magistrate', with a view to the exercise of the regulative powers conferred by the proclamation of 1559 and the statute of 1572 for the remedy of the abuses of playhouses, and if possible to the complete suppression of playing. The City fathers, although Gosson railed against their 'sleepiness', were by no means deaf to these appeals.[4] Many of them had themselves adopted Puritanic principles. And apart from strictly religious considerations, they had their own reasons for looking with disfavour upon plays. They were husbands and employers, and their wives and apprentices wasted both time and money in gadding abroad to theatres, at a risk to their virtue and
