CHAPTER 15.

WILLIAM PRYNNE.

One who remembers the course through which the question of the lawfulness of stage-plays was prepared for its last great expression, will find the character of that expression in part accounted for. Since the sentiment against the drama had grown till it was voiced by men of all professions, especially in the ever increasing Puritan body; since the arguments, after an early development, had advanced steadily in completeness and bitterness; and since the church and court by measures of exasperation and tyranny hastened this growth, one can easily surmise the nature of the great attack of 1633. To be really expressive of the latest Puritan sentiment, this work had to be both more embracing and more extreme than its predecessors. It was forced to summarize more completely than the Shorte Treatise had done the arguments of its forerunners; to rehearse more at large than the Refutation had done the feelings of antiquity; and above all to betray, in a degree determined by the character of the author, the heightened tension felt throughout the Puritan world. With these points in mind one is prepared for the last great expression of the Puritan aversion, the work of William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, the Players Scourge.

Having obtained a knowledge of the historical setting of this work, it is essential now to acquire a sense of its subjective element. Of all Englishmen who attacked the stage, the career of William Prynne was the most varied and interesting. He was born in 1600 in the town of Swainswick, several miles from Bath. In his father's plain but comfortable home the first lessons of Puritanism were learned, and the spirit then received was fostered by the

1

1 Bruce's fragment of Prynne's life is published in Documents Relating to William Prynne. See also Dict. of Nat'l. Biog.

stirring years of his boyhood. At the time of the Gunpowder Plot his grandfather was sitting for Bath in the House of Commons, and the excitement following the discovery of that conspiracy undoubtedly filled the boy's heart with party rancor. In 1611 the Authorized Version of the Bible was issued, to replace the Geneva translation of which all Puritans were so fond, and this, too, he must have heard discussed. Then, in 1616 leaving the Bath grammar school, Prynne went to Oxford, which under Laud's influence was gradually turning from sympathy with Geneva to a more and more anti-Puritan, Anglo-Catholic attitude in church. matters. Here, therefore, Prynne early faced the enemy, and his heart was filled with disgust and hatred. Consequently, by the time of his admission to Lincoln's Inn in 1621, where the influence of the lecturer, John Preston, and where the soberer life that distinguished that body from the other Inns of Court only strengthened the trait, his militant spirit was already well formed.

Under conditions so qualified to intensify whatever of intolerance lurked in his nature, Prynne started in life. From the beginning, he combined with his legal work theological studies. His first book was published in 1627—a treatise on theology, which was followed soon by three separate attacks on the doctrines of Arminianism. But at the same time he took an active interest in the reformation of the manners of the age, and assailed the follies of Elizabethan England, for example the custom of drinking healths, and the extravagant head-dress then fashionable, as virulently as he could have done a positive vice. If such foibles roused his wrath, it is not strange that the great and widely recognized evils of the drama should have attracted his attention. By the year 1624 he began work untiringly on his Histrio-Mastix. Throughout the long imprisonment which followed its publication, his pen was never idle in the attack on the arbitrary rule of Bishops and Kings. As a reward, when the Long Parliament assembled, he was liberated and restored to the position and degree of

which he had been deprived. Immediately he reciprocated all the animosity Laud had shown in his persecution, heaping not the metaphorical coals of fire on the Archbishop's head. But it was not the ecclesiastical party alone that suffered his reviling. He soon took up the cause against Milton's doctrine of divorce, and fought the growth of Independency with all the vehemence of his nature. Next, in 1647, he turned again to politics, upholding Presbyterianism against the encroachments of the army. For this he was arrested a few days after Pride's Purge, and from that time forth the Commonwealth bore the wrath of his invective pen. Thus estranged from his old party, when, on the fall of Richard Cromwell, the Long Parliament reassembled, Prynne's attempts to take his old seat were repelled. Hence the busy pamphleteer was thrown into a new warfare in behalf of the "excluded members," till finally he was readmitted in time to take a prominent part in the action against the army and its despotism, and in welcoming the new order of things. Thus the man who had once been branded "Seditious Libeller" because of his Histrio-Mastix, was regarded as the "Cato of his age" by a leading Royalist. But great as the change of view may seem, his heart was still the same. Though his intolerance and blind zeal had drawn him from his early friends to hatred of the Puritan rule, he was still the same uncompromising Presbyterian. He died unmarried in Lincoln's Inn in 1669, and there was buried where he so long had worked in solitude over his books, a type, like Burton and Fuller, of the omnivorous reader of the day, but unlike them possessed of neither moderation nor Christian charity.

Such was the life and training of the man who has come to stand as the final leader and grand martyr of the Puritan cause. He does not stand before the world as a man possessed of the calm and dignified spirit of Northbrooke, nor of the worldly knowledge and the humor of the penitent Gosson, nor finally of the keen eye and interesting descriptive power of Stubbes. His very mode of life forbade any

such wisdom or calm vision. His Histrio-Mastix is important, rather, because in that quaint, dumpy little volume of some eleven hundred pages is massed all the force of previous attacks on the stage-the condemnations of heroes of old, the anathemas of the Fathers, and the writings even of those "punier times" in which Prynne himself lived. It was the encyclopædic reference work of the attack, collecting and classifying, but adding little to the contribution of the past. And even its usefulness in that capacity was destroyed by its blind zeal. For Prynne refused to restrain himself within the ample grounds allowed by justice, and respected by his many forerunners; he dissipated by his invective the favorable opinion prepared in advance for him, so that his book represents the extreme of intolerance and unreason which the Puritan argument ever reached.

The history of Prynne's book is most interesting. The author was inspired to his task by the recollection of those four wicked plays to which he had been enticed while yet a "novice" by carnal-minded companions. With this extensive basis for Baconian induction, and with apparently no greater familiarity with English dramatic literature, he set to work as early as 1624 to digest and classify the "play condemning passages" from all known sources. True, he wished to publish sooner, and was forestalled only by Dr. Harris' refusal of a license. This indiscretion caused that gentleman some years later real contrition, as he thought how the book had since appeared in a form "seven times bigger and seven times worse. 991 For Prynne returned to his task with undismayed energy, and when at last the book slipped through the licenser's hands, Laud himself, thoroughly acquainted as he was with the capabilities of his age in the production of mighty folios, asserted that the mere reading of the works cited by Prynne would occupy sixty years of a man's life.

It is really amusing to think from what a slight cause the book grew through those laborious years in comprehen

1 Rushworth, II, 226.

siveness and detail. Perhaps the scope of Histrio-Mastix, its two tragedies with their thirteen acts and countless scenes, fully equipped with prologues, choruses, catastrophes, and the other incidental paraphernalia of the buskined stage, can be most readily seen by a glance at the well-crowded title-page, and at the margins stuffed with references and quotations from all sources. Earlier opponents of the drama had shown the same wish to fortify their position with the authority of the Fathers, as they fairly might do; but in "marginal Prynne," as Milton' dubbed him,1 this spirit was carried to the extreme. In the preface he explained that the countless quotations were made "onely for the Readers better satisfaction," not at all for vainglorious ostentation, and the never-ceasing repetition of the same authority, only that new vistas of the subject might be thereby opened to the reader's view. He falsely assumed that to all mankind the maxims of antiquity brought as much of comfort as they did to himself. He had, however, a further reason for such an array of authority. From Histrio-Mastix, as from other writings of the day, we see clearly that the term Puritan had become a bitter taunt, and that the reviled were smarting under the attack. Reflections of this feeling, together with Prynne's passages of sturdy defense, add spice and savor to the dull old book. "In these our dayes; wherein Stage-playes almost cry down Sermons," and when "Paganizing Actors and Playhaunters . . . hate, revile and slander, all zealous, practicall Christians, under the Tearmes of Puritanes, Prescitians, Novellers, Factionists, Holy-breathren, Men of the Spirit, Bible-beares, Sermon-haunters, Hypocrites, Holysisters, and a world of such like ignominious, disgracefull tearmes," Prynne felt called on to defend those "Magistrates Ministers or Professors of Religion," who were brought upon the stage "to deride, and jeer them, for that which most commends them to God and all good men." Surely 1 Original draft of Colasterion; see Masson, III, 470. 2 p. 532. 4 p. 875.

3 p. 543.