CHAPTER 3.

NORTHBROOKE, THE LEADER OF THE ACTIVE CAMPAIGN.

The preceding chapter has traced the growth of English opposition to the stage to the years 1575 and 1576, when the city of London at last succeeded in expelling the players from its limits, and when a clearly defined sentiment was rapidly spreading throughout the country. This opposition was led by men high in the English church; for, to repeat somewhat, Puritanism was then only an advanced Protestantism, touching forms, not doctrines, and supported partially, at least, by many of Elizabeth's early bishops. In these years a natural division appeared in the controversy. In 1575 the London Corporation won its temporary victory, and, resting on its arms, awaited the renewal of the warfare which the defiant opening of regular theaters in the Liberties, just without the boundaries of the city, rendered inevitable. Events seemed also to culminate in that year for the main body of the Puritan party. In 1575 the see of Archbishop Parker fell to his more liberal successor, Grindal, whose sentiments on the stage had already been heard; and to the extreme branch of the church renewed hope of recognition was given. Not much later, in 1576, the genuine Puritan sentiment against the stage, which had already found expression in Alley, Dering, North, Harrison and others, was crystalized in the first definite and extended arraignment of the English drama. Therefore, we naturally end the first period of our survey with the oncoming of these years. For, in pursuing the study, a merely chronological arrangement of material, which leaves everything unconnected, is insufficient. Scarcely more satisfactory is it to group the different phases of the movement according to the sovereigns' reigns, since only a small part in the struggle was borne by the court. To mark the different stages in the attack by the appearance of the most prominent and characteristic of the Puritan treatises is a far more logical

method of division. And still better is it if certain periods can be found in which at approximately the same time the Puritan literary campaign and the civic opposition came to a crisis, and together gathered their forces for a new advance. Such a point was reached at the beginning of the last quarter of the 16th century. By that time the preliminary work had been done; the London theater was firmly and defiantly settled in its permanent home; and, in consequence, the time was ripe for a more active and consecutive literary warfare against stage-plays.

Beginning this new period with the renewal of the civic struggle, and with the commencement of the Puritans' literary attack, we shall trace the growth of the movement, passing by the slight culmination of events in 1583-4, and closing the second period with the last years of the Queen's reign, when again both parties to the attack seemed to rest momentarily before renewing their active endeavors for reform.

No decided break is to be looked for at the beginning of any of these periods. The first of the definite Puritan attacks, the honor of which belongs to John Northbrooke, showed the same moderate tone and spirit of fairness that had marked the utterances of earlier years. Northbrooke, a man apparently of liberal culture, was one of the first ministers ordained by Bishop Berkeley of Bath and Wells. At one time he was imprisoned by the Bishop of Exeter, it may be inferred for some act of nonconformity. And that as early his eye was open to the abuses around him is revealed in the dedicatory epistle of his first publication, where he gives, as one of his motives for writing, the savage abuse of John Blackeall, whom he had detected in certain offenses.1 Was this not the same Puritan spirit that moved him in 1577, with the motto Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra, to enter for publication, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine playes, or Enterluds, with other idle pastimes, &c., commonly used on the Sabboth day, are

1 For the facts of his life we have used the Dict. of Nat'l. Biog.

reproued by the Authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers? In perfect harmony with these words, the citation from Cicero at the close of the long title, "We are not to this ende borne that we should seeme to be created for play and pastime; but we are rather borne to sagenesse, and to certaine grauer and greater studies," reveals the Puritan temper of the author and foretells the nature of his work.

Notwithstanding, Collier, the editor of the Shakespeare Society's reprint of the Treatise, hesitated to call Northbrooke a Puritan. His very method of argument, "made dialoguewise," seemed to Collier strangely inconsistent in a work of its kind. But to the Puritan, dialogue had no necessary connection with the drama. The Book of Job had that form; it was used by Grindal, also, in his Fruitful Dialogue between Custom and Verity, and later by Bunyan; and even to those Puritans unfamiliar with Plato no inconsistency in Northbrooke's method could have suggested itself. In other respects, equally groundless, he

seemed to Collier un-Puritan. If Northbrooke was inclined to permit academical plays, so also were other of the early Puritan attackers, notably North; if he did sanction honest recreation and bètray a love of certain field sports, so also did Alley and his fellows; and his feeling that to gather hay on Sunday in order to save it could be no harm, at least not so harmful as to idle away the day, was a latitude of opinion not unusual, especially in the early days of Puritanism. Even Dr. Bownd's work on the Sabbath, the rock bottom of later Sabbatarian feeling, allowed considerable freedom in works of necessity; and John Rainoldes, the petitioner at the Hampton Court Conference for a stricter observance of the day, permitted liberty in the very point at which Collier found Northbrooke stumbling. With apparent commendation Rainoldes once wrote,1 "Good Emperours haue allowed men to doe their workes of tillage and husbandry on the Sunday, when other daies the season

1 Overthrow, p. 14.

serueth not." Northbrooke's position, therefore, was quite in accord with Puritan ideas, and quite natural in one mindful of the parable of the unfortunate sheep. He was a staunch Protestant, as his hatred of the Papists indicates; he was, moreover, a staunch Puritan of that moderate and liberal spirit common among ministers of Parker's and Grindal's archbishoprics.

To this conclusion, the outline of the Treatise must force us. It is in form a dialogue between erring, but well-intentioned Youth, and Age, a man trained in the knowledge of pagan authors, the Church Fathers and the Scriptures. As Age is on his way home from church, he meets Youth, and, on learning how he has wasted his day, takes occasion to give him a lesson from the Bible and the holy writers on righteousness and moderation in all things. This is the keynote of his advice. Quoting Scripture for his authority, he grants Youth readily such "good exercises and honest pastimes" as may be necessary to refresh his body for a renewal of labor; but urgeş care lest these recreations be used to excess. For even honest diversions, if they conflict with divine service, Bible study, or holy deeds, become sins. And against those idlers, "detestable and odious" in any commonwealth, who, regardless of their Maker, waste their time and substance in "vaine, wanton, and idle playes [pastimes]," his wrath never softens. Every idle hour to Age, especially on the Sabbath day, every idle word, is a misapplication of God's gifts, and an enticement to so many crimes that again and again he comes back to this topic. If the worthy laws against idlers were but enforced, he says, England would not harbor "so many loytering ydle persons, so many ruffians, blasphemers, and swinge bucklers, so many drunkardes, tossepottes diceplayers and maskers, fencers, theeves, enterlude players, cutpurses." In this way the subject of stage-plays is gradually approached. They, too, are included among those "euil and unprofitable acts" that lead 1 1 p. 76.

men to ruin. Yet in his characteristically moderate spirit, lest he be thought "too stoicall and precise," Age hesitates to condemn all plays. Explaining away Cyprian's apparent condemnation of the training of child actors, he would permit the use of plays in schools, provided they be kept free from evil words and acts, and used in moderation, without any outlay in gaudy apparel, and, with no pecuniary motives, solely as a means of instruction.1 But he refuses absolutely any further sanction of theatrical performances, lest he in so doing should "giue waye to a thousande mischiefes and inconueniences, which daily happen by occasion of beholding and haunting suche spectacles."2 Liberal and sound in principle, his final stand against the art is taken only to preserve the fundamental safeguards of religion and society. But since excess of all sorts is commonly regarded as its blemish, let due recognition be given to the Puritanism which acts in an intelligent and broad-minded way.

Thus it was not against art as art that Northbrooke objected; for of true poetry and music he approved. It was only the immoral tendencies of plays that forced him to his decided stand. In the moral efficacy of the miracleplay, with its mingled "scurrilitie and diuinitie," he had no faith; but that form of the drama was too clearly expiring to give ground of itself to his attack. Nor would his practical Christian nature have objected seriously to man's wearing of woman's clothes had no evil come of it. Even for the waste of money he could probably have devised some means of correction. It was the actual lewdness of the plays of his time, and the actual evil of the play-house that inspired such passages as, "I am persuaded that Satan hath not a more speedie way, and fitter schoole to work and teach his desire, to bring men and women into his snare of concupiscence and filthie lustes of wicked whoredome, than those places [the Theater and 1 Epist. 16, lib. 1. See Treatise, p. 103-4. 2 p. 83.

3 pp. 85-6, 91.

3