uniformly employed than it had been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their chief patron, the public.
Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its forms continued to enjoy the favour or good-will of the court, although a close supervision was exercised over all attempts to make the stage the vehicle of political references or allusions. The regular official agent of this supervision was the The drama and Puritanism.master of the revels; but under James I. a special ordinance, in harmony with the king’s ideas concerning the dignity of the throne, was passed “against representing any modern Christian king in plays on the stage.” The theatre could hardly expect to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state denied to the public at large; and occasional attempts to indulge in the freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less decisive repression and punishment.[1] But the sympathies of the dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court that the real difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the population, well represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the representation of stage-plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and-death kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,[2] though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions,[3] rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;[4] and the comedies of his contemporaries and successors[5] abound in caricatured reproductions of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the diversions of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Puritan opposition to all and any stage plays. A patient endeavour to reform instead of suppressing the drama was not to be looked for from such adversaries, should they ever possess the means of carrying out their views; and whenever Puritanism should victoriously assert itself in the state, the stage was doomed. Among the attacks directed against it in its careless heyday of prosperity Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix (1632), while it involved its author in shamefully cruel persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone of the dramatic literature of the subsequent period; but the quarrel between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep to end in any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of its Closing of
the theatres. protectors. The Civil War began in August 1642; and early in the following month was published the ordinance of the Lords and Commons, which, after a brief and solemn preamble, commanded “that while these sad causes and set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne.” Many actors and playwrights followed the fortunes of the royal cause in the field; some may have gone into a more or less voluntary exile; upon those who lingered on in the familiar haunts the hand of power lay heavy; and, though there seems reason to believe that dramatic entertainments of one kind or another continued to be occasionally presented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to magistrates against any players found engaged in such proceedings (1647), and bade them treat all stage-players as rogues, and pull down all stage galleries, seats and boxes (1648). A few dramatic works were published in this period;[6] while at fairs about the country were acted farces called “drolls,” consisting of the most vulgar scenes to be found in popular plays. Thus, the life of the drama was not absolutely extinguished; and its darkest day proved briefer than perhaps either its friends or its foes could have supposed.
Already “in Oliver’s time” private performances took place from time to time at noblemen’s houses and (though not undisturbed) in the old haunt of the drama, the Red Bull. In 1656 the ingenuity of Sir William Davenant whose name (though not really so significant in the dramatic as in another field Revival of
the drama.of English literature) is memorable as connecting together two distinct periods in it, ventured on a bolder step in the production of a quasi-dramatic entertainment “of declamation and music”; and in the following year he brought out with scenery and music a piece which was afterwards in an enlarged form acted and printed as the first part of his opera, The Siege of Rhodes. This entertainment he afterwards removed from the private house where it had been produced to the Cockpit, where he soon ventured upon the performance of regular plays written by himself. Thus, under the cover of two sister arts, whose aid was in the sequel to prove by no means altogether beneficial to its progress, the English drama had boldly anticipated the Restoration, and was no longer hiding its head when that much-desired event was actually brought about. Soon after Charles II.’s entry into London, two theatrical companies are known to have been acting in the capital. For these companies patents were soon granted, under the names of “the Duke (of York)’s” and “the King’s Servants,” to Davenant and one of the brothers Killigrew respectively—the former from 1662 acting at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then at Dorset Garden in Salisbury Court, the latter from 1663 at the Theatre Royal near Drury Lane. These companies were united from 1682, a royal licence being granted in 1695 to a rival company which performed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and which migrated to Covent Garden in 1733. Meanwhile, Vanbrugh had in 1705 built the theatre in the Haymarket; and a theatre in Goodman’s Fields—afterwards rendered famous by the first appearance of Garrick—led a fitful existence from 1729 to 1733. The act of 1737 deprived the crown of the power of licensing any more theatres; so that the history of the English stage for a long period was confined to a restricted area. The rule which prevailed after the Restoration, that neither of the rival companies should ever attempt a play produced by the other, operated beneficially both upon the activity of dramatic authorship and upon the progress of the art of acting, which was not exposed to the full effects of that deplorable spirit of personal rivalry which too often leads even most intelligent actors to attempt parts for which they have no special qualification. There can be little doubt that the actor’s art has rarely flourished more in England than in the days of T. Betterton and his contemporaries, among whose names those of Hart, Mohun, Kynaston, Nokes, Mrs Barry, Mrs Betterton, Mrs Bracegirdle and Mrs Eleanor Gwyn have, together with many others, survived in various connexions among the memories of the Restoration age. No higher praise has ever been given to an actor than that which Addison bestowed upon Betterton, in describing his performance of Othello as a proof that Shakespeare could not have written the most striking passages of the character otherwise than he has done.
- ↑ Chapman, Marston (and Jonson), Eastward Hoe (1605); Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624); Shirley and Chapman, The Ball (1632); Massinger(?), The Spanish Viceroy (1634).
- ↑ Twelfth Night.
- ↑ The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street, by “W. S.” (Wentworth Smith?).
- ↑ The Alchemist; Bartholomew Fair.
- ↑ Chapman, An Humorous Day’s Mirth; Marston, The Dutch Courtesan; Middleton, The Family of Love.
- ↑ Among these was Sir Richard Fanshawe’s English version of the Pastor fido (1646); after his death were published his translations of two plays by A. de Mendoza.
