which was not prepared to exclude the academic play from the general condemnation of things theatrical. Naturally this tendency shows itself mainly at the Universities, where tragedies and comedies, both in Latin and in English, continued to be part of the ordinary exercise of youth, especially when Christmas was kept or entertainment had to be found for a royal visit, and where men of high ecclesiastical standing, such as James Calfhill, Penitentiary of St. Paul's and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, did not disdain to furnish dramas for the use of their scholars.[1] So far as Cambridge is concerned, we find Vice-Chancellor Beaumont reporting to Archbishop Parker in 1565 that 'two or three in Trinity College think it very unseeming that Christians should play or be present at any profane comedies or tragedies'.[2] We find Sir John Harington, who was an undergraduate from 1576 to 1578, noting his recollection about 1597 that 'in Cambridge, howsoever the presyser sort have banisht them, the wyser sort did, and still doe mayntayn them'. And we find John Smith of Christ's haled before the University for an unguarded attack upon the less strict practice of his fellows in a Lenten sermon of 1586.[3] It was at Oxford, however, that the divergence of opinion became most articulate. The protagonist was John Rainolds, afterwards President of Corpus Christi College, and a man of great influence in the Puritan party, whom he represented at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. Rainolds first touched the question, to which his attention was probably called by the dispute then raging in London, with a passing allusion to the 'pestes scenicorum, theatralia spectacula' as one of the great interruptions to Oxford studies, in his preface to some disputations published in 1581. There is no reason to suppose that he voiced the general view of the University, and in particular of those of its members who were still under the influence of the humanist spirit. Probably these were better represented by the commentaries on the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle published by John Case, Fellow of St. John's College, in his Speculum moralium quaestionum (1585) and Sphaera civitatis (1588). Case commends plays, provided that they are an expression of comitas, the Aristotelian [Greek: eutrapelia], and not of its excess scurrilitas. They are sanctioned by the use of
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Calfhill, for Walter Haddon's somewhat slighting reference to his theatri celebritas.
- ↑ Parker Correspondence (Parker Soc.), 226.
- ↑ Strype, Annals (1824), III. i. 496. Smith had said, 'Si illud verum sit quod auditione accepi, istius modi certe ludos diris devoveo et actores et spectatores'.
