Plays and Puritans | Page 8

for comedy never. It is a sin; not merely
theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the parent of
seven other sins,--of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a whole
bevy of devils. The prevalence of adultery in any country has always
been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and revolution;
where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a
light thing, that people has been always careless, base, selfish,
cowardly,--ripe for slavery. And we must say that either the courtiers
and Londoners of James and Charles the First were in that state, or that
the poets were doing their best to make them so.
We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall

only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century, with
the exception of Shakspeare's, in which adultery is not introduced as a
subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the whole plot. The
seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a 'handsome
gentleman'; the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of which
we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn and ridicule. In
this latter habit (common to most European nations) there is a sort of
justice. A man can generally retain his wife's affections if he will
behave himself like a man; and 'injured husbands' have for the most
part no one to blame but themselves. But the matter is not a subject for
comedy; not even in that case which has been always too common in
France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to have been
painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a
mariage de convenance, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a
decrepit old man. Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects
for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry. Therefore the men who
look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked are not
good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when they
erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in
teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and
consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity,
pointing 'Eastward Ho!' i.e. to the city of London, as the quarter where
court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions amid the
fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens. If the citizens drove the
players out of London, the playwrights took good care to have their
revenge. The citizen is their standard butt. These shallow parasites, and
their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it
happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley's
'Gamester,' Charles the First's favourite play, a passage like that in Act i.
Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and
that of his fellow- merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have
repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a
humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of having
given those base words his royal warrant and approbation.
The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as
questionable as the comedies. That there are noble plays among them
here and there, no one denies--any more than that there are exquisitely

amusing plays among the comedies; but as the staple interest of the
comedies is dirt, so the staple interest of the tragedies is crime.
Revenge, hatred, villany, incest, and murder upon murder are their
constant themes, and (with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in
his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors with
little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the
audience, and of displaying their own power of delineation in a way
which makes one but too ready to believe the accusations of the
Puritans (supported as they are by many ugly anecdotes) that the
play-writers and actors were mostly men of fierce and reckless lives,
who had but too practical an acquaintance with the dark passions which
they sketch. This is notoriously the case with most of the French
novelists of the modern 'Literature of Horror,' and the two literatures
are morally identical. We do not know of a complaint which can be
justly brought against the School of Balzac and Dumas which will not
equally apply to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding the
civil wars.
This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so greedily,
tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon them (and
not undeservedly) heavy odium.
One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art