What the Puritan ethic gave England
These moral principles suited the taste of the middle class, because they produced diligent workers and gave commerce and private property a religious sanction. Poverty came to count as a sin rather than wealth, and want was taken as a sign of weak character and of deprivation of God's favor.
Politically the Puritans wanted a kind of democratic government under the guidance of the clergy, in which there would be no distinctions among people except moral and religious ones, no ruler but Christ and no law but the word of God. They also opposed the heavy taxes levied to support the Anglican church. Artisans of Puritan belief felt that the grand and costly apparatus was milking them, and, as one pamphleteer wrote, 'the trade of the nation sinks into this episcopal gulf.' Although they defended wealth, the Puritans opposed the idle luxury of the aristocracy. As later ages would prize liberty above all, the Puritans pushed moral discipline to excess, and it may be that their inhuman rules were needed to reform the morals of the English of Elizabeth's age. They produced some of the strongest-willed people in history, such as Cromwell, Milton and those who conquered the wilderness of America. They also left us parliamentary government and trial by jury. Part of the English gravity and reserve, the stability of English families and the integrity of British public life is owed to Puritan labor, and that labor was not in vain.
The war on the theater
The first victory of the Puritans was in their struggle against the theater. All the traits that made them famous, their religious beliefs about the 'elect' and the 'damned', their strict morals, their solemn manner and their Bible-like speech, had been mocked on the stage in ugly, ridiculous and unforgivable portraits. In 1629 the worst offence of all took place: a French actress dared to play a female part at the Blackfriars theater in place of a boy. The audience pelted her with apples and rotten eggs.
The new dramatists might have joined the Puritan camp, for although they sometimes cracked coarse jokes to please the lower audience, they were on the whole well-bred men. Philip Massinger, in his play A New Way to Pay Old Debts, attacked not chastity but the greed of the monopolists. It had no fine verse, sweet wit or graceful art, but it showed how an unscrupulous usurper is finally hauled before the court, and its five acts pass without one word about loose women. John Ford, to draw audiences, wrote a play with a shocking title, but that play and The Broken Heart were both gentle and dignified in tone, and if modern audiences could bear the bloody endings, those plays might still be staged.
When William Prynne, the bold chief of the Puritans, sent his book Histriomastix to the printer (the source gives a garbled title, and the usual one is The Players' Scourge), the sharpest criticism of the theater was made. Prynne was a lawyer and made no claim to impartiality. He drew up a brief of about a thousand pages for the plaintiff and, quoting the Bible, the church fathers and even pagan philosophers, tried to prove that drama was invented by the devil and was at first meant to honor him. He wrote that most plays were blasphemous and shameful, full of amorous embraces, wanton gestures and lustful tunes; that dancing was mischievous and every step of it led a person toward hell; and that most actors were criminals, unbelievers and godless. He also held that the only fit school was the church of God, not the playhouse, and that only the Torah, the Gospel, sermons and the scriptures were worth the reading of Christians. If they needed amusement, he said, they would enjoy the many sights of the sun, moon, planets and stars and thousands of creatures, their ears would be soothed by the songs of birds, their noses would be perfumed by the matchless scents of plants, flowers and fruits, and they would enjoy the taste of all edible things. They would find full pleasure in gardens, rivers, pools and woods. Besides this, God had granted them the delight of friendship, kinship, marriage, children, property, wealth and every other outward blessing.
It was a learned and eloquent argument, but in the book every actress was called a prostitute, and the queen had brought several actresses from France and was herself rehearsing for a court masque. Henrietta Maria was offended, and Laud summoned Prynne to court on a charge of seditious libel. Prynne declared that he had not meant to satirize the queen and apologized for the excesses of his book. Nonetheless, with a severity that the Puritans long remembered, Prynne was disbarred, fined an impossible sum (the book adds a dollar equivalent, left out here), sentenced to life imprisonment, and then pilloried and mutilated. In prison he wrote News from Ipswich (1636), in which he called the high clergy of the Anglican church traitors and greedy wolves and urged that they be hanged. He was pilloried again and further mutilated. He remained in prison until the Long Parliament freed him in 1640.
In 1642 Parliament closed all the theaters. This was in effect an act of war and was apparently meant to last only through that troubled time, but it stayed in force until 1656. The long labor of Elizabethan drama, the greatest drama in England's history, had come to an end.
Selden and the prose of Charles's reign
In England there were at least two men who watched this tumultuous scene calmly. One of them, John Selden, was so learned that people said, 'What Selden does not know, nobody knows.' As an antiquary he collected state papers of the Norman period and compiled a book called Titles of Honor (1614). As an orientalist he studied idolatry and became famous across Europe. As a jurist he interpreted rabbinic law and wrote a History of Tithes in which he rejected the divine origin of the tithe. As a member of Parliament he took part in the impeachment of Buckingham and of Laud and in drafting the Petition of Right, and he was twice imprisoned. Selden took part in the Westminster Assembly as a layman, in his own phrase 'to see the war of the donkeys,' and urged the members to take a moderate course in religious debate. After his death his conversation, recorded by his secretary, became a classic. Here is a sample of its content, in paraphrase.
It is idle to speak of heresy, he said, because a man cannot think other than he thinks. In early ages there were various opinions, and when a king adopted one, the others were counted heresy. Nobody is wiser for his learning; learning supplies materials to work with, but wit and wisdom are born with a person. Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. Once a lion asked a sheep whether his breath smelled; the sheep said yes, and the lion punished him for his folly. Then he called the wolf and asked the same question, but the wolf said no, and the lion punished him for flattery. Finally he summoned the fox and asked his opinion, but the fox said that he had a cold and could not smell.
Sir Thomas Browne
The last man was Sir Thomas Browne, who is, so to speak, that fox. Browne was born in London in 1605 and studied at Winchester school and at Oxford, Montpellier, Padua and Leiden. (The source text is garbled at this point; it appears to say that there he studied art, science and history, and then settled for a medical practice at Norwich.) Without giving up medicine, he expressed his views on every subject, and he set out his theological opinions, wrapped in other matters, in his book Religio Medici ('A Doctor's Religion'). It is one of the masterpieces of English prose. In it Browne appears, like Montaigne, as a strange and interesting man, imaginative and changeable, and what he writes about friendship seems to be drawn from Montaigne. He sacrifices his skepticism to his loyalty to the established church. While professing a love of knowledge and reason, he also shows his faith. He fills his writing with classical allusions and derivations, loves the craft and music of words, and uses style as an 'antiseptic against corruption'.
His upbringing had made Browne inclined to doubt. In his longest work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors (1646), he described and criticized hundreds of false beliefs then current in Europe. His list is taken up in the next part of this series.