Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/292

240 for Edward VI in 1551. Bucer allows of plays, both for the exercise of youth, and for the honest and not unprofitable delectation of the public. They must be written by learned and pious men, and may be either comedies or tragedies, which deal respectively with mean and exalted actions. For comic themes he instances the dissension between the shepherds of Abraham and Lot, the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob's service amongst the flocks of Laban; and he expounds no less than six moral lessons which the first of these plots may serviceably inculcate. As for tragedy, the histories of patriarchs, kings, prophets, and apostles, from Adam onwards, are full of those upon which Aristotle lays such stress. It is from such sources that Christians should draw their poetry, rather than from the impious fables and histories of the Gentiles. And care must be taken to let vice awaken a horror of sin and well-doing a sense of the divine grace; for edification is to be the end of the action, even if, in order to attain it, some sacrifice of literary decorum is necessitated. Bucer holds that plays conceived in this spirit may with advantage be performed by youth in the vernacular, as well as in Greek and Latin; and declares that some have already been written which, although men of secular learning may miss in them the literary graces to be found in the comedies of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence and the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, are yet to be preferred for their religious character to pieces whose effect upon morality can only be deplorable. It is to be noticed that Bucer proposes to submit all plays before production to the judgement of persons at once expert in the dramatic art and of sound divinity, one of whose functions it shall be to let nothing which is leve aut histrionicum be shown. This is interesting not only because it anticipates the actual Tudor experiments in a dramatic censorship, but also because it indicates that the idea of a censorship arose out of ethical, as well as out of merely political, considerations. It is possible that Bucer may have been familiar with the actual working of the system at Geneva, to which further reference will presently be made.

In actual practice the Protestant religious drama, whether it was imitating Latin comedy or advancing on the lines of the popular morality, used the Scriptures with some discrimination. It drew freely upon the historical books and upon the parables. The parable of the prodigal son, in