Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/295

 literary and educational significance of the drama. But so far as the popular stage is concerned, there is no reason to suppose that they would have failed to see eye to eye with John Bale himself, for it is pretty clear from the passage quoted above that Bale's tolerance of the interlude-players was entirely conditioned by the polemical use he had been enabled to make of them, and that, apart from what he chose to regard as their conversion, they would have had short shrift at his hands. Now by the time of the Puritans this break in the normal relations of the stage to the pulpit had come to an end. The drama of Protestant controversy survived its original manipulator, Cromwell. It flourished greatly under Edward VI. It won the imitation of the Catholics under Mary. And when Elizabeth came, its exponents made haste to re-enter a field which was probably by now capable of yielding profit in a worldly as well as a spiritual sense. It is clear that at the beginning of the reign Elizabeth and her ministers deliberately continued Cromwell's policy of encouraging stage-polemic. During the Christmas of 1558 the court and the streets were full of masks, in which cardinals, bishops, and abbots were held up to derision as crows, asses, and wolves. During the debates on the Act of Uniformity in the following spring, Abbot Feckenham protested against the way in which 'by the onely preachers and scaffold players of this newe religion, all thinges are turned up-side downe'. Almost simultaneously the dispatches of Venetian agents mention the prevalence of anti-Catholic plays in hostels and taverns, and dwell particularly upon one performance in which Philip and Mary and Cardinal Pole were represented in exposition of their religious views. The inwardness of the movement is made clear by a letter of the Duke of Feria to Philip himself, in which he reports Elizabeth's diplomatic repudiation of the insolent pieces, and adds that he knew for a fact