Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/304

 copy of Ulysses, with an enlarged epilogue and a repudiation of any personal intention in the character of Momus. This led to a letter from Rainolds, in which he set out his views upon the stage at great length and with considerable learning, to a reply from Gager, who was or professed to be stung by some of the reflections cast by Rainolds upon the Christ Church men, and to a rejoinder from Rainolds, in which he reiterated his original arguments with even greater elaboration. His main contentions were four in number. Firstly, he laid stress upon the infamia with which the Roman praetors had 'noted' histriones, and refused to accept Gager's pleas that this only applied to those who played for gain, or that gentlemen who only appeared upon the stage rarely and at long intervals could not properly be called histriones at all. Secondly, he adopted Calvin's interpretation of the Deuteronomic prohibition of the change of sex-costume as an absolute one, belonging to the moral and not merely the ceremonial law. Gager had taken the view, which later on had the support of the learned Selden, and which to a folklorist hardly needs demonstration, that what Moses had in mind was a change of costume forming part of an idolatrous ritual; and had also committed himself to the weaker argument that a man might justifiably, as Achilles did, put on a woman's clothing to save his life. The latter Rainolds denied, and pointed out that, even if it held good, it would hardly cover a change designed for a purely histrionic purpose. His third argument was based on the moral deterioration entailed by counterfeiting wanton behaviour in a play; and his fourth on the waste both of time and money involved. He does not wish to be thought an enemy either of poetry or of reasonable recreation, but he expresses a doubt whether some hours were not spent over Gager's plays that ought to have been spent at sermons. The theory of humanistic educators that acting teaches lads self-confidence he is not prepared to admit as a sufficient justification of their practice. The debate is, of course, a good deal complicated by topics of mere erudition and by disputes as to whether Momus was really meant as a caricature of Rainolds, or as to whether Rainolds's abstract argument about infamia bore the concrete implication that such honest youths as the Christ Church students or so well-voiced a musician as the Master of the Choristers, who had played with them, were in fact infames, or as to the extent of approval implied by the presence of University dignitaries and of the queen herself at performances of Gager's pieces. Anyway, said Rainolds, the queen's laws set down players as vagabonds. Given their common pre