Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 1).pdf/305

 *mises, it must be acknowledged that both in learning and in logic the Puritan had the advantage over his opponent, although common sense was on the side of the latter, and it is with some scepticism that one reads the statement of the printer who gave Rainolds's share of the controversy to the world in 1599, that ultimately Gager 'let goe his hold, and in a Christian modestie and humilitie yeelded to the truth, and quite altered his judgement'. My own conviction is that Gager would have subscribed to anything, in order to have done with receiving argumentative letters from Rainolds. But when Rainolds had disposed of Gager, he had to meet a fresh adversary in Alberico Gentili, an Italian who held the professorship of civil law at Oxford and had committed himself to a different view as to the force of the praetorian infamia. Between these two pundits the discussion continued for some time without contributing much to the elucidation of the main issue. Rainolds's book, the first line of the title of which was Th' overthrow of Stage-Playes, furnished many weapons later on for the armoury of Prynne, and material for ridicule in the play of Fucus, sive Histriomastix, produced at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1623.

The problem with which, long before the University disputants handled the matter at all, the London Puritans had to deal, was not one of nice differentiation between the position of the amateur and that of the professional player. Their concern with the academic drama was comparatively small; some at least of them were prepared to subscribe to all the allowances for it that were made by the Synod of Nîmes. What they were face to face with was the rapid growth in London of professional playing as a recognized occupation, using an increasing number of playing-places, almost entirely free from control on its ethical side, and tending more and more to become a permanent element in the life of the community. And the attitude of condemnation which they adopted was in the main one in which Lutheran, Calvinist, and humanist, Case and Gager no less than Rainolds, would in theory at least have concurred. The writings against the stage, especially those of the critical period from 1576 to 1583, are of a very heterogeneous character. The most important are, on the one hand, long passages in two treatises by ministers devoted to the flagellation of social evils generally, the Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes, or Enterludes (1577) of John Northbrooke, and the Anatomie of Abuses (1583) of Phillip Stubbes; and on the other, three special pamphlets