Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/113

Rh turns upon an attempt of the Corporation, goaded by the preachers, to convert their power of regulating plays into a power of suppressing plays, as the ultimate result of which even the power of regulation was lost to them, and the central government, acting through the Privy Council and the system of patents, with the Master of the Revels as a licenser, took the supervision of the stage into its own hands.” It is fascinating to watch the details of the struggle. What folly it must have seemed to the cultured statesmen of Elizabeth’s Council, sharing no doubt the ironic sanity of Sir Thomas More, when the Puritan Corporation insisted on seeing the hand of an avenging God in the collapse of any rotten scaffold. And at the same time how strangely ineffective their own thunders appear sometimes to have been. In 1581 they took the important step of entrusting all play-licensing to the Master of the Revels, yet a few months later they were still urging the Corporation to appoint fit persons for the purpose. After fifteen years they ordered “the complete gutting of the theatres,” but, instead of consternation in dramatic circles, we find Henslowe quietly reconstructing his company in the confident and justified belief that the restraint was a purely passing inconvenience! Elizabeth, high-handed as her methods were, understood the importance of government by consent, and won it. The Tudor period closes with an established equilibrium and the stage a recognised member of the body politic. It was due to the extravagance and incompetence, the blindness and licence, of the Stuart regime that in the space of forty years the verdict was reversed and the stage swallowed up in the gencral debacle. The story of that defeat is not told here. But already we see the straws flying and catch the murmurs of the gathering storm. Provincial towns are closing their gates on players, with the legal support of a Chief Justice: soon the Privy Council will grant licence for such exclusion—a sop to Cerberus.

But for the most part the implicit drama of theatrical history is felt rather than seen as a background to the orderly chronicle of events. Dr. Chambers can wield a weighty pen upon occasion, but here he sticks closely to business, and the reader is seldom allowed to enjoy the flowing periods of a heightened style. A deliberate austerity reigns, which apparently even forbids reference (i. 164) to the pictorial embellishments of his own volumes. Nor is the subject one that lends itself readily to humour; it is rare to catch more than the flicker of a smile on the author’s lips. There is,