The reaction of the playwrights was to ridicule these pious people on stage. In Elizabeth’s reign there was no unity of dramatists against Puritans, although several Puritan figures cropped up in plays and were heavily satirised. Perhaps the most well known puritanical figure of the Elizabethan stage was Shakespeare’s Malvolio. He is, of course, not a Puritan in any historical sense, but as an incarnation of the Puritan’s besetting foible of self-righteousness, making himself a judge of others. Sir Toby questions Malvolio’s conviction in himself in Act II saying, ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (II. iii. 120-22). ‘Cakes and ale’ are symbols of jollity and this shows Malvolio’s puritanical hatred of church ales and the feasting that took place between Christmas and Twelfth Night.
Elizabeth had no particular concern for the Puritans, unlike her successor James whose fear of Puritans ranked alongside his hatred of Catholics. He wished to rid the country equally of both groups. In 1617 he issued the Book of Sports which outlined the recreations permissible on Sundays. All ministers were required to read it from the pulpit, which caused great controversy with the Puritans who advocated a strict Sabbath rest. The book was written to counter the Puritan view of the Sabbath as well as the popish recusants who used Sunday recreations to entice his subjects away from the church service. James’ opinion of the Puritans gave dramatists even more scope to satirise them. James attempted to bring the public stage under the control of the crown and he appointed a Master of the Revels to censor plays which made any reference to monarchy or the established church which could be taken in a negative way. His dislike of the Puritan movement, however, allowed dramatists to develop more and more ridiculous pious characters. Before 1600 puritanical allusions were slight but under James they sharpened and left us with a stock comic view of a Puritan.
The onstage Puritan was easily recognisable. Their liking for a plain style of dress and certain manners of speech were easy targets for a satirist. Puritans were portrayed as greedy for money, despite their feigned unworldliness; they were noisy, overpious and hypocritical. The most obvious example of a stage Puritan is Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. He is dominating in the amount of dialogue he is given, which parodies Puritan pulpit oratory, and is an embodiment of hypocrisy and religious excesses. The argument with the puppet in Act V stages the old conflict between actors and Puritan writers. Busy says of the puppet/actor that ‘his profession is profane’ (V. v. 60). He also claims that his main argument against actors ‘is that [they] are an abomination; for the male among you putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male’ (V. v. 90-2). His convictions are made to look trifling when, fewer than 20 lines later, he confesses his conversion on the matter.
Zeal-of-the-land Busy is also amusing in his ability to see Rome everywhere, another satirical trait of Puritans who wanted to destroy any remnants of popish idolatry. He calls a tray of gingerbread men an ‘idolatrous grove of images, this flasket of idols!’ (III. vi. 92). It is his hypocrisy, however, which I believe would have raised the most laughs in the Jacobean theatre. His disapproval of the Fair could not be clearer when in Act III he says, ‘the wares are the wares of devils; and the whole fair is the shop of Satan!’ (III. i. 38-9), yet he continues to revel in the place. These attacks on Puritans gave the audience a feeling of superiority, although the Anglicans were hardly better, the Puritans stressed their purity.
Unlike Jonson, Thomas Middleton was known, at the least, to have Puritan sympathies and yet was still writing for the ‘profane and idolatrous’ stage. This anomaly stresses the fact that Puritanism was a varied branch of religious feeling. Most of his patrons were also Puritan but not necessarily Puritanical. They owned mansions, which were often old monasteries which had been given to them after the Reformation, they purchased fine fabrics and hired musicians for special occasions. In fact, these were the very hypocritical types which many playwrights were mocking. Families such as the Sidneys were likely to have feared a Catholic restoration which would have deprived them of their recent aristocratic status. This combination of Puritan playwright and Puritan patron shows that the theatres were only attacked by extremists.
Middleton’s The Changeling takes its main source from The Triumph of God’s Revenges Against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murther, by John Reynolds. This tract was incredibly popular with Puritans, being ranked by some alongside Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The way Middleton portrays the responsibility of women, the insistence that crime should be equally punished regardless of rank and the general acceptance of the folly of idleness shows the Puritan way of seeing the realities of everyday life. This shows that although many Puritans condemned the theatre for not being educational, their ideas were being portrayed in a positive light, although in a subtle and perhaps more persuasive way, on the stage.
For the most part Puritans were strongly criticised on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. This is due in part to a strong anti-clerical feeling in London. Margot Heinemann makes the point in her book on Puritanism and Theatre that religious hypocrisy has been a source of humour for centuries but the Anglican church was protected from satire by political censorship. Satire about pious hypocrisy on stage was only possible about Puritans, unless the setting was foreign when friars and cardinals could also be mocked. This is an important point when looking at the accumulation of weight of anti-Puritan satire over James’ reign.
It is clear that the Puritan vices were magnified on the stage as a way of punishing those who threatened the dramatists. As W. Holden points out, it is the zealots and eccentrics who are made typical of the whole movement. They are ‘witty pictures of fools who have gone mad on religion’. The dialogue between the Puritans and the playwrights was bitter and both sides kept pushing to have their voices heard. The how and the why of Puritan presentation on the stage are interwoven and for every overzealous Puritan there was an exaggerated form of him onstage. It is interesting that at the time of the vehement attacks of the Puritans the public theatres opened with the work of the generation of Shakespeare and Jonson, showing how often conflict produces fantastic art.
It must be noted, however, that only a few pages of the work deal with the theatre.
Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), ed A. Freeman. New York: Garland, 1973.
On the topic of James’ dislike of Puritans see R.A. Burt, ‘Licensed by Authority’: Ben Jonson and the
Politics of Early Stuart Theatre, ELH, Vol. 54, Issue 3, 1987. pp. 529-60.
At around this time the Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men.
Both Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton were brought to account. Jonson for his portrayal of
Sejanus, and Middleton for satirising an Anglican bishop although later in the play he is uncovered as a Roman Catholic. The censorship was almost entirely political, with the exception of a specific ban on profane language in 1606. Taste and morality were never really questioned.
I shall be using the version in ‘Three Comedies’, ed. M. Jamieson. London: Penguin, 1985.
M. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre. Cambridge: University Press, 1982. p.73.
W. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire 1572-1642. New York: Yale University Press, 1954. p. 110.