Category: Theatre

[I wrote this essay in 2002 and never got around to placing it in a journal. It deals with two ‘lost’ plays, as explained in the opening paragraph, and so finds a home in this blog; and it explores a topic that took centre stage in my book, Shakespeare and Comedy: the early modern War of the Theatres, which eventually led to the closing of all English theatres in the middle of the Seventeenth Century. Its most interesting element is, I think, the discussion of the concept of ‘delight’ as a key word in early modern literary-theatrical theory. I’d be interested to hear your reaction!]

My purpose here is to trace links between two plays, both of which might be described as in some sense “lost,” and both of which concern themselves more or less directly with the Elizabethan censorship system and the ongoing theatrical controversy in early modern England.  The first is a play whose script has disappeared entirely: the anonymous Play of Plays, performed in 1581 or 1582 and described in some detail by the anti-theatrical polemicist Stephen Gosson in one of his pamphlets.[i]  The second is Sir Thomas More, whose script we possess but which seems never to have been performed, and whose status as a “lost” play depends on the tendency of its readers until recently to treat it as a loose bundle of fragments incapable of theatrical presentation.  The second of these plays has been the subject of scholarly investigation on two counts: first, because the manuscript provides the best evidence we have of the working methods of the Master of the Revels, the chief censor of plays under Elizabeth I; and secondly, because one short passage in the manuscript appears to be in the hand of William Shakespeare.[ii]  The first play, on the other hand, has never before been discussed at any length.  I shall suggest here that a careful study of what we know about The Play of Plays may tell us a great deal about the thinking that lay behind Sir Thomas More, and that this can help to salvage the later play as a coherent artistic project, albeit a collective one.  I shall also propose that a study of the two plays together throws new light on the first phase of the Elizabethan theatrical controversy, and that this is a topic which deserves much more attention than it has yet received.  I shall begin my case by scrutinizing The Play of Plays in context, and shall not arrive at Sir Thomas More until the end; but the contextual details are important if we are to come to an understanding of either play.  And I hope by the end to have opened a substantial new window onto the imaginative landscape of mid-Elizabethan culture, where censors, polemicists, playwrights and poets engaged in an energetic exchange which helped prepare the ground for the great dramatic achievements of the 1590s and 1600s.

What we know about the Play of Plays can be rapidly summarized.  The sole surviving mention of the play occurs in Stephen Gosson’s brilliant anti-theatrical polemic Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), which describes it only to put it down.  But we can get a pretty good idea of its contents from Gosson’s account, and this account provides a vital key to the way playwrights and players were thinking about the theater in the age of Peele, Greene, Kyd and Marlowe.  This was a period of intense debate about the morality or otherwise of the dramatic art.[iii]  The debate was at its most heated between the mid-1570s, when the first purpose-built playhouses were erected in the suburbs of London, and the late 1580s.  We know a good deal about the anti-theatrical side of the controversy, since all its major documents seem to have survived: among them John Northbrooke’s tract against Vaine Playes and Enterluds (1577), the anonymous pamphlet A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580), Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), and William Rankins’s A Mirrour of Monsters (1587).[iv]  But we have surprisingly little evidence of how the players reacted to this moralistic onslaught.  Only two responses exist, and neither was written by players.  These are Thomas Lodge’s defence of poetry, hastily printed in 1579 and suppressed at once, and Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, written in about 1580 but not printed until 1595.[v]  Four major interventions by the players have been lost, all of which are mentioned by Stephen Gosson in his polemics: two prose defences of the theater, Straunge Newes out of Affrick and Honest Excuses; a scene in Robert Wilson’s play The Three Ladies of London, which is absent from the edition of the play printed in 1584; and The Play of Plays.[vi]  It is tempting to ascribe the loss of these texts to a strenuous campaign to control the theater, which had been waged by the Mayor and corporation of the City of London since at least 1574.[vii]  After all, the apparent censorship of Lodge’s defence suggests that other defences may have been censored too.[viii]  But despite every effort to suppress the players’ voices, the ghost of The Play of Plays lives on – ironically enough, in the detailed synopsis of it supplied by its most stringent critic.  And it seems to me that this synopsis constitutes one of the best pieces of evidence we possess about the players’ side of the early Elizabethan theatrical controversy.

1. The Play of Plays and Honest Recreation

Gosson’s synopsis occurs in the fourth of the five “Actions” he brings against plays in Playes Confuted.  It is described in the margin as “The su[b]stance of the play of playes written in theire owne defence”:

The Author of the playe of playes, spreading out his battel to hemme me in, is driuen to take so large a compasse, that his array is the thinner, and therefore the easier, to be broken.  He tyeth Life and Delight so fast together, that if Delight be restrained, Life presently perisheth; there, zeale perceyuing Delight to be embraced, of Life, puttes a snafle in his mouth, to keepe him vnder, Delight beinge bridled, Zeale leadeth life through a wildernesse of lothsomenesse, where Glutte scarreth them all, chasinge both Zeale  and Delight from Life, and with the clubbe of amasednesse strikes such a pegge into the heade of Life, that he falles downe for dead vpon the Stage.

Life being thus fainte, and ouertrauailed, destitute of his guyde, robbed of Delight, is readie to giue vp the Ghost, in the same place, then entereth Recreation, which with musicke and singing rockes Life a sleepe to recouer his strength.

By this meanes Tediousnesse is driuen from Life, and the teinte is drawne out of his heade, which the clubbe of amasednes left behinde.

At last Recreation setteth vp the Gentleman vpon his feete, Delight is restored to him againe, and suche kinde of sportes for cullices are brought in to nourishe him, as none but Delight must applye to his stomache.  Then time beinge made for the benefite of Life, and Life being allowed to followe his appetite, amongst all manner of pastimes, Life chooseth Commedies, for his Delight, partly because Commedies are neither chargable to the beholders purse, nor painful to his body; partly, because he may sit out of the raine to viewe the same, when meany other pastimes are hindred by wether.  Zeale is no more admitted to Life before he be somewhat pinchte in the wast, to auoyde extremitie, and being not in the end simply called Zeale but Moderate Zeale a fewe conditions are prescribed to Comedies, that the matter be purged, deformities blazed, sinne rebuked, honest mirth intermingled, and fitte time for the hearing of the same appointed, Moderate Zeale is contented to suffer them, who ioyneth with delight to direct life againe, after which he triumphes ouer Death and is crowned with eternitie.[ix]

Gosson offers further details of the piece elsewhere in his treatise.  The full title of the play seems to have been “The Playe of Playes and Pastimes” (p. 189).  Earlier he tells us that it was performed at the Theater, and that he saw the performance on “the three and twentieth of Februarie last” (p. 169) – perhaps in 1582, since Plays Confuted was probably written by April of that year.[x]  Gosson adds that though it promises English comedies “shalbe… purged” (p. 169), The Play of Plays itself stands in most need of purging, since it includes “a baudie song of a maide of Kent, and a litle beastly speech, of the new stawled roge, both which I am compelled to burie in silence, being more ashamed to vtter them, then they” (p. 170).  Finally, towards the end of the fourth Action Gosson tells us that The Play of Plays makes “sorowe an enemie to delight without distinction” (p. 184).  This sounds as if there were an additional character named “Sorrow” in the interlude, perhaps a companion of the vice-figure “Glutte” who drives a peg into Life’s head and leaves him for dead on the stage.  It is unclear, too, whether “Glutte” is the same as “Tediousnesse,” who is driven from Life by the healing powers of Recreation.  But two things, at least, are perfectly clear from the synopsis.  The first is that the plot of The Play of Plays derives ultimately from an early humanist interlude by John Redford, Wit and Science.  The second is that it defends the theater – and comedy in particular – in terms not unlike those employed in the surviving contemporary defences of poetry by Lodge and Sidney.

Redford’s play was probably written between 1530 and 1534, when he was Master of St. Paul’s School, for performance by the choristers, perhaps at court.[xi]  It survives only in a single damaged manuscript, but was well enough known in Elizabeth’s reign to inspire at least two dramatic imitations: the anonymous The Marriage of Wit and Science (before 1569), performed like Redford’s play by children; and Francis Merbury’s The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (before 1579), possibly performed at Cambridge.[xii]  But the play’s influence goes further than this.  Its presence can be detected in John Lyly’s celebrated prose fiction, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578); two versions of it at least are invoked in Anthony Munday’s play Sir Thomas More (c. 1593); and it supplies the basic plot of the anonymous academic comedy The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (1599).[xiii]  In fact, Redford’s interlude has few rivals for the title of most imitated play of the sixteenth century.

The interlude is an allegory of the humanist pedagogic programme – an appropriate topic if it was written for performance by boys – and focuses on the favorite humanist theme of the vital relationship between hard work and carefully chosen leisure-time activity.  This theme was taken up with eloquence by English educationalists from Thomas Elyot to Roger Ascham, and became central to defences of poetry, fiction and the theater throughout the sixteenth century.  The chief concern of the humanists in devising curricula for the children of the nobility was to “declare an induction or meane, howe children of gentill nature or disposition may be trayned in to the way of vertue with a pleasant facilitie” – in other words, how to make schoolwork attractive.[xiv]  To this end the humanists considered it “very expedient that there be mixte with studie some honest and moderate disporte, or at the lest way recreation, to recomforte and quicken the vitall spirites, leste they longe travailyng, or beinge moche occupied in contemplation or remembrance of things grave and seriouse, moughte happen to be fatigate, or perchance oppressed.”[xv]  Redford’s Wit and Science offers itself as an example of Elyot’s “honest and moderate disporte, or… recreation,” an integral part of the training of its young performers.  And to make its point it includes a character called Honest Recreation, who was to become a central player in the first English war of the theaters during the 1570s and 80s, and in this capacity found her way (as “Recreation”) into the lost Play of Plays.

Wit and Science begins with Wit (whose name here means something like “natural intellectual aptitude”), having been betrothed to Science (“knowledge”), setting out on a journey to marry her with the blessing of her father, Reason.[xvi]  On the way he is attacked by the monster Tediousness, who drives off his two travelling companions, Study and Diligence, and kills him with a club.  Honest Recreation then enters with her companions Comfort, Quickness, and Strength, and together they sing a song which miraculously revives Wit from the dead.  But the revived Wit so enjoys the company of Honest Recreation that he refuses to return to his studies, and soon falls in with Idleness, who lulls him to sleep and swaps his coat for the fool’s garb of her son Ignorance.  In his new foolish guise, Wit finds himself mocked and rejected by his fiancée Science; he is beaten by Shame and asks and obtains forgiveness from Reason.  He attacks Tediousness once more, with the aid of Study, Diligence and a new companion, Instruction, and this time succeeds in killing him at the foot of Mount Parnassus, from the top of which Science witnesses his victory.  At last Wit is free to marry Science, on one condition (imposed by her mother Experience): he must use her well, that is, “Unto Godes honor, and profyt both / Of you and your neybowre” (p. 218, ll. 1059-60); otherwise he will find himself divorced and punished.

Up to the point of Wit’s death The Play of Plays follows Redford’s plot closely, replacing the name “Wit” with “Life,” retaining the club-wielding monster Tediousness (or Glutte) and the singer Recreation, and adding a new element in Zeal’s bridling of Delight.  Moreover, the song sung by Redford’s Honest Recreation may have given the later author a hint for one of the key arguments in his defence of the theater.  Honest Recreation revives Wit by addressing stanzas to each of his lost senses: the third stanza urges him to “Gyve an eare to Honest Recreation,” the fourth to “Gyve an eye,” and the fifth to “Gyve an hand” (pp. 191-2, ll. 225-60).  In the same way, Gosson tells us that the “strongest reason” given by the Play of Plays for tolerating the theater is precisely that appeal to the senses for which it was condemned by its critics: “because wee haue eares to heare, eyes to see, and so foorth, Comedies presenting delight to both, are not so rashly to bee condemned” (pp. 189-90).  The echo of Christ’s parable of the sower (“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” Luke 8. 8) lends biblical authority to the play’s endorsement of the acquisition of instruction by way of the senses: Christ did it in his parables, so why shouldn’t we follow his example in our plays?  The argument is familiar from Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, and the same term, “delight,” takes centre stage in both Sidney’s and the play’s defences of comedy.[xvii]

But after Life’s resuscitation by song The Play of Plays seems to have parted company with Wit and Science.  The changes made by its author are clearly calculated to erase from its defence of the theatre any shadow of the ambiguity towards the performing arts which was present in the interlude.  Ambiguity is, in fact, one of the most striking features of Redford’s play.  The theme comes to prominence as soon as Wit is revived from the dead, when Wit at once abandons his pursuit of Science and transfers his attention to the woman who revived him, Honest Recreation.  To win her love he throws aside the garments sent him as a love-token by Science and launches into a vigorous dance – a “galyard” – before collapsing exhausted into the lap of Idleness.  There follows an acrimonious debate between Honest Recreation and Idleness as they compete for Wit’s affections.  Each woman accuses the other of being a whore, and as their debate becomes more heated its language begins to sound more and more like that of Elizabethan anti-theatrical polemic.  Wit urges the two women to “declare” or describe themselves for him so that he can choose between them; Honest Recreation replies that their names alone should inform him about their natures; but the response of Idleness is to claim that they have both been misnamed:

Cawlyst thow thy sealfe Honest Recreacion,
Ordryng a poore man after thys facion,
To lame hym thus, and make his lymmes fayle
Evyn wyth the swyngyng there of thy tayle?
The dyvyll set fyre one the!  For now must I,
Idlenes, hele hym agayne, I spye.
I must now lull hym, rock hym, and frame hym
To hys lust agayne, where thow dydst lame hym. (p. 196, ll. 357-64)

Here Idleness transforms dancing – prescribed by Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named The Governour (1531) as the perfect “honest… recreation” for the young aristocrat – into a wild orgy in which Wit has exhausted his sexual energies, and sets herself up as his only true physician, capable of restoring him – as her rival is not – to his former prowess.  She then proceeds to accuse Honest Recreation of encouraging every kind of illegal activity in her adherents, from gambling to prostitution:

Mark her dawnsyng, her maskyng and mummyng.
Where more concupyscence then ther cummyng?
Her cardyng, her dycyng, dayly and nyghtlye –
Where fynd ye more falcehod then there?  Not lyghtly…
As for her syngyng, pypyng, and fydlyng,
What unthryftynes therin is twydlyng!
Serche the tavernes and ye shall here cleere
Such bawdry as bestes wold spue to heere.
And yet thys is kald Honest Recreacion,
And I, poore Idlenes, abhomynacion.
But whych is wurst of us twayne, now iudge Wyt. (p. 196, ll. 372-85)

Honest Recreation is taken completely off her guard: Idleness has stolen all the arguments by which she could have distinguished herself from her unruly counterpart.  The vice has, in fact, effectively swapped natures with Honest Recreation, describing Honest Recreation as if she were Idleness and setting herself up as Wit’s defender as if she had been personally responsible for his resuscitation.  In reply, Honest Recreation can do no more than point this out before abandoning Wit to her enemy’s mercy:

she, lo, drawes
Her sort to abuse myne honest games,
And therby full falsly my name defames.
Under the name of Honest Recreacion
She bryngth in all her abhomynacion,
Dystroyng all wytes that her imbrace,
As youre-selfe shall see wyth-in short space. (p. 197, ll. 408-14)

As we have seen, her prophecy is fulfilled all too soon: Wit is transformed by the simplest of tricks into Ignorance and almost loses his identity for good.  But even at the end of the play, when Wit marries Science and a comic resolution seems inevitable, Redford continues to emphasize the precariousness of Wit’s position – the ease with which he could lapse again into folly, and the strenuous efforts required to keep to the path of learning.

In Wit and Science the marriage of native intelligence with knowledge is a highly volatile union, hemmed in with threats and temptations, and young scholars need to be constantly inspecting themselves in the mirror of Reason if they are to avoid complacency and moral collapse.  The point is made still more strenuously by Redford’s imitator Francis Merbury, whose play The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (1579) transforms Idleness into a protean male Vice, a self-confessed “mummer” or actor (p. 30, l. 710ff.) who adopts successive disguises – as a pimp called Honest Recreation, a doctor called Due Disport, a veteran soldier turned ratcatcher, a beggar turned thief, and a priest – in his efforts to ensnare the play’s gullible protagonist.  In Merbury’s reworking of Redford’s plot, Wit is tricked by Idleness and his fellow vices not once but three times before finally wedding Wisdom.  The world is a stage positively bustling with masked criminals, whose plots to con the innocent – and the not-so-innocent – out of their honesty and their income offer an endless fund of dramatic situations to be plundered by the resourceful playwright.

But the ease with which Honest Recreation can lead to Idleness, and with which the two can be confused with one another, were clearly not subjects the author of The Play of Plays wished to dwell on.  He therefore chose to follow the example not of Merbury, who multiplies the confusions of Redford’s play, but of the anonymous author of The Marriage of Wit and Science (1570).  In this earlier adaptation Honest Recreation (named simply “Recreation,” as in The Play of Plays) never gets confused with Idleness – indeed, the two never share the stage at any point in the action.  Wit is accompanied by a talkative page named Will, who might have given the author of the Play the idea for his character Delight.  Wit twice succumbs to despair, which again might have suggested to the Play’s author the notion of having Life succumb to Sorrow and be revived by comedy (laughter was deemed by early modern physicians to be the best cure for melancholy).[xviii]  And the action ends with Wit’s triumph as well as his marriage: “true report,” Science tells him, “shall sende abrode, your everlasting name” (l. 1537).  But The Play of Plays ends more triumphantly still, without a shadow of ambiguity to cast a pall over Life’s happiness.  After Life’s defeat by the monster Tediousness, Recreation lulls him into a healing sleep, then leads him to a reunion with an unbridled yet unquestionably virtuous Delight.  The two companions choose to beguile the time by watching instructive comedies, of which The Play of Plays is presumably intended to be a model example; and the play ends with a general celebration, in which Life “triumphes ouer Death and is crowned with eternitie.”  The ending seems more suitable for a Divine Comedy than a humble interlude, and this is presumably the aspect of the play to which Gosson is referring when he says that the author has been driven to over-extend his “compasse” (p. 181).  Here Life comes perilously close to being identified with Christ, who described himself as the “life” in the Gospels; and the parallel is clearly an intentional one, since the playwright’s point is that plays can serve as an instrument for setting their audiences on the path to eternal life.  The author does retain elements of the conditional ending of Wit and Science; but instead of being imposed on Life, conditions in The Play of Plays are imposed on the comic genre to which it belongs.

This would have come as no surprise to the play’s audience.  The notion that comedy needed to be subject to careful regulation was familiar to many of them from the works of Horace and the late classical critic Donatus, both of whom they would have encountered at school.  Horace’s Ars poetica and Donatus’ preface to Terence explain that both Greek and Roman comedy had fallen foul of the authorities at certain junctures in their history, and had only been permitted to return to the stage after laws had been passed to keep them under control.[xix]  Most Elizabethan accounts of theatrical history implied that these laws were imposed on comedy from without, by the presiding urban government at the time in question.  In The Play of Plays, by contrast, comedy is self-regulating, voluntarily collaborating with Life, Delight and Moderate Zeal to draw up the terms by which it will be governed: “that the matter be purged, deformities blazed, sinne rebuked, honest mirth intermingled, and fitte time for the hearing of the same appointed.”  The author of The Play of Plays is scrupulously careful to exempt his protagonist, Life, and his companions, Delight and Comedy, from the kinds of humiliation to which Redford’s Wit was subjected.  Where Wit resembles one of the headstrong young lovers from the comedies of Plautus or Terence, Life is a hero and reaps, in the end, a hero’s reward.

2. Delight and its kinds

But the author’s efforts to extricate the theater from ambiguity are most apparent in his treatment of Life’s companion, Delight.  The term “delight” itself would have been morally ambiguous for the Elizabethans.  It could be used to translate two superficially similar but morally antagonistic concepts: those of voluptas, sensual pleasure or voluptuousness, and delectatio, innocent pleasure.  Both the link and the distinction between these two concepts can be aptly illustrated from Cicero’s celebrated oration in defence of a poet, Pro Archia poeta, which influenced every defence of poetry and the theater from Petrarch to Sidney.  Before launching into a praise of the arts practised by his client, Cicero is careful to insist on his own exemption from charges of voluptas so that he can freely confess to his pleasure in poetry.  “I am a votary of literature,” he declares, “and make the confession unashamed; shame belongs rather to the bookish recluse, who does not know how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows… But what shame should be mine… who have made it a rule of my life for all these years never to allow the sweets of a cloistered ease or the seductions of pleasure [voluptas] or the enticements of repose to prevent me from helping any man in the hour of his need?”[xx]  His point made, Cicero embarks on his encomium of poetry, which leads him at one point into a passage where Sidney found hints for his Apology: “these [i.e. literary studies] give stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; they add charm to success, and offer a haven of consolation to failure; in the home they delight us [delectant domi], while beyond our doors they do not get in the way.”[xxi]  For Cicero, delectatio would seem to be a private experience and an invaluable adjunct to public action.  Voluptas, on the other hand, is shamelessly open – one might say, exhibitionist – and encourages only torpor.

Most Elizabethan representations of Delight before Sidney depict it as voluptas, a vice: the “Unbrydelyd will” which draws young men fresh from school to “luste and pleasure.”[xxii]  In the interlude The Trial of Treasure, for instance – published in 1567 – the Vice Inclination encourages the young man Lust in his career as an attendant on “Lady Delectation.”[xxiii]  Throughout the play Lust embraces good fellowship and merry-making, while his drably virtuous counterpart Just insists that only solemnity has any value.  Just takes as his motto “the wise man’s sentence” that “It is better in the house of mourning to be / Than in the house of laughter, where folly hath residence” (p. 208); and twice in the course of the interlude he and his companions savagely bridle Inclination so that, as the Vice tells the audience, “I cannot make you any more sport” (p. 224).  There is clearly something inconsistent about putting on an interlude which claims to be “merry” (p. 207) while setting aggressive constraints on the chief purveyor of laughter in the play.  The Play of Plays draws attention to this inconsistency by representing the unbridling of Delight as essential to its own functioning as a comedy, as well as to Life itself.  Indeed, the play as Gosson describes it sounds in this respect like a self-conscious revision of The Trial of Treasure, as the only surviving interlude in which a Vice is bridled.  Where Just insists that virtue dwells in “the house of mourning,” The Play of Plays makes “sorowe an enemie to delight without distinction,” thus anticipating the medical opinion of Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch and his confederates: “I’m sure care’s an enemy to life.”[xxiv]

The role of Delight in the play may also have been suggested, at least in part, by one of the most influential poetic accounts of censorship in the early Elizabethan period: George Gascoigne’s satirical pamphlet The Steele Glas (1576).[xxv]  Delight plays a major part in Gascoigne’s satire, but again as voluptas, whose operations do irreparable damage to the reputation of contemporary verse.  At the same time, Gascoigne links the escapades of Delight very closely with the Elizabethan system of literary censorship; and it is the nature of this link that the author of The Play of Plays is particularly concerned to modify.

The first part of Gascoigne’s pamphlet consists of a satire in blank verse, which opens with a brief allegory based on Ovid’s tale of the rape and mutilation of Philomene, describing and explaining the hostile reception of Gascoigne’s two earlier collections of poetry among a certain section of their readership.  This hostility led to the withdrawal of the second collection in 1576, on the orders of “the Q. M. Commisioners” – presumably the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission responsible for the policing of non-dramatic printed texts under Elizabeth I.[xxvi]  In The Steele Glas Gascoigne responds to this act of censorship by representing himself as a latter-day Philomene, whose innocent songs or verses have been appropriated by certain malevolent readers – descendants of the original Philomene’s rapist, King Tereus – as an open invitation to “unbridled lust.”  The chief of these readers is a nobleman called “vayne Delight,” who marries Gascoigne’s Procne figure – “pleasant Poesys” – then lusts after her sister Satyra (representing both Gascoigne and Satire) and rapes her (pp. 144-5).  The rapist’s assistant Slander then accuses Satire/Gascoigne of having “entist Delyght, to love and luste,” and Delight himself cuts out her tongue “with Raysor of Restraynte” (p. 146).  In Gascoigne’s version of things, then, delight-as-voluptas is forced on poetry and satire by perverse readers, and the censorship to which he himself was subjected – whether he means censorship in the modern, specific sense of intervention by the state authorities, or simply harsh judgement – is a tyrannical act of injustice worthy of Tereus himself.  And towards the end of his pamphlet Gascoigne proposes that the perpetrators of this injustice learn to restrain themselves before restraining others: that is, that they control their own wayward sexual impulses before censoring the inoffensive texts or tongues of the writers who are subject to their authority.

The second part of the pamphlet is given over to another retelling of Ovid’s fable of Philomene – a fairly close verse translation from the Metamorphoses.  But this is stitched together with another allegory in a different meter, which is clearly designed as a continuation of The Steele Glas.  The poet goes wandering in Spring, like so many of his predecessors, and hears the nightingale-Philomene lamenting the diminishment of her status among songbirds in recent years.  The unhappy bird then launches into a song, the first part of which the poet transcribes traditionally enough: “Tereu, Tereu… fy, fy, fy, fy, fy… Jug, Jug, Jug” (p. 180).  But she adds an unexpected coda to the song: “Nemesis, Nemesis.”  The poet wishes he knew what the notes signify, then falls asleep and finds himself visited by an obliging commentator: a woman who holds a whip in one hand and a bridle in the other, and introduces herself as Nemesis or “Just revenge” (p. 181).  It is Nemesis who retells the story of Philomene, this time as an illustration of the retribution to which “lechers lust” is subject.  Afterwards she explains that the bridle she holds is a “brydle for desire” (p. 205), warning unruly noblemen to restrain their impulse to seduce or rape their inferiors, for fear of reprisals.  In his pamphlet, then, Gascoigne turns the tables on his censors – or as he puts it, reproves the deeds of his “Reprovers.”[xxvii]  The powerful figures who arbitrate over Elizabethan poetry – figures collectively characterized as “vaine Delight” – are themselves the source of the corruption they identify in the poets.  They are therefore in greater need of the services of an unrestrained poetry, with its unique ability to deliver instruction and rebuke in palatable form, than poetry is in need of their services as judges or censors.  Gascoigne is perfectly willing to acknowledge that poetry may be exploited to incite its readers to lust; but he shifts the blame for this incitement from the poet to the reader; and this is very close to the position adopted by the writer of The Play of Plays.

In The Trial of Treasure, the bridle represented an act of censorship imposed on the slippery Vice Inclination.  In The Steele Glas it was used to restrain the dirty minds of Gascoigne’s own censors.  By the time it was introduced into The Play of Plays, then, the bridle was a familiar metaphor for censorial restraint, central to the debate over how far the liberty of poets and playwrights needed to be kept in check by authoritarian intervention.  And this becomes particularly interesting when we remember that The Play of Plays was written at a time when new powers of censorship were being granted to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney.[xxviii]  In December 1581 the Queen gave Tilney a special commission authorizing him:

to warne commaunde and appointe in all places within this our Realme of England… all and every plaier or plaiers with their playmakers, either belonginge to any noble man or otherwise, bearinge the name or names of usinge the facultie of playmakers or plaiers of Comedies, Tragedies, Enterludes or what other showes soever, from tyme to tyme and at all tymes to appeare before him with all suche plaies, Tragedies, Comedies or showes as they shall have in readines or meane to sett forth, and them to presente and recite before our said Servant or his sufficient deputie, whom wee ordeyne appointe and aucthorise by these presentes of all suche showes, plaies, plaiers and playmakers, together with their playing places, to order and reforme, auctorise and put downe, as shalbe thought meete or unmeete unto himselfe or his said deputie in that behalfe.[xxix]

This commission was probably designed both to improve the quality of the drama offered at court and to ensure that the court had superior authority over the theaters to that of the City of London.  We cannot be sure of the exact date of The Play of Plays, but presuming that it was performed in the February of 1581 or 1582 it may well have been conceived as an intervention in an ongoing discussion about the appropriate means of exercising control over plays.  Its major contribution is to decriminalize Delight – to change its status from voluptas to delectatio – by demonstrating the validity of its release from the restraints appropriate for a Vice.  At the same time it proposes, like Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, that the figure who imposed that unjust punishment on an innocent victim should himself be subject to restraint, as the alteration of his name from Zeal to Moderate Zeal implies.  The name “Zeal,” with its connotations of religious enthusiasm, may even have identified Delight’s accuser as a personification of the notoriously zealous City of London.  If so, the putting down of a character who was possibly as hypocritical and certainly as self-righteous as his successor, Ben Jonson’s Zeal-of-the Land Busy, would have been doubly attractive to the audience in the Theater, which had been threatened with closure so often by the City authorities.[xxx]

Stephen Gosson – who appealed both to the City authorities and to the Privy Council in his attacks on the stage[xxxi] – certainly saw himself as one of the play’s targets, embodying as he did an anti-theatrical zeal that became increasingly immoderate as the years went by.  His response to the Play’s celebration of Delight was to launch into one of his most brilliant logical confutations.  Like Cicero in Pro Archia he distinguishes between two different kinds of delight; but where Cicero distinguished these primarily on the basis of their function, Gosson insists that there is an essential difference between them.  “You must consider,” he writes, “that there are two sortes of delight, the one belonging to the bodie, the other to the minde, that, is carnall, this spirituall” (p. 183).  For Gosson, carnal delight appeals to the senses and emotions and therefore suppresses reason, while spiritual delight is rational, being “the operation of vertue consisting in a meditation of the life to come purchased to us by the bloode of Christ, and reveiled for our comforte in the word of God” (p. 184).  Carnal delight, which is what drama deals in, should therefore be shunned; spiritual delight sought out.

Gosson’s distinction between the two kinds of delight is not, however, as clear as he would like it to be.  He defines as an acceptable form of delight, for instance, “Sorrowe as it is remembred when it is paste, considering with our selves that wee were in trouble and escaped it” (p. 185) – a sensation it would be hard to describe as “spiritual.”  And towards the end of his discussion he is forced to acknowledge that God’s creation is specifically designed to encourage certain forms of carnal delight: “the creatures of God,” he writes, “may be used both for necessity, and for delight, so farre foorth as they are referred to that ende, for which they were made” (p. 190).  He returns, in fact, to the idea that it is the function of carnal delight that makes it good or evil, a virtue or a vice.  Gosson’s efforts to impose simplicity on his argument founder; in his text delight remains a fundamentally ambiguous concept; and by his own admission, ambiguity is a quality that is best explored by imaginative writing or performance.  The relatively light touch with which the Master of the Revels seems to have applied his proscriptive powers suggests that he, at least, was prepared to countenance that ambiguous concept as a necessary ingredient in the new improved drama of the 1580s and 90s.

3. The theatrical controversy after The Play of Plays

The more one reads of the controversy surrounding the theater in the late 1570s and 1580s, the clearer it becomes that the vocabulary of The Play of Plays was forged in the white heat of contemporary debate.  The terms it employs are ubiquitous in attacks and defences of the drama.  “Delight,” for instance, is famously central to Sidney’s defence of theatrical comedy, which scrupulously distinguishes the delectatio of true “sportfulness” from the voluptas and scurrility of what he calls laughter.[xxxii]  (But after making this careful distinction Sidney recommends that the two be fused in the ideal comic performance: clearly he was canny enough to see that any attempt to simplify the appeal of comedy could only diminish it.)  Again, both Sidney and Lodge, in their respective defences, claim to share the view of the anti-theatrical lobby that the contemporary theater is in urgent need of “reform” (although Lodge adds, as the author of The Play of Plays would have done, that the plays’ audiences are in greater need of reform than the plays themselves).[xxxiii]  Soon afterwards the notion of theatrical reform finds its way into official discourse.  As we have seen, the 1581 commission gave Tilney the authority “to order and reforme, auctorise and put downe” plays and shows throughout the realm of England.  And in 1582 the phrase “honest recreation,” too, becomes prominent in the language of the authorities.  In a letter dated April 11th, six members of the Privy Council asked the Lord Mayor of London to relax restrictions on the performance of plays “for honest recreation sake, in respecte that her maiestie sometimes taketh delight in those pastimes.”[xxxiv]  To this end they asked him to “appointe some fitt persones whoe maie consider and allowe of suche playes onely as be fitt to yeld honest recreacion and no example of evell.”  Their effort to enlist Zeal on behalf of Delight proved futile, since the Mayor refused to lift his prohibition of plays on the grounds that the plague was unusually severe that spring.  But responses to the bridling or allowing of the players continued to use the vocabulary exploited by the author of The Play of Plays for the rest of that decade – not necessarily because the play was well known, but because it was so extraordinarily topical.

The court dramatist John Lyly, for instance – who seems to have known the Wit plays well, and who certainly knew the anti-theatrical work of Stephen Gosson – repeatedly announces the “reformed” status of his comedies, dissociating them not only from the scurrilous Old Comedy banned from Greece but from the risqué New Comedy that took its place.[xxxv]  And in the Blackfriars Prologue to his second comedy, Sapho and Phao (1584), Lyly distinguishes delight from laughter along lines that ally him with the thinking of both Sidney and the author of The Play of Plays.  “Our intent was at this time to move inward delight,” he writes, “not outward lightnesse, and to breede (if it might bee) soft smiling, not loude laughing: knowing it to the wise to be as great pleasure to heare counsell mixed with witte, as to the foolishe to have sporte mixed with rudenesse.”[xxxvi]  Like Cicero, Lyly seems here to make delectatio a private sensation and voluptas or “lightnesse” a form of exhibitionism; and his yoking of wit with wisdom in his audience associates him with the English dramatic tradition initiated by Redford’s interlude.  Later in Sapho and Phao, Cupid – the personification of erotic pleasure – is stolen from his mother by the wise queen Sapho, who then tells Venus she is “not worthy to be the Ladye of love… that to satisfie the unbrideled thoughtes of thy hearte, transgressest so farre from the staye of thine honour” (5. 2. 59-62).  By the end of the play, in fact, a mythical queen has successfully bridled Cupid in the name of a reformed court culture.  But in Lyly’s next play, Gallathea (c. 1587) – which is as determined as its predecessor to avoid giving offence “in Scaene nor sillable” (p. 431) – Cupid is more savagely restrained, this time by Diana the goddess of chastity herself.  Diana tells him “I will bridle thy tongue and thy power” (3. 4. 89), and proceeds in addition to break his bow and arrows, bind his hands, clip his wings and fetter his feet.  The response of Cupid’s mother Venus is to condemn Diana as a sadistic killjoy: “This is shee that hateth sweete delights, envieth loving desires, masketh wanton eyes, stoppeth amorous eares, bridleth youthfull mouthes, and under a name, or a worde constancie, entertaineth all kinde of crueltie” (5. 3. 29-32).  Diana’s restraint of Cupid proves futile: as he tells his mother, “I beare nowe myne Arrowes in mine eyes, my Winges on my thoughts, my brandes in myne eares, my bowe in my mouth, so as I can wounde with looking, flye with thinking, burne with hearing, shoote with speaking” (5. 3. 94-7).  Those given to finding topical allegories in court comedies might take this to mean that the efforts of the censors to control the erotic element in drama merely make it more potent and attractive.  They might see Venus and Diana as representing conflicting aspects of Elizabeth’s persona, with Lyly enjoining her to give rein to the former.  Whatever the case, the epilogue of Gallathea is knowingly impertinent, proclaiming the necessity of love to life just as The Play of Plays proclaimed the necessity of Delight to the well-being of its protagonist: “Yeelde Ladies, yeeld to love Ladies… Confesse him a Conquerer, whom yee ought to regarde, sith it is unpossible to resist” (p. 472).  As Lyly’s career proceeded, he seems to have grown increasingly confident that honest recreation could freely celebrate delight without making self-defensive gestures of submission to the concept of reform.

Yet even as Lyly was celebrating the emancipation of drama in terms familiar from The Play of Plays, the anti-theatrical lobby continued to articulate their condemnation of the theater in terms drawn from the same theatrical tradition.  William Rankins’s A Mirror of Monsters (1587) is among the most imaginative of Elizabethan attacks on the imagination.[xxxvii]  Rankins was an ex-playwright, like Gosson, and he is constantly raiding the dramatic archives in his efforts to invigorate his assault on the drama.  He uses Terence’s Gnatho from The Eunuch to illustrate the flattery encouraged by players (D3r), and Ferrex and Porrex from Gorboduc to illustrate the dissension players foster (F3r-F3v).  And like Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions, which is organized on the basis of the Terentian five-act structure, Rankins’s pamphlet not only refers to but resembles the plays it condemns.  It reads like a sketch for a moral interlude, the sort of entertainment one might expect to see at an aristocratic wedding.  His style has much in common with that of the chief court dramatist of the time, John Lyly, making repeated reference to the same “unnatural natural history,” and constructing its arguments from the same balanced alliterative clauses.  More strikingly still, his plot contains many echoes of the Wit plays.  It centers on a monstrous travesty of the marriage of Wit and Science: the marriage of Fastus and Luxuria (Pride and Lust) in the chapel of adultery (a playhouse).  And Rankins explains his own former attraction to the playhouse by way of an allegory with which we are now thoroughly familiar.  The theater, he explains, is a place “famous for filthinesse… where my selfe luld in the lap of Securitie, not long since was brought a sleepe by Carelesse cogitations… wherein viewing manie things able to intice a pleasant eye to beholde, or an open eare to delight, by the line of grace, at length I got out, when I vowed to my guide unspotted love, heartie zeale, and continuall praise, that brought a soule almost sunke in sinne to the brinke of mercie” (B3v).  Rankins poses, in other words, as another Wit who has escaped not only from the clutches of Idleness but from the entire dramatic framework which brought him into her clutches in the first place.  It is therefore hardly surprising that his description of the abuses of the theater – offered to the reader on the principle that “none can better describe the furie of fier, then he which hath beene scorched with the flame” (B3v) – should have proved so much more dramatic than that of his anti-theatrical predecessors.

For Rankins, the most dangerous aspect of the theater – the thing that makes it so seductively potent – is its infinite capacity for generating disguises.  Above all he shares with Francis Merbury a sense of the beguiling plausibility with which it disguises its vices as virtues.  To illustrate this power of illusion Rankins develops his allegory along lines that were more dazzlingly explored by Marlowe and Spenser.  In honour of the theatrical wedding of Lust and Pride, the infernal god Pluto arranges for a masque of six hounds from hell to accompany the wedding feast.  Each hound personates a vice peculiar to players, and each has its own “visard” or mask to conceal its foul complexion from the view of the world.  The first and most powerful vice to appear is one we know well: Idleness, whose mask, of course, is “Honest recreation” (D2r).  Idleness, we learn, is the sin of those who refuse to take the pains “which must be endured before wee can obtayne the possession of wysedome”; who revel in “false delight”; who court “ignoraunce” by shunning “vertuous studie” (C4r-C4v).  And the quality celebrated by the players as “Honest recreacion” is no less than “cussed damnation” (D2r).  In other words, Rankins restores Honest Recreation to the doubtful status it had in the Wit plays – as a concept capable of masking vice – and from which the author of The Play of Plays sought to redeem it.

In doing so, Rankins accidentally puts his finger on those elements in Redford’s Wit and Science which made it one of the most influential plays of the sixteenth century.  As we have seen, Redford placed at the core of his play a figure – or rather, a pair of figures, Honest Recreation and Idleness – who breathed life into the ambiguous attitude to literature that prevailed throughout the early modern period.  The productive confusion of Idleness with Honest Recreation, virtue with vice and vice versa, was capable of being adapted to as many variations as there were twists and turns in the debate about poetry and drama; and in this turbulent century the twists and turns were many.  His version of Everyman, too – native Wit, with his cocky conviction of his own self-sufficiency and his infinite capacity for lapsing into Folly – wittily embodied the dangers which the humanists themselves recognized in their aspiration to gain status through intellectual merit.  On one level, Wit’s death at the hands of the monster Tediousness enacts the ease with which the clever student can succumb to disastrous over-confidence in the powers of his own eloquence.  More seriously, it articulates the threat of death that hovered over any kind of personal or political ambition in the age of the Reformation.  But what was particularly seductive about Redford’s allegory was, perhaps, its recognition of how far it was the appeal to the senses that lay at the heart of the debate over poetry, drama and other forms of eloquence.  Redford was willing to accept sensuality as a tool of learning, but he was also acutely aware of the risks involved in this acceptance.  In other words, his dramatic discussion of education and recreation occupied territory that was to be fought over by religious reformers and counter-reformers throughout the century, thus ensuring that the contest between Idleness and Honest Recreation would remain a live issue for decades to come.

The Play of Plays took its plot from Redford and his successors, and introduced another figure of potent ambivalence into the story: Delight, which shared with Honest Recreation the honour of being the most contested concept in the debate over the theaters that raged in the 1580s.  The Play of Plays and its context shows us something that has been getting steadily clearer to literary historians: that early modern attacks and defences of poetry shared a common ground and a common vocabulary, just as their composers shared a common training in the schoolroom – and often enough, as writers for the stage.  The question at issue between attackers and defenders of the theatre was the question of whether dramatic recreation was honest, and whether delight in the things of the senses was justifiable.  These were questions over which the Elizabethan disputants genuinely puzzled, and about which they may have changed their minds more often than we have tended to recognize.  The questions were, as The Play of Plays and Wit and Science remind us, matters of Life and death.  Ambivalence over its own function is what gave the Elizabethan theater its astonishing vitality: every serious play was, in effect, a dramatization of the debate over drama.  Salvaging The Play of Plays may help us, I think, to understand how far this is the case.  It certainly helps clarify the ferocity and intelligence of the debate at the time when Shakespeare’s great predecessors, Lyly and Marlowe, had possession of the London stages.

4. The Play of Plays and Sir Thomas More

But the debate did not end with the 1580s, and the issues confronted in The Play of Plays were not forgotten in the next decade.  I shall end by indicating a suggestive point of contact between Shakespeare himself and the theatrical controversy in which The Play of Plays took part.  In about 1593 the secret agent and translator Anthony Munday wrote a play, Sir Thomas More, making extensive use of material that had been current among the disputants at the beginning of the previous decade.[xxxviii]  (He probably wrote it in collaboration with other writers, but for convenience I shall refer to the original play as his throughout this account.)  Later, between a year and ten years after Munday wrote the first draft, William Shakespeare was one of those commissioned to write additions to the play to prepare it for stage performance.[xxxix]  As he read through the tragedy before making his contributions, Shakespeare would have become nostalgically immersed in the complex milieu from which The Play of Plays sprang: a milieu which helped to shape his early development as a playwright.

Munday himself may have taken part in the theatrical controversy of the 1580s: he has sometimes been credited (if that is the right word) with the authorship of an anti-theatrical tract supporting Gosson, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters (1580).[xl]  If he did write it, then he is yet another example of an Elizabethan writer who could write with equal facility on both sides of a question.  Sir Thomas More is among other things a passionate defence of the stage, which draws on the Wit plays, and perhaps even on The Play of Plays itself, in its construction of More as the champion of poetic free speech and freedom of conscience.

Throughout the play More is depicted as poet, player, and patron of the arts.  He begins by transforming a law court into the setting for a miniature comedy (1. 2), and ends by confessing that he has finally been transformed from “a state pleader” to “a stage player” on the scaffold erected for his execution (5. 4. 73).  The difference between these two performances – the first a farce, the last a tragedy – reflects the sheer eclecticism of More’s literary tastes.  He takes equal delight in the most popular and the most esoteric branches of poetry, in the “merry jests” of the jest-books and the poetry of religious consolation to which he has recourse (along with jests) before his death.  His closest ally in the play is Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, anachronistically made into More’s contemporary so as to allow the two great men of English letters to engage in a dialogue on poetry and politics.  More refers to Surrey throughout as “most noble poet,” as though this were his highest honorific.  But he also declares his solidarity with the poverty of non-aristocratic, “professional” writers like Munday himself.  On being asked by his jailer if he has made a lot of money as chancellor he replies, “That part of poet that was given me / Made me a very unthrift. / For this is the disease attends us all: / Poets were never thrifty, never shall” (5. 3. 61-4).  Munday’s More is as much at home with poor poets, players and playwrights as with earls: he befriends anyone, in fact, who shows a spark of wit at any social level.  Indeed, his delight in wit is taken by some in the course of the play to signal his want of wisdom.  And it is perhaps for this reason that Munday’s mind turned, as he wrote, to the Wit plays, which had traced the relationship between these two qualities throughout the sixteenth century.

The first echo of the Wit plays occurs in Act III, when More plays a practical joke, with the help of his household fool, to test the integrity of a visitor to his house, the great scholar Erasmus.[xli]  Like Wit in Redford’s interlude More gives his clothes to the fool; but unlike Wit he does it for a serious purpose: to see whether Erasmus “can distinguish / Merit and outward ceremony” (3. 1. 40-1) – that is, whether he will be more impressed by the robes of office than by the nonsense uttered by the fool who is dressed in them.  The serious purpose behind More’s joke is reinforced by the many references to his learning that preface the deception.  As Erasmus approaches the chancellor’s presence, Surrey tells him that More is “great in study, that’s the statist’s grace” (3. 1. 131); and he goes on to explain the relationship between More’s learning and his political position: “That study is the general watch of England: / In it the prince’s safety and the peace / That shines upon our commonwealth are forged / By loyal industry” (3. 1. 142-4).  These allusions serve both to make More’s deception funnier and to suggest that it may have a direct bearing on the well-being of the commonwealth.  But the scene also showcases More’s sympathy with the craft of the player, and his learning lends gravitas to this sympathy.  He tells his fool to “act like a formal player our grave part,” and later repeats the injunction: “act thy part / With a firm boldness, and thou winst my heart.”[xlii]  More’s combination of learning and a delight in honest recreation allies him with Redford and the author of The Play of Plays.  And by the end of the episode it enables him to launch into a full-blown defence of the theatre – and especially of the most reviled dramatic genre, that of comedy – which makes many of the same points as the lost play.

The defence takes its cue from Elizabethan medical theory.  In the revised version of Munday’s play, the episode begins with More reflecting (in a speech that may have been written by Shakespeare) on the strange fortune that has carried him, through personal merit, from “humble” origins to the exalted position of chancellor.[xliii]  He goes on to observe that such giddy good fortune needs to be “physicked by respect” if it is not to “turn our blood / To much corruption” (3. 1. 13-14).  More’s practical joke is designed to “physic” his pomp by putting it in context – by reminding him and his visitors of the qualities on which his good fortune depends.  Afterwards he tells Erasmus that it was meant to show how far “respect / Waits often on the ceremonious train / Of base illiterate wealth, whilst men of schools, / Shrouded in poverty, are counted fools” (3. 1. 175-8).  But he goes on to identify a medical reason for adopting the comic mode as his preferred means of instruction:

Pardon thou reverend German I have mixed
So slight a jest to the fair entertainment
Of thy most worthy self.  For know, Erasmus,
Mirth wrinkles up my face and I still crave
When that forsakes me I may hug my grave. (1. 3. 179-83)

More is referring here to the early modern medical belief, founded on the writings of the “laughing philosopher” Hippocrates, that laughter extends a man’s life – as it did that of Hippocrates himself, who is supposed to have lived to a ripe old age.[xliv]  His allusion to facial wrinkling evokes the notion of the “Hippocratic face,” whereby a physician makes his first and most searching diagnosis of a patient’s condition from the close study of his countenance.[xlv]  Erasmus, of course, agrees wholeheartedly with More’s high opinion of jesting, as the Elizabethan audience would have expected from the author of The Praise of Folly .  “Your honour’s merry humour,” he tells him,

is best physic
Unto your able body.  For we learn
Where melancholy chokes the passages
Of blood and breath, the erected spirit still
Lengthens our days with sportful exercise.
Study should be the saddest time of life,
The rest a sport exempt from thought of strife. (3. 1. 184-88)

As we have seen, this theme is central both to the Wit plays and to The Play of Plays, in which “sportful exercise” miraculously revives their protagonists from death.  Indeed, at the end of The Play of Plays the indulgence in an appropriate form of “sport” makes Life immortal – or so it seems from Gosson’s account.  Given that the Play also makes “sorowe an enemie to delight without distinction” – following the Hippocratic doctrine that melancholy is unwholesome – we might suspect that its ending was reinforced by an appeal to the related doctrine that laughter imparts longevity.

But there is of course a good deal of irony about invoking these views in the context of More’s life, which was so conspicuously witty and yet was cut short in so spectacular a fashion.  And when More takes up the theme of “physic” in conversation with the Earl of Surrey, who was also to die young – executed by Henry VIII for treason like More himself – the irony becomes marked.  Towards the end of the deception scene, Surrey protests against being called “My noble poet” by the Chancellor: “O my lord, you tax me / In that word poet of much idleness” (3. 1. 192-3).  But More reassures the Earl that his poetic occupation provides him with his best claim to noble status (it is Surrey’s “sweetest heraldry,” 3. 1. 198).  And he adds, anticipating Sidney, that poetry is currently in low esteem because the poets have no opportunity to exercise their pens in their preferred arena, that of celebrating military heroes, since soldiery is as little regarded now as verse (3. 1. 204-7).  As a consequence the “unphysicked” poets simply “melt away,” starved of the material they need to sustain their craft.  The world More inhabits, then, is inimical to poets and playwrights, and the “physic” they derive from indulging in “fresh and staid delights” (3. 1. 211) is cancelled out by the absence of “great subjects of their pen.”  So when he later summons his guests to a banquet of “neat wit” (3. 1. 214), he is inviting them to join a select company whose intellectual qualities will lay them open to misunderstanding, persecution and ultimately death.  This, one presumes, is one of the points he was making in staging his deception.  By deliberately confounding the chancellor with the fool he anticipates the moment of his fall from royal favour, when he refuses to subscribe to the Henrician articles of faith.  At that point in his life More’s wisdom, sustained in adversity by his wit, will look like folly to the rest of the play’s cast.  And unlike the protagonists of the earlier plays, his devotion to honest recreation will be unable to procure him a miraculous reprieve from the fate to which he is sentenced.

The episode with the fool, then, prepares Munday’s audience for the more extended exploration of the relationship between wit and wisdom that occurs in the following scene, and which is developed in the last two acts of the tragedy.  At the very center of his play Munday sets the performance of an interlude in More’s house: and the interlude is called The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, after the play by Francis Merbury.  The interlude is not in fact Merbury’s but an amalgam of interludes, combining a prologue from Thomas Ingelend’s Disobedient Child, the Vice Inclination from The Trial of Treasure, a heroine from The Marriage of Wit and Science and many lines from Lusty Juventus.[xlvi]  But the plot closely resembles the stories with which we have become familiar.  Wit yearns for pleasure; he meets Inclination, who introduces him to a woman he calls Wisdom; Good Counsel comes in and warns him that she is really Lady Vanity.  At the end of the play – in the part we do not see – Inclination is bridled as he was in the Trial, and Wit and the real Lady Wisdom live happily ever after.  Or so we presume; because the interlude breaks off before it comes to an end, More is summoned to take his seat in the King’s Council and sign the articles of faith confirming Henry VIII as supreme head of the church in England, and the chain of events leading to his execution is set inexorably in motion.  In other words, Munday seamlessly merges the Wit plays with the high political matters of More’s career, thus taking the defence of the theater to a level barely imagined by the controversialists of the previous decade.  But his use of the old Wit plays demonstrates that he is doing so in the full knowledge that he is working in a tradition that dates at least from the time of More – when the first of the Wit plays could well have been written.  And his awareness of the part played by these plays in the theatrical controversy is strongly suggested by the audience he chooses for More’s interlude: the very personification of the anti-theatrical prejudice of the 1580s and 90s, the Lord Mayor of London himself.

The mayor’s appearance at this crucial point in the drama would seem to have been a carefully calculated stratagem, designed to reinforce Munday’s specific targeting of Londoners in his defence of plays.  Two recent editors of Sir Thomas More have plausibly suggested that Munday’s choice of More as a subject was inspired by his desire to find a hero for the merchants and craftsmen of London, and that this formed part of the playwright’s extended campaign to attract “the puritanically inclined City middle class” to the theater.[xlvii]  But in Sir Thomas More Munday’s campaign is also marked by a decidedly unflattering portrayal of the chief civic authority, the Lord Mayor.  This may seem odd in view of Munday’s later role as the principal author of the spectacular Lord Mayor’s shows mounted between 1602 and 1623.[xlviii]  But at this earlier stage in his career Munday was concerned to modify his fellow citizens’ attitude to drama – a project in which he was still busily engaged when he wrote The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon  in 1598, which revives More’s contemporary Skelton to explain to an Elizabethan audience the principles of good theatrical writing.[xlix]  And as we have seen, the figure who encapsulated the anti-theatrical inclinations of the citizens was their elected representative, the mayor.  Munday therefore has More rise above his former superior by virtue of his eloquence in the first two acts of the play, then force him to sit quietly through an interlude in the third.  But in the third act he is also careful to have More remember that the Mayor and Aldermen of the city were once his “brethren” (3. 2. 93), thus paving the way for an eventual reconciliation between the city and the arts.  It is pleasing to think that Munday himself came to embody this reconciliation in the final stages of his own poetic career.

As I have suggested, in the first two acts More’s unhistorical role in suppressing the rebellion of 1517 establishes his credentials as an exemplary citizen; but it does so at the expense of the mayor’s reputation.  In the first Act the Lord Mayor is not merely ineffectual in controlling the abuses perpetrated by foreigners in the City, which are the source of the rebels’ resentment: he is also said to be complicit with these abuses.  As one of the rebels complains: “my lord mayor, on the ambassador’s complaint, sent me to Newgate one day because (against my will) I took the wall of a stranger” (1. 1. 40-2).  The mayor’s efforts to control the rebellion are limited to a single cry of “Peace ho, peace!  I charge you keep the peace” (2. 3. 31), which is utterly ignored by the rebels; and before this the foreigners are depicted insulting the mayor’s wife with impunity (1. 1. 46-9).  More, by contrast, calms the rebels by the sheer force of his rhetoric: as one says, “Sheriff More, thou hast done more with thy good words than all they could with their weapons” (2. 3. 181-2).  His words again prove effective when he successfully pleads to the king for the rebels’ lives.  Munday’s point would seem to be that the citizens’ elected representative, the mayor, can do less for them than the humbly-born scholar and lover of the arts who is prepared to speak on their behalf; indeed, he requires the scholar’s assistance in discharging his office.  And Munday would also seem to be throwing doubt on the mayor’s credentials as a judge of the effect of the oral arts on the urban public.  The mayor needs, in fact, to be taught a lesson: and the lesson comes in the third act of Munday’s tragedy.

In Munday’s version of history, More is made Lord Chancellor on the strength of his successful negotiation with the rebels – as a reward for his rhetorical success.  The reappearance of the mayor at More’s house in the third act therefore reminds us, as I said, that the chancellor has been promoted over his former superior.  It also offers More an excuse to reaffirm his loyalty to the capital: as he tells the aldermen, “once I was your brother / And so am still in heart.  It is not state / That can our love from London separate” (3. 2. 93-5).  But it gives him, too, a chance to instruct the mayor once again in the value of the spoken word, this time as it is used in drama.  The scene begins with More lamenting the departure of Erasmus, “whose delicious words / Express the very soul and life of wit” (3. 2. 7-8); and the hint here of wit’s close relationship with life is confirmed a few lines later when More welcomes the mayor’s approach: “More’s merry heart lives by good company” (3. 2. 18).  Munday then goes on to dispose of the old notion that a delight in wit leads inevitably to idleness, by representing More as strenuously active as he prepares to receive his guests.  “Come, my good fellows,” he tells his servants, “stir, be diligent, / Sloth is an idle fellow, leave him now, / The time requires your expeditious service” (3. 2. 23-5).  Just at this moment a company of players arrives and is caught up in the business of preparation.  More now takes on the role of Master of the Revels, selecting an appropriate play from several offered by the company and being assured by his son-in-law Roper that it will prove a “right pleasing pastime to your guests” (3. 2. 58).  Sure enough, when the mayor is told that he is about to see a play he keeps any objections he may have to himself, silenced by the knowledge that it was his host who earlier “drove rebellion from our door, / With grave discretion’s mild and gentle breath” (3. 2. 3-4).  He is also disarmed by More’s automatic assumption that the mayor shares his love of theater: “if art fail,” More cries like the ideal spectator, “we’ll inch it out with love” (3. 2. 132).  By this means Munday wittily steers his fictional mayor – and his living counterpart, perhaps – into a position of uncharacteristic indulgence of, and even participation in, the performance mounted for his benefit.

The most active participant in the drama apart from the players themselves is, of course, the chancellor: when one of the players fails to arrive in time to play his part, More steps on stage and improvises the role himself.  In the process he might be said to demonstrate the proper function of a censor like the Master of the Revels (or indeed any “sufficient persone” appointed by the mayor to work alongside the Master): that is, to reform the defects of plays with sensitivity and skill.[l]  His attitude to the drama is much like his attitude to the rebels: when things get out of hand he intervenes with “mild and gentle breath,” rather than with the aggressive surgeon’s knife recommended by Stephen Gosson in his anti-theatrical polemics.[li]  And the role he adopts is not that of Wit – who is even more sexually voracious in this version of the play than he was in earlier versions – but the man who strives to set Wit on the right course, Good Counsel.  In this role he removes the metaphorical mask from Lady Vanity, exposing her for all to view; and in doing so he demonstrates that this is one of the functions of drama.  Where successive Lord Mayors had assumed, with William Rankins, that the theater disseminates deceits, More shows that rightly used it puts deceit to shame.[lii]  It therefore remains the most appropriate art form for a world where, as the interlude’s Prologue puts it, “in every land / Vice doth increase and virtue decays” (3. 2. 170-1).  The composite interlude does include a bridle, but this is a theatrical device to represent the players’ voluntary restraint of themselves, not an instrument of oppression.  In other words, Munday’s use of the Wit plays is entirely in keeping with the use made of them by the author of The Play of Plays.

But his use of them is also a good deal more sophisticated.  As we have seen, in the revised version of the play the interlude breaks off abruptly, as More is summoned to a session of the Privy Council which is the prelude to his tragic fall.  But this is not to say that the interlude remains unfinished; it signals instead the fact that More’s tragedy itself is a refined enactment of the interlude’s themes, updated for the more sophisticated audiences of Elizabethan times.  More declares his personal interest in these themes when he tells the mayor that the topic of the interlude is “a theme of some import, howe’er it prove” (3. 2. 131).  We have already noted a number of places in Sir Thomas More that highlight the marriage of wit and wisdom for which More was famous; and there are many more.[liii]  They fall, broadly speaking, into three distinct parts, corresponding to the three parts into which the play has conventionally been divided.[liv]  The first part of the play establishes More’s dedication to wisdom.  On his first appearance he sets up a practical joke in order “To check the folly” of a justice and identify “Wisdom” as the object of his own devotion (1. 2. 92 and 200).  Later Surrey describes him as “a wise and learned gentleman” well qualified to deal with the rioters (1. 3. 86); and More confirms Surrey’s opinion of him by dissuading them from their course by an appeal to reason, in the dazzling scene interpolated (perhaps) by Shakespeare (2. 3. 1-159).  The middle part of the play is devoted, as we have seen, to More’s wit rather than his wisdom: he shows it in his dealings with the fool and the players.  But in the last part of the play – the last two acts – both his wit and his wisdom are called into question, even by his friends and family.  When he refuses to sign Henry’s articles Shrewsbury tells Surrey that “Error in learned heads hath much to do” (4. 1. 110); and when More tells his wife afterwards, “I have resigned mine office: countst me not wise?” she can say no more than “O God” (4. 2. 74-5).  Later More’s wisdom is reaffirmed, first by his former brewer and then by the Lieutenant of the Tower (5. 2. 13 and 5. 3. 5-9).  But when his son-in-law Roper tells him that “The world… hath ever held you wise,” and that it shall be “no distaste unto your wisdom / To yield to the opinion of the state,” More is swift to dismiss this worldly kind of wisdom with a characteristic joke (5. 3. 89-99).  In this way he commits himself to die as a “fool of flesh” in order to hasten his “birth to heaven,” where the only true marriage with wisdom will take place (5. 4. 116-18).

Munday’s version of The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, then, takes the bold step of implying that genuine wit and wisdom can easily be taken for folly by authorities eager to keep their subjects under rigorous control.  Munday was no Catholic sympathiser – on the contrary, he had helped entrap English recusants – but he clearly felt that his moral transcended sectarian divisions: the last lines of the play are spoken by the Protestant Surrey, whose wit and wisdom are to end exactly as More’s had done.  The moral’s relevance to players is underscored by More’s transformation in the last act into a “stage player,” employed by the king “to act this last scene of my tragedy” on the scaffold (5. 4. 73-5).  So there is something deeply poignant in the fact that Munday’s play, with its appeal for gentle censorship and its depiction of bloody royal retribution for dissent, should have survived into the twentieth century as a major piece of evidence for the censorious practices of the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney.  Several passages of the manuscript are marked up in Tilney’s hand for deletion or revision, and most scholars have assumed that the changes he demanded were the reason why the play seems never to have been performed in early modern England.[lv]

The most important reform Tilney demanded was the removal of all scenes depicting the rebels: the discontents of the London citizens were a sensitive subject in 1593.  But he left untouched the scenes that evoke the theatrical controversy of the 1580s, when he obtained the powers he was exercising as he marked up the manuscript.  One wonders whether he recalled The Play of Plays as he read, with its joint appeal for the unbridling of delight and the reformation of the stage, and whether he was wryly amused by the recollection.  It was a tricky balance he was called on to strike, between catering for the Queen’s delight in plays and ensuring that neither she, nor her Privy Council, nor the Lord Mayor of London, nor anyone else in authority was offended by the plays he licensed.  There could be no more striking testament to the trickiness of Tilney’s task than the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, laden as it is with textual debris from the first Elizabethan War of the Theaters.

Notes

[i] Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), reprinted in Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1974), pp. 138-97.  All references are to this edition.

[ii] See Sir Thomas More, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), introduction.  All references are to this edition.

[iii] For an account of the debate see Jonas A. Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

[iv] Extracts from these texts are printed in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), vol. 4, 198-9, 208-12, 221-5, and 227-8.  I discuss Rankins’s pamphlet below.

[v] Both texts are reprinted in G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press,1904), vol. 1, pp. 61-86 and 148-207.  Smith prints only substantial extracts from Lodge’s Defence.

[vi] Straunge News is attacked at the beginning of Gosson’s prose fiction, The Ephemerides of Phialo (1579), while he mentions Honest Excuses at the end of the volume, in An Apologie of The Schoole of Abuse.  See Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, introduction, and pp. 133-5.  The missing scene from Wilson’s play is mentioned in Playes Confuted; see Markets of Bawdrie, pp. 165-6.  For The Play of Plays, see below.  Some scholars take Honest Excuses to have been the title of Lodge’s Defence of Poetry.

[vii] On December 6^th 1574 an Act of Common Council of London attempted to bring plays under the control of the City.  See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4, 273-6.  On the relationship of the City to the stage see Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), chapter 1, pp.1-15.

[viii] Lodge’s Defence survives only in two copies, neither of which has a title page.  Smith presumes it was “issued privately [i.e. without being registered with the Stationers’ Company] in 1579, and withdrawn immediately,” and Lodge mentions its suppression in the dedication to An Alarum against Usurers (1584), where he tells us that it was refused permission to be printed “by reason of the slendernes of the subject (because it was in defence of plaies and play makers)” (The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883), vol. 1. 4, p. 6).

[ix] Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, pp. 181-3.

[x] Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, p. 18.

[xi] See Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 183.  All references are to this edition.

[xii] See The Marriage of Wit and Science, ed. Arthur Brown (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1960 (1961)), p. vi, and Francis Merbury, The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom, ed. Trevor N. S. Lennam (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1966 (1971)), p. xi.  All references are to these editions.

[xiii] For its presence in Lyly’s Euphues, see my Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 201, 227, 232, and 258.  For the two versions in Sir Thomas More see Gabrieli and Melchiori’s introduction, pp. 9-10.  For the connection between the Wit plays and the Parnassus plays see Eckhard Auberlen, The Commonwealth of Wit: The Writer’s Image and his Strategies of Self-Representation in Elizabethan Literature (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984), pp. 136ff.

[xiv] Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour, ed. H. H. S. Croft, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1883), vol. 1, p. 238, my emphasis.

[xv] Elyot, The Governour, vol. 1, pp. 238-9.

[xvi] For definitions of wit in the sixteenth century see William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: the Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937; repr. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964).

[xvii] For the senses in Sidney’s Apology see Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), introduction, p. 48ff.

[xviii] Wit gives himself up to despair at l. 1013ff. (where his speech is wrongly assigned to Will) and at l. 1280ff.  For sixteenth-century theories of laughter see Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, translated and annotated by Gregory David de Rocher (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980), introduction.

[xix] See Horace, De Arte Poetica, ll. 281-4 (also Epistles, II.i.139-55).  For Donatus on Terence see Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. O. B. Hardison et al. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974), pp.39-49.

[xx] “Ego vero fateor me his studiis esse deditum: ceteros pudeat, si qui se ita litteris abdiderunt, ut nihil possint ex his neque ad communem adferre fructum neque in aspectum lucemque proferre: me autem quid pudeat, qui tot annos ita vivo, iudices, ut a nullius umquam me tempore aut commodo aut otium meum abstraxerit aut voluptas avocarit aut denique somnus retardarit?” (Loeb edition, trans. N. H. Watts (London: William Heinemann, 1955), pp. 20-1).

[xxi] “Haec studia adolescentiam acuunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris…” (Loeb edition, pp. 24-5).

[xxii] Quotations are from The Fable of Ovid treting of Narcissus (1560), cited in R. W. Maslen, “Myths exploited: the metamorphoses of Ovid in early Elizabethan England,” Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15-30, p. 21.  This essay includes a discussion of Delight on which the present essay draws.

[xxiii] Reprinted in Early English Dramatists: Anonymous Plays, 3^rd Series, ed. John S. Farmer (London: Early English Drama Society, 1906; reprinted Guildford: Charles W. Traylen, 1966), pp. 203-46.  All references are to this edition.

[xxiv] Twelfth Night, 1. 3. 2.

[xxv] Reprinted in The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), vol. 2, The Glasse of Governement… and Other Poems and Prose Works, pp. 133-207.  All references are to this edition.  For further discussion of this text see Maslen, “Myths exploited,” pp. 24-7.

[xxvi] See George Gascoigne, An Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III, p. 684.

[xxvii] The gods have deigned, he tells us, “by their devine decrees, / That with the stumps of my reproved tong, / I may sometimes, Reprovers deedes reprove, / And sing a verse, to make them see themselves” (p. 146).

[xxviii] For a discussion of these new powers see Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship, chapter 1.

[xxix] Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 286.

[xxx] See Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 5.5.

[xxxi] The Schoole of Abuse ends with an appeal “To the right honorable Sir Richard Pipe, Knight, Lorde Maior of the Citie of London,” while Playes Confuted is dedicated to “Sir Frances Walsingham Knight… of her highnesse most honorable Privy Counsell” (Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, pp. 112 and 140).

[xxxii] An Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, rev. Maslen, pp. 112.1-113.17.

[xxxiii] See Lodge, Defence, pp. 79-82, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1.

[xxxiv] Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, pp. 287-8, my emphases.

[xxxv] See Michael Pincombe, The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 19.  Lyly’s knowledge of Gosson’s anti-theatrical polemic may be deduced from the fact that the protagonist of Euphues and his England recommends Gosson’s prose fiction, The Ephemerides of Phialo, to his friend Philautus (see Pincombe, The Plays of John Lyly, p. 14).  The Ephemerides was printed together with ‘An Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse’ (see Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, p. 121 ff.).

[xxxvi] The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), vol. 2, p. 371.  All references are to this edition.

[xxxvii] Reprinted in Kind-heart’s Dream by Henry Chettle and A Mirror of Monsters by William Rankin, introd. Peter Davison (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972).  All references are to this edition.

[xxxviii] See Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, introduction.

[xxxix] It is also possible that Shakespeare had a hand in the original version of the play.  See Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), chapter 7.

[xl] See e.g. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 208.

[xli] The servant dressed in More’s robes is never specifically referred to as a household fool – he is More’s “man Randall” – but he is at least informally invested with that status before his exit, when More says, “Fool, painted barbarism, retire thyself / Into thy first creation” (3. 1. 3-4).  This implies that his original job (his “first creation”) was that of being a fool.  His association with playing may also imply that he’s a professional fool; for the relationship between fools and players see Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship, chapter 2.  Incidentally, the deception has something in common with an incident in the opening scene of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (published 1594), in which Prince Edward gives his clothes to his fool Ralph Simnell.  Indeed, Sir Thomas More has more than this in common with Greene’s play.

[xlii] Both of these quotations come from Munday’s original version of the scene, p. 215.

[xliii] On this soliloquy see McMillin, Elizabethan Theatre, pp. 25-7.  As the editors of Sir Thomas More point out in their notes to the speech, the historical chancellor’s origins were far from humble.

[xliv] See Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, introduction.

[xlv] See Hippocrates, Prognostic, II.

[xlvi] See Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, introduction, pp. 9-10.

[xlvii] See Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, introduction, p. 16.

[xlviii] See for instance his first Lord Mayor’s show, The Triumphs of Re-United Britannia, in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp.369-81.  See also the discussion of Munday’s career in Kinney’s introduction to the show.

[xlix] See Munday, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, ed. John C. Meagher (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1965 for 1964), sc. i, 110-41; sc. vi, 843-89; sc. xiii, 2208-48; sc. xiv, 2782-840.

[l] A Minute of the Privy Council for November 1589 mentions a letter to the Lord Mayor of London which urged him to appoint a “sufficient persone” to work with the Master of the Revels in licensing and censoring plays.  See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 306.  See also the letter of April 1582 mentioned above.

[li] See e.g. Markets of Bawdrie, ed. Kinney, p. 196: “Wherefore I hope the wise will accompt it necessarie, that such as have lefte theire occupations, eyther be turned to the same againe, or cut of from the body as putrified members for infecting the rest.”

[lii] For the views of successive Mayors on the theatre – many of whom show an impressively detailed knowledge of the theatrical debate – see e.g. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, pp. 269, 279, 294-5 (a letter which expresses the mayor’s awareness that the “reproch… to us as the sufferers and mainteiners of such disorders is published to the whole world in bokes”), 307-8, and 316-7.  The last is a letter from the Lord Mayor to Lord Burghley, dated November 1594, which declares “I am not ignorant (my very good L.) what is alleadged by soom for the defence of these playes” before launching into a new attack on drama.

[liii] See Charles R. Forker and Joseph Candido, “Wit, Wisdom, and Theatricality in the Book of Sir Thomas More,” Shakespeare Studies, 13 (1980), pp. 85-104.

[liv] For detailed accounts of the play’s threefold structure see McMillin, Elizabethan Theatre, p. 20 ff., and Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, pp. 29-32.

[lv] See Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, p. 33.