It deals with the revolt of the Affections against Love and Hatred, 'whom heretofore they counted their King and Queene.' Love and Hatred are aided by the Virtues, headed by Justice, while the rebels have the support of the Vices disguised as Affections or Virtues, and commanded by Pride. Justice, however, unmasks them, and sends them to confinement, whereupon the Affections tender their submission and are pardoned. The work is in prose throughout, and contains interesting passages and many allusions to recent events, but lacks dramatic movement and vivacity. Religious satire is another predominant element in the later university plays-a foretaste of the dread conflict that was fast approaching. Loiola, by John Hacket, acted at Trinity before the university on 28 February and before James on a third visit to Cambridge on 12 March 1623, is an entertaining Latin comedy, which attacks impartially Roman Catholics and Calvinists, the former in the person of Loiola, 'an unscrupulous Jesuit,' the latter in that of Martinus, a canting elder of Amsterdam, where the scene is laid. To the same year belongs the semi-allegorical Fucus Histriomastix, wherein the title role, that of a hypocritical puritan minister, was played by Robert Ward of Queens' college, who was probably the author of the piece. Fucus, who hates all plays and amusements, seeks to prevent the marriage of Philomathes and Comoedia, otherwise, the production of an academic comedy. The arguments he uses are the same as those of Rainolds in his controversy with Gager, and seem derived from his book. But his intrigues are foiled, and he also comes off badly in a feud with the merry-making countryman, Villanus, who is in love with Ballada, an illegitimate sister of Comoedia'. Another actor in Fucus was Peter Hausted, afterwards fellow of Queens', who, when Charles and Henrietta Maria visited Cambridge in March 1632, wrote in their honour the singular play The Rival Friends. This is linked to the comedies satirising religious hypocrisy by its caustic portraiture of the wooers of the deformed and foolish Mistress Ursely, whose hand carries with it an 'impropriate parsonage.' More realistically humorous personages are Stipes, the shepherd of the simoniacal patron, and his wife and daughter, all genuinely rustic figures without the customary pastoral veneer. From Hausted's preface to the play when it was published, it is evident that his low-life portraiture had been adversely criticised as unbefitting the royal presence. But to 1 See Fucus Histriomastix, edited by Smith, G. C. Moore (1909), introduction and notes, pp. 98-9. The editor suggests that the play may have been partly inspired by an attempt, recorded by Chamberlain, to suppress the performance of Loiola. Hausted. Randolph 325 modern taste this appeals much more strongly than does the pseudo-romantic main plot. The two friends, Lucius and Neander, rivals for the love of Pandora, vie in their readiness to abdicate in each other's favour, and carry their altruism so far that the lady gives her affections, at first in pretence, afterwards in reality, to a third wooer. The popularity, however, of such fantastic themes was evidenced by the successful production at Trinity, during the same royal visit, of Thomas Randolph's The Jealous Lovers. Randolph, a distinguished alumnus of Westminster and Trinity, had already written two short academic 'shows,' Aristippus or The Joviall Philosopher and The Conceited Pedler. The Jealous Lovers was his first complete play, and the rapturous welcome accorded to it does little credit to either the university or the court. Randolph's inventiveness and rhetorical fluency cannot redeem the essential falsity of the main plot. Tyndarus is insanely suspicious of the faithfulness of his beloved Evadne, and Techmessa similarly mistrusts her devoted Pamphilus. The two 'jealous lovers' go through a mock funeral (which gives occasion for an imitation of the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet) as a final test of the constancy of the seemingly bereft pair. But, after this ordeal has proved their loyalty unswerving, Hymen forbids the proposed unions, and it transpires that Tyndarus is the brother of Evadne, and Techmessa the sister of Pamphilus. Interwoven with these pseudoromantic episodes is an underplot of gross humour. The royal pair, accompanied by their nephews, the palatine princes, paid a second visit to Oxford in August 1636, when the last important series of academic plays was produced in their honour. William Strode, public orator, welcomed the king to Christ Church with a speech, and with an allegorical drama, The Floating Island, which was staged with great elaboration, and furnished with music by Henry Lawes. The title and general conception of the work, in which the island represents the human mind afloat on the sea of the passions, was, doubtless, suggested by Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island or The Isle of Man, published at Cambridge in 1633. But Strode develops the theme on lines of his own, and with the added spice of political and religious satire. A conspiracy is formed by Audax, Irato and others against the rule of king Prudentius and his counsellor, Intellectus Agens. Prudentius resigns his crown, and Fancy is proclaimed queen, her only law being 'that each man use his proper humour, be it vice or virtue.' Discord and tumult are the result, and Prudentius is finally implored to resume the crown, after each of the plotters has declined it in turn. The implied lesson on the evil results of rebellion, and the castigation of Prynne, in the person of Melancholico, a play-hating puritan, helped to recommend the play to the royal favour. Equally successful were the two dramas produced on the following day. One of these, Love's Hospitall, by George Wilde, fellow of St John's, was performed in the afternoon at that college at the expense of Laud, who, as chancellor of the university, was present to welcome the king and queen. The piece is an entertaining comedy of humours, in almost farcical vein, and is in no way characteristically academic. This is also true of William Cartwright's The Royall Slave', acted in the evening at Christ Church. An Ephesian captive, Cratander, in accordance with an old custom among the Persians, is granted for three days before his execution the full insignia and privileges of kingship. During this period, he displays such nobility of soul that heaven intervenes in his favour, and he is spared to become the wearer of a real crown. This theme is handled by Cartwright with genuine rhetorical effectiveness, and his drama was furnished with special scenic effects by Inigo Jones and incidental music by Lawes. So delighted was the queen with the performance that she afterwards borrowed the costumes and scenery for a repetition of the play by her own company at Hampton court. The academic stage was to number yet one more illustrious recruit in Cowley, whose Naufragium Joculare, based on classical sources, was acted at Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1638, and was followed in 1642 by his satirical comedy The Guardian, remodelled after the Restoration into Cutter of Coleman Street. But the royal visit to Oxford in 1636 marks the close of these elaborate university displays, which had begun with Elizabeth's coming to Cambridge in 1564. Even in the traditionally loyal community on the banks of the Isis, there were ominous symptoms of the rapidly growing resentment against the autocratic rule of Charles and Laud. As the king and queen rode away from Christ Church, the streets, according to custom, were lined with 'Scholers of all degrees,' but 'neither they nor the citizens made any expression of joy, nor uttered, as the manner is, Vivat Rex.' When Oxford, some seven years later, again opened its gates to Charles, it was not to entertain him with 'masques and triumphs,' but to afford him shelter in his stern conflict with his parliamentary foes. The civil war and the commonwealth mark a period of deep cleavage in English stage history. With the Restoration, came new men and new methods, and a forgetfulness of all but the greatest dramatists of 'the former age.' It was virtually 1 See, as to Cartwright's plays, ante, chap. Ix. Concluding Survey 327 the work of the nineteenth century to rediscover the lesser Elizabethan writers for the popular stage. The university drama, bilingual in utterance, and with its memorials not easy of access, has had to wait for yet tardier recognition. It had, of course, patent faults. It produced much that was artificial, amateurish and unduly imitative, and its moral standard was as unexacting as that of the London theatre of the day. But it had behind it truly formative influences, in the renascence ardour for classical lore and delight in pageantry, in the gownsmen's haughty resentment of the buffets of fortune to which they were exposed, and in the traditional hostility between scholars and townsmen by Isis and by Cam. Hence sprang that special type of Aristophanic comedy, unique in this period of the drama, represented by Pedantius and Ignoramus, Club Law and the Parnassus trilogy. And, in addition to these distinctively topical university plays, we owe to the academic stage a number of dramas moulded and coloured by the peculiar conditions of their origin. Such are the semi-Senecan plays on religious, historical and mythological subjects, like Archipropheta, Richardus Tertius and Ulysses Redux; comedies like Laelia and Hymenaeus; allegorical pieces like Lingua, Fucus and The Floating Island; pastorals like The Queenes Arcadia and Sicelides. In these and kindred productions, noted in this chapter or merely recorded as 'comedy' or 'tragedy' in college account-books, the university humanists preserved elements of classic and neo-classic culture which would otherwise have been almost entirely lost to the stage. From Oxford and Cambridge, these influences permeated to the capital. For, sharp as in general was the division, social and intellectual, between academic and professional playwrights, the latter and larger class was constantly being recruited from graduates who had gained their earliest dramatic experience as spectators, actors, or, in some cases, authors, of college 'shows.' The royal visits to the universities helped further to extend the range of influence of the amateur stage. And they did something more. Under the personal rule of the Tudors and Stewarts, the centre of national life was not fixed in Westminster, as at present; it moved with the movements of the sovereign. And thus, the university plays, as the principal magnet which drew Elizabeth, James and Charles with their courts to Oxford and Cambridge, performed a more important function than has been usually recognised. They helped materially for nearly a hundred years to keep the two seats of learning in contact with the throne, from which radiated, for good and for ill, the dominating forces of the age. CHAPTER XIII MASQUE AND PASTORAL THE Elizabethan drama, being without scenery and elaborate stage apparatus, made its appeal to the mind rather than to the eye, and used language as the main instrument by which the imagination of its audience was aroused and satisfied. This familiar fact goes far to explain the essentially intellectual character of the Elizabethan drama, and the wonderful literary power of the great dramatists. But we should misinterpret the facts very seriously if we allowed ourselves to suppose that the Elizabethan age was indifferent to the appeal of the eye, or to imagine that, because the Elizabethan playgoer was without the elaborate scenery and staging of the modern theatre, he was disdainful of spectacle, and unwilling to spend time and money on gorgeous shows in which the master art of pageantry combined music, singing, painting, dancing and architecture in united effort to charm and delight his senses. The Elizabethan, for all his intellectual energy, was intensely sensuous. In this respect, he represents the end of the Middle Ages rather than the beginning of modern times. We cannot here consider the meaning of that reaction against pageantry which was an important part of puritanism, but we may note that the modern student does not see the Elizabethan age as it saw itself; for he overlooks as childish those things which it most cared for. The drama meant, broadly, the introduction into popular entertainment of a new intellectual element, which gradually discredited pageantry, so that it ceased to be the art of the educated and refined. But, all through the Elizabethan age and until the closing of the theatres in 1642, masque and pageantry held their place in the public eye, and in the public interest, as the most important and honourable and magnificent of the arts. The masque at court and among the nobility, and the pageant among the citizens, were practised with an energy that, for the |