Richard Baker’s defense of the theater. Rejecting William Prynne’s antitheatrical tract, Baker writes, “(What Puritans may do, I know not but) I verily think, scarce one Protestant will be found to take his part.”51 Here, Baker categorizes antitheatricalism as puritan. However, we should not simply reproduce this polemical conflation.52 Rather than maintaining a clear division between moderate Protestants who enjoy theater and radical puritans who reject it, Baker’s pamphlet itself blurs these distinctions by invoking the puritan Francis Walsingham’s support of plays: “Who hath not heard of Sir Francis Walsingham an Eminent Councellour in Queen ELIZABETH’S Time, famous for his … Piety in advancing the Gospel? yet this was the Man that procured the Queen to entertain Players for her Servants; and to give them Wages as in a just Vocation? And would he ever have done this, being so religious a Man, if he had thought plays to be prophane[?] … And now, me thinks, I have said enough in defence of Plays.”53 This paragraph opens the tract, framing Walsingham’s approval as the first and last word on the religious acceptability of plays. Baker presents Walsingham, who supported both the puritan cause and players, as a normative, nostalgic figure of Protestant piety, in order to position Prynne’s antitheatrical tract as “puritan” extremism. Curiously, Baker asserts Walsingham’s perfect Protestantism through positive terms of godly piety, emphasizing his commitment to an evangelical, preaching ministry (“advancing the Gospel”) and using a puritan-inflected idiom (“to give them Wages as in a just Vocation”). Baker’s appropriation of godly Walsingham against godly Prynne demonstrates the degree to which the distinction between puritan and Protestant was in the eye of the beholder, as well as the diversity of thought among the godly regarding theater.
English Protestantism encompassed a range of positions on the role of the visual and material in religious worship that did not neatly correspond to particular attitudes to theater. For example, Stephen Gosson’s 1582 tract Playes Confuted in Five Actions attacks theater with a hot Protestant aversion to images. Yet Gosson himself was a ceremonial conformist; he used the Book of Common Prayer, wore the surplice, and made the sign of the cross at baptism.54 The contrast between the puritan tone of Gosson’s tracts and the conforming style of his churchmanship demonstrates that attitudes to the visual in religious ceremony and in art did not always match. Some hot Protestants were iconophobic, but generalized antipathy to visual and material culture was far from standard among the godly. It is a mistake to think that people who strongly rejected “popery” in the English Church were therefore averse to plays, even when they made polemical connections between popish ceremony and theatrical artifice. To the contrary, the incriminating taint of theatrical popery could be used to advance a puritan agenda in ways that did not imply a wholesale rejection of plays themselves. For example, godly theatergoer and satirist Samuel Rowlands attacks the surplice by comparing it to a stage costume:
The gull gets on a surpliss
With a crosse upon his breast.
Like Allen playing Faustus,
In that manner was he drest.55
Rowlands uses the accusation of theatricality to raise a puritan objection to popish vestments, yet his memory of a specific costume, actor, and role suggests a pleasurable engagement with the play.56 Early modern London was not divided between prayer book Protestants, whose moderate views on ceremony enabled the uncomplicated enjoyment of dramatic spectacle, and precise extremists, whose zealous commitment to reformed worship precluded theatrical pleasure. In fact, it was possible for godly people to separate the negative association between theater and popery from their attitude toward actual plays.
The diary of theatergoer and puritan preacher Richard Madox demonstrates the ability of the godly to reject excessive materiality and spectacle in religious worship but still attend the theater. In 1582, Madox kept a journal of time spent in London while waiting to set sail as chaplain on a trade ship to the Moluccas, a position he received on the recommendation of that champion of puritan clergy, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and which the zealous Madox understood as an opportunity for evangelization.57 The London diary records both the details of a sermon, which “shewd … God is always with us and therefore we need no ymage,” and a trip to the playhouse. There is no indication in the diary of a sense of contradiction between attending a sermon against the use of images in worship and watching a play. In both entries, the preacher seems to be sightseeing. Madox writes, “We went to the theater to se a scurvie play set owt al by one virgin which there proved a fyemartin with owt voice so that we stayed not the matter.”58 Part of his description suggests possible moral disapprobation—the play is “scurvie.”59 But this remark is a far cry from the heated denunciations typical of antitheatrical polemic, and we should not extrapolate from it a general antipathy to theater because of Madox’s religious orientation. Furthermore, the reason Madox gives for leaving the play is not moral but aesthetic, the performer’s being “with owt voice.” The description of the player as a “fyemartin,” or “freemartin”—a sterile female calf with partly male anatomy—may refer not so much to the actor’s transvestism as to the vocal failure of a boy player going through puberty.60 In any case, Madox’s disappointment itself shows the expectation of pleasure.
Madox and Rowlands were not the only puritans who enjoyed theater. In practice, the godly attended plays alongside their less zealous neighbors. Butler has already demonstrated the substantial presence of puritans in late Caroline playhouses such as Blackfriars. These playgoing puritans included Sir Thomas Barrington, who supported nonconforming clergy; Sir Thomas Lucy, who was praised for godly piety; and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, whose religious devotion is celebrated in a biography by the puritan divine Samuel Clark. Godly Bulstrode Whitelock was such a habitué of Blackfriars that the house musicians struck up a tune he had written whenever he walked through the door. Sir Edward Dering, who as member of Parliament introduced the Root and Branch Bill proposing the abolition of the episcopacy, also frequented the theater—even on the Sabbath. That Butler can locate these godly individuals in the privileged audiences of the Caroline playhouses demonstrates both how embedded puritanism was within the English establishment and “how false it is to conceive of puritan feeling as being in a state of intransigent hostility towards the theatres in the 1630s.”61
Other playgoing puritans further demonstrate that a zealous commitment to reform in Church worship did not necessitate a rejection of theatrical spectacle. In a 1659 speech to Parliament, godly moderate Henry Cromwell (son of Oliver) compares his own political fortunes to the temporary elevation of the clown Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, recalling the performance in detail and without disapprobation.62 Theatergoer and later parliamentarian army officer Captain Charles Essex kept a nonconformist chaplain.63 Moderate puritan Richard Newdigate frequented both godly sermons and Jacobean playhouses.64 Sir Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, attended plays in the public theaters in the 1610s and later supported the separatists who decamped to Massachusetts.65 His brother Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, took in Henry VIII at the Globe in 1628, while part of a puritan court faction.66 Rich’s unlicensed chaplain, John Smith, a man who mocked Laudian bishop (and fellow playgoer) Richard Corbett’s inability to preach, declared in 1633 “that he loved the company of players above all, and that he thought there might be as much good many times done by a man hearing a play as in hearing a sermon.”67 Not all puritans perceived a conflict between their religious beliefs and enthusiasm for plays.
Godliness was an ongoing process. People’s religious leanings and attitudes to theater were subject to alteration. While he did ultimately reject theater, the puritan diarist Richard Norwood also describes an earlier period of his life when he felt the alternating pulls of religious fervor and worldly attractions such as plays. Like many in the period, Norwood’s religious life was full of change. However, Norwood’s later convictions do not negate his previous experience of wavering between godly piety and the appeal of the stage.68 The former puritan
