to enjoy the favour or good-will of the court, although a close
supervision was exercised over all attempts to make the stage the
vehicle of political references or allusions. The regular official agent
of this supervision was the master of the revels; but under James I. a
special ordinance, in harmony with the king's ideas concerning the
dignity of the throne, was passed "against representing any modern
Christian king in plays on the stage." The theatre could hardly expect
to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state
denied to the public at large; and occasional attempts to indulge in the
freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less
decisive repression and punishment.[204] But the sympathies of the
dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court that the real
difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a
directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of
hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the population, well
represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility
found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the
Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the
representation of stage-plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and
during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily
suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced
type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war
between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and-death
kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest
attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts,
caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up
a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and
of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling
of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,[205] though he
cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and
coarsest expressions,[206] rose into a spirit of open defiance in some
of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;[207] and the comedies of his
contemporaries and successors[208] abound in caricatured reproductions
of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the
other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of
ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by re