to show that an
institution which in England made possible the drama of Shakespeare,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Jonson and Dekkar, writings which
we still point to with pride as our chief contribution to the creative
literature of the world, could include abuses so flagrant as to call
forth the stern denunciations of a Cromwell, and later even shock the
decidedly easy standards of a Pepys. The religious element in society
was, at intervals, to break out against the stage from pulpit or through
the pen, in historical iteration of this early attitude; as with Collier
in his famed attack upon its immorality at the close of the seventeenth
century, and numerous more modern diatribes from such clergymen as
Spurgeon and Buckley.

And in order to understand the peculiar relation of the respectable
classes in America to the theater, it is necessary to realize that those
cherishing this antipathy were our forefathers, the Puritan settlers.
The attitude was inimical, and of course the circumstances were all
against a proper development of the function of the playhouse. Art and
letters upon American soil, forsooth, had to await their day in the
seventeenth and following centuries, when our ancestors had to give
their full strength to more utilitarian matters, or to the grave demands
of the future life. The Anglo-Saxon notion that the theater is evil is
to be traced directly to these historic causes; and transplanted to so
favorable a soil as America, it has produced most unfortunate results in
our dramatic history, the worst of all being the general unenlightened
view respecting the use and usufruct of an institution in its nature
capable of so much good alike to the masses and the classes.

CHAPTER IV

GROWTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Preparedness in the appreciation of a modern play presupposes a
knowledge of the origin and early development of English drama, as
briefly sketched in the preceding pages. It also, and more obviously,
involves some acquaintance with the master dramatists who led up to or
flourished in the Elizabethan period, with Shakespeare as the central
figure; it must, too, be cognizant of the gradual deterioration of the
product in the post-Elizabethan time; of the temporary close of the
public theaters under Puritan influence during the Commonwealth; and of
the substitution for the mighty poetry of Shakespeare and his mates of
the corrupt Restoration comedy which was introduced into Eng