This stage persecution, which began in the reign of Elizabeth, had been necessarily resented by the theatrical people, and the fanatics were really objects too tempting for the traders in wit and satire to pass by.  They had made themselves very marketable; and the puritans, changing their character with the times, from Elizabeth to Charles the First, were often the Tartuffes of the stage.[152] But when they became the government itself, in 1642, all the theatres were suppressed, because “stage-plaies do not suit with seasons of humiliation; but fasting and praying have been found very effectual.”  This was but a mild cant, and the suppression, at first, was only to be temporary.  But as they gained strength, the hypocrite, who had at first only struck a gentle blow at the theatre, with redoubled vengeance buried it in its own ruins.  Alexander Brome, in his verses on Richard Brome’s Comedies, discloses the secret motive:—­

                      ——­’Tis worth our note,
    Bishops and players, both suffer’d in one vote: 
    And reason good, for they had cause to fear them;
    One did suppress their schisms, and t’other JEER THEM. 
    Bishops were guiltiest, for they swell’d with riches;
    T’other had nought but verses, songs and speeches,
    And by their ruin, the state did no more
    But rob the spittle, and unrag the poor.

They poured forth the long-suppressed bitterness of their souls six years afterwards, in their ordinance of 1648, for “the suppression of all stage-plaies, and for the taking down all their boxes, stages, and seats whatsoever, that so there might be no more plaies acted.”  “Those proud parroting players” are described as “a sort of superbious ruffians; and, because sometimes the asses are clothed in lions’ skins, the dolts imagine themselves somebody, and walke in as great state as Caesar.”  This ordinance against “boxes, stages, and seats,” was, without a metaphor, a war of extermination.  They passed their ploughshare over the land of the drama, and sowed it with their salt; and the spirit which raged in the governing powers appeared in the deed of one of their followers.  When an actor had honourably surrendered himself in battle to this spurious “saint,” he exclaimed, “Cursed be he who doth the work of the Lord negligently,” and shot his prisoner because he was an actor!

We find some account of the dispersed actors in that curious morsel of “Historica Histrionica,” preserved in the twelfth volume of Dodsley’s Old Plays; full of the traditional history of the theatre, which the writer appears to have gleaned from the reminiscences of the old cavalier, his father.

The actors were “Malignants” to a man, if we except that “wretched actor,” as Mr. Gifford distinguishes him, who was, however, only such for his politics:  and he pleaded hard for his treason, that he really was a presbyterian, although an actor.  Of these men, who had lived in the sunshine of a court, and amidst taste and criticism, many perished in the field, from their affection for their royal master.  Some sought humble occupations; and not a few, who, by habits long indulged, and their own turn of mind, had hands too delicate to put to work, attempted often to entertain secret audiences, and were often dragged to prison.