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Selections from William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix (1633)

A Critical Introduction and Annotated Edition

by Sarah MacLeod, University of British Columbia-Okanagan

The Dangers of Men in Women’s Roles on the Renaissance Stage:

An Analysis of William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix

I. Biography of William Prynne (1600-1669)[1]

William Prynne was a Renaissance “pamphleteer and lawyer,” who “was born in Upper Swainswick, Somerset.” His father, Thomas Prynne, was a farmer, and his mother, Marie was the daughter of William Sherston, “the first mayor of Bath under Elizabeth I’s charter.” Prynne “attended Bath grammar school” in 1612 and went to Oriel College in 1616. In January of 1621 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts,“and was admitted as a student of Lincoln’s Inn in the same year.” Prynne was “called to the bar in 1628, and by then had produced the first of his more than two hundred pamphlets” (William Lamont).

His most famous work remainsHistrio-mastix (1633), a more than one thousand page argument for the closure of the theatres. In it, Prynne attacked actresses, arguing that having women actors on stage would lead them and their audience to whoredom. The denunciation was often seen as one against Queen Henrietta Maria as she was participating in a court masque at the time of the work’s publication. As a direct result of the publication of Histrio-mastix, Prynne was tried in 1633 for sedition (Lamont). Prynne argued in his defence that the pamphlet had been in the works for many years,“and [that] it had been published a month before the queen’s performance” (Lamont). However, it was also noted that “[he] had inserted additional criticisms of female actors in an appendix while Henrietta Maria was rehearsing for the event” (Lamont). The Star Chamber was unconvinced and “he was . . . found guilty of sedition, sentenced to have his ears cut off, fined £5000, and sentenced to life imprisonment” (Lamont).

Imprisonment, however, did not stop his pamphlets from being smuggled out and reaching the streets. In 1637, he was tried on a second count of sedition and found guiltyonce again (Lamont). As his ears only received a trim the first time around, Prynne was sentenced to having his ears fully removed. In addition, “[Prynne’s] nose was slit, and the initials S.L [“Seditious Libeller”] burnt into his cheeks” (Lamont). Despite his punishment, Prynne’s spirit was unbroken. In A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641), he stated, “The more I am beat down, the more am I lifted up” (Lamont). He was released from the Tower of London in 1640 by the Long Parliament.

Prynne was a determined critic of the Church of England under Archbishop Laud, particularly because of Laud’s emphasis on ceremony, ritual and the powers of bishops, all of which struck Prynne and others as smacking of a return to Roman Catholicism: “Throughout his writings in the 1630s, Prynne assailed Laudianism as a betrayal of his sentimentalized perception of what the Elizabethan church had been” (Lamont). However,“in 1641, he lost faith in [the] non-Laudian bishops” he had initially championed (Lamont). In the same year, one of these non-Laudian bishops, Joseph Hall, defended the “divine right episcopacy,” a position also adopted by Laud (Lamont). In response to this apparent betrayal of early Elizabethan Protestantism, Prynne became violently opposed to bishops in general: “inThe Antipathie (1641) . . . [Prynne] attacked all bishops, . . . argu[ing] for a “’root and branch’ destruction of episcopacy” (Lamont).

During the 1640s, Prynne often wrote scathing critiques of King Charles I, includinga “bitter, personal attack upon[the king]” called Popish Royall Favourite (1643). He and fellow Puritans believed that the civil war originated because Charles I “had secretly commissioned the Irish rebels of October 1641” (Lamont). However, he was strongly against Pride’s Purge of Parliament, and the trial and beheading of the king, which he argued “were all . . . part of an orchestrated ‘popish plot’” (Lamont). After the beheading of the king, Prynne changed his tune about Charles I and saw him as a martyr of the Church of England; in fact, “[he] reverted to the royalism of his earlier years, maintaining that he had been consistent even in the period from 1642 to 1649, since (in his view) it was Charles I, not himself, who had lapsed from his imperial principles” (Lamont).

During the civil war, “Prynne opposed both Calvinist Independency and presbyterianism” (Lamont). In 1644, he argued that Independency was an “anti-social force which denied man’s dependence upon his neighbours, church and country for the fulfilment of his nature” (Lamont). After the beheading of the “Martyr King,” Prynne was imprisoned, once again, for three years “for opposing the Commonwealth” (Lamont).

Charles II noted Prynne’s support of the royalist cause during the interregnum and “recognized Prynne’s worth” (Lamont). Although some were suspicious of Prynne’s royalist credentials, he did quite well after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660: hebecame MP for Bath during the Convention Parliament and the Cavalier Parliament, recorder of Bath, as well as “the “keeper of the records in the Tower of London,” a position to which he was appointed by the king himself (Lamont). This royal patronage, however, did not deter Prynne from writing and publishing tracts attacking his favourite targets: public immorality, particularly fighting and drunkenness. Prynne also continued to attack the non-puritan court, but always added to his criticisms “professions of loyalty to Charles II” (Lamont). For example, “in the introduction to the fourth volume [ofAn Exact Chronologiacall Vindication... of our Kings Supreme Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction,]”Prynne argued that “the king was God’s viceroy to implement his rule on earth; the distinction between church and state is a popish invention; [and] all church power derived its authority from the crown” (Lamont). His dedication to the Crown went hand-in-hand with his attacks on religious outsiders and home-grown English sectarian groups: in his later years, Prynne continued to oppose the “readmission of Jews into England,” believed the Quakers to be “masked papists,” and “blamed the great fire of London on the papists” (Lamont). When a Laudian revival loomed,however, he did not advocate his violent “‘root and branch’ principles of 1641-45,” but rather “revert[ed] to his moderate episcopalianism of 1628 to 1640” (Lamont).

Many of Prynne’s contemporaries did not think highly of him. One stated that his arguments, although superficial, “take with the people” (Lamont). His public writings, howver, offer modern critics valuable eye-witness commentary on contemporary events (Lamont). He was “never married . . . but [somewhat jokingly] support[ed] . . . measures to punish women who refused to cohabit with their husbands” (Lamont). After his death, his brother Thomas and sister Katherine Clarke were executors of his will. His private papers have not been recovered to this day (Lamont).

II. Summary of Histrio-mastix: Actus 5, Scena Sexta

Histrio-mastix is a 1006 page argument for the closure of the theatres. “Actus 5, Scena Sexta” focuses on the dangers involved in acting and watching plays, that such activities threatened to make male actors and spectators alike effeminate; because women were barred from performing on the Renaissance stage, male actors dressed in female costumes to play the women’s roles. Prynne argues that plays are unlawful and “abominable unto men” specifically because of the “apparell in which they are acted, which is first of all womanish and effeminate, belonging properly to the female sex” (178). He states that men who act women’s roles in women’s costumes “must needs be sinfull, yea, abominable unto Christians” (179).

Prynne makes many references to Deuteronomy 22.5: “The women shall not weare that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so, are abomination to the Lord thy God” (179). To those who believe that this passage refers only to those who wear the women’s clothing“from day to day; or to those who put it on with a lewd intent..; or to satisfy their lusts,” and excludes those who only occasionally wear the clothes to act in a play or save their lives in some extreme circumstance, Prynne maintains that they are wrong. He states that this passage is for all who dress in the clothes of the opposite sex at one point or another, no matter what the reason is. Prynne adds that “rareity adds nothing to its lawfulnesse” (182). As God has left no exceptions, those who dress in the opposite sex’s clothing to save their lives are still abominable.

Prynne refers to Philo’s statement that men should never wear women’s garments in case “the shadow or footsteps of effeminacy, should stamp some blemish on the masculine sex” (186). Clemens Alexandrinus argues that the Deuteronomic law exists because God “would have us to be men, and not to be effeminate neither in body, nor in deeds, nor in minde, nor in words” (187). As men playing women’s characters are seen as most effeminate, they act against the teachings of the Bible and are thus, abominable. Prynne adds, “Men’s putting on of woman’s raiment is a temptation, an inducement not only to adultery, but to the beastly sin of Sodomy, which... is most properly called adultery, because it is unnaturall” (212).

To further his argument, he refers to a number of “Pagans” who believe it wrong for men to dress as women. He adds, “If men in women’s apparel be thus execrable unto Pagans, how much more detestable should they be to Christians, who are taught not only by the light of nature, but of the Gospel too, to hate such beastly male-monsters in the shapes of women?” (200). Prynne concludes with the argument that it would not be better, or worse, for women to play female parts on stage,since neither female actors nor male actors playing women’s roles should be tolerated: “[B]oth of them are abominable both intolerable, neither of them laudable or necessary” (216).

III. The Dangers of Theatre in the Renaissance

During the Renaissance going to the theatre was a popular recreation. For playwrights, the stage was a useful venue for political, social and cultural commentary and a place to introduce new ideas to the public. It is, then, not surprising that the theatre had a number of critics that argued that the stage was dangerous. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Puritans were just such a loud and forceful anti-theatrical lobby. Edmund Morgan states that the “longest, most bitter, and most effective attacks on the theatre came from English Puritans, or at least from Englishmen living in the age of Puritanism” (Morgan 340). Numerous pamphlets were written against theatre in an attempt to close it down. This “literature of denunciation” was influential and “reached its culmination in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix in 1633” (340). Although,according to Morgan, Prynne writes that it is perfectly fine to read plays for recreation (341), he still believes that it is dangerous to participate in them as an actor or an audience member. The Puritan fear of the theatre was telling. Many twentieth-century critics have argued that this fear was part of a wider anxiety about the nature of identity. Puritans feared the theatre, because they feared that people’s identities were unstable, and they saw the theatre as revealing and producing this instability and a terrifying, monstrous transformation of the self; they saw the theatre as so powerful that people mimicked what they saw, and what they saw on the stage was men playing women’s parts.

In “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” Phyllis Rackin states that the term “gender roles” implies that“gender is a kind of act for all women, not only for actresses and not only for boys pretending to be women” (Rackin 29). As “gender roles” can be applied to men as well, it is not just women who are acting as women, but men as men. When men play women’s roles there is an erasure, or at least a fear of erasure, of the actor’s ability not just to play and establish a masculine role, but to ‘be’ a man at all. Like Rackin, Laura Levine recognizes Renaissance fears concerning the dangers inherent in this role playing of the sexes. In Men in Women’s Clothing, Levine states:

. . . [m]en are only men in the performance of their masculinity (or, put more frighteningly, that they are not men except in the performance, the constant re-enactment of their masculinity) –or... that they have no way of knowing they are men except in the re-enactment, the relentless re-enactment, of their own masculinity. (Levin 7)

Similarly, Judith Butler argues that the “’gendered body’ has no ‘ontological status’ at all except for these series of actions and performances that create the idea of gender. For Butler this is a liberating possibility precisely because it is in the failure to repeat these acts (as well as in parody) that the possibility for gender transformation exists” (8). It is easy to see, then, why cross-gendered theatrical role-playing generated such anxiety and fear. If a man played a woman’s role, this actor was not reinforcing his masculinity---proving to himself and others that he is a man---but instead is compromising the whole concept of a stable masculine identity. During a time in which the only true human was man, when women and homosexuals (‘sodomites’ to use the dominant Renaissance term for men who had sexual relations with other men) were seen as inferior, it would have been very important for men to continuously reinforce the idea that they were masculine and still deserved to remain superior to these‘lesser’ beings. The idea that gender or sex is fluid would have been frightening, as it threatens men’s dominant role. It also opens up the question of whether men contain in themselves that which they find so abhorrent in the ‘other’ (the sodomite and the woman).

Plays like John Lyly’s Gallathea (1587) and Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night seem to draw attention to the idea that “gender is, above all, a social construct, arbitrary and varying from one society to another, related to sex but not identical with it” (Rackin 30). Lyly’s Gallathea is about two girls, “disguised as boys, [who] fall in love with each other. When their true sex is revealed, the possibility of their marriage seems to be precluded” (30). However, the gods decide to intervene and they agree to change one of the girls (it is unknown which one) into a boy. Neither girl cares if it is she or her lover whose gender is to be transformed (Rackin 30). The two girls in Gallathea, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night are all able to cross the borders of gender and be accepted as either sex in society. In fact, “Shakespeare emphasizes the attractiveness of his transvestite heroines, to other women as well as to the men they love” (36). This gender fluidity and the desires it permits particularly horrified the Puritans. Prynne stresses over and over again that men should never wear women’s clothes and vice versa, under any circumstances: “It is again a most abominable thing for women to become men... and to wear that apparell of a man” (188). He also repeatedly calls such cross-dressing “unnaturall” (200) and “effeminate” (206). This repetition in Prynne’s work seems to parallel that which Butler and Rackin speak of. Prynne’s repetition seems to be an attempt to establish (or re-establish) the division of the two sexes. By doing so, he (and his fellow anti-theatrical critics) try to hold on to their age’s conventional sexual and gender hierarchy.

In an attempt to maintain this hierarchy, Prynne continuously calls those who cross-dress “monsters of nature” (as he does those cross-dressers of the classical past: Elagabalus, Sporus, Nero, and Caligula) (Prynne 200), and “abominations” (as he does all men who dress in women’s garments). Levine states that Prynne “described a man whom women’s clothing had literally caused to ‘degenerate’ into a woman” (Levine 10). Prynne sees woman as being so below man that in order to become woman a man must degenerate, diminish in quality. The same result occurs when a man becomes effeminate; he diminishes in quality in order to take on the natural actions and likeness of a woman. The Puritans believed that theatre could cause men to become effeminate. However, there is no mention of being able to undo the monstrous transformation that has occurred. Levine argues that the self (as the people of the Renaissance saw it) “can . . . be altered [but only] by . . . malevolent forces outside its control” (Levine 12). Anti-theatricalistsheld the view that “the self was both inherently monstrous and inherently nothing at all” (12). Therefore, a “male actor, dressed in woman’s clothing, seemed to lack an inherent gender, and this seemed to make him monstrous” (12).

Perhaps this is why Prynne and other anti-theatricalists also represent sodomites as unnatural and monstrous, since theyare also perceived as lackinga visible and distinct inherent gender. As Prynne’s repeated and anxious attacks show, the anti-theatricalists generally like to have clear, visible gender borders, with no blurred lines. Borders allow them to believe that their own identity is solid and unchangeable. However, the representation of female characters by male actors suggests that gender borders are as fluid as water, and gender can take the shape of whatever clothing it is put into. Thus, the anti-theatricalists use strong and repeated attacks to convince themselves that this fluidity is unnatural and evil, something like magic (Levine 12-13).