* * * *

Let us pass on. Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit?

There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here,
and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible.
The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy's expense, in 'Bartholomew
Fair,' turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women's parts acted by
boys. Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of
puppets instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked
nevertheless. What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans
is hard to conceive. Prynne, in his 'Histriomastix,' may have pushed
a little too far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the
Mosaic law: yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by
Moses' law, not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which
did harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that,
therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day a
similar practice would produce a similar evil. Our firm conviction
is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne was
perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player was pretty
certainly to send him to the devil. Let any man of common sense
imagine to himself the effect on a young boy's mind which would be
produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience not
merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in
almost every play. We appeal to common sense--would any father allow
his own children to personate, even in private, the basest of
mankind? And yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be
supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons
to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while