Cambridge and its history : with sixteen illustrations in colour by Maxwell Armfield, and sixteen other illustrations . n as the College spokesman was a recognitionof his superior learning and poetical abilities. Inlater life when he was taunted with an un-Puritanicaladdiction to theatres, he dismissed the charge with agratuitous jibe at the stage performances of which hewas a spectator in college days. Many young divines, and those of next aptitude in divinity,have been seen oft in the colleges upon the stage, writhing andunboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gesturesof T
Cambridge and its history : with sixteen illustrations in colour by Maxwell Armfield, and sixteen other illustrations . n as the College spokesman was a recognitionof his superior learning and poetical abilities. Inlater life when he was taunted with an un-Puritanicaladdiction to theatres, he dismissed the charge with agratuitous jibe at the stage performances of which hewas a spectator in college days. Many young divines, and those of next aptitude in divinity,have been seen oft in the colleges upon the stage, writhing andunboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gesturesof Trinculos, buffoons and bawds, prostituting the shame of thatministry, which eitlier they had or were nigh having, to the eyes ofcourtiers and court-ladies, with their grooms and , while they acted and overacted, among other young scholarsI was a spectator : they thought themselves gallant men, and Ithought them fools : they made sport, and I laughed : theymispronounced, and I misliked : and, to make up the Atticism,they were out, and I hissed. The disclaimer was perhaps a little disingenuous, if. MILTON AND THE COMMONWEALTH 197 it suggested a disparagement of Shakespeare. Howthe 3oung candidate for ordination was magnetisedby the genius of Shakespeare we know from the hneswhich he wrote, t\\ o years after his degree, in prefaceto the second FoHo edition of the plays, from the re-curring echoes of his master in Comus, and the directallusion in LAllegro. But what Milton condemnedwas not Shakespeares comedy but the badness of theacting and the impropriety of the performance of it byclerical actors before an audience of courtiers andladies. His words seem to imply that The Tempestwas acted on some state occasion when he was a youngscholar. The King and Queen visited the Universityin 1632, just before Milton took his degree andleft Cambridge. On that occasion two comedies wereperformed in their presence, The Rival Friends, byHausted, a fellow of Queens, and T
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