Plays and Puritans

Plays and Puritans is a long essay by Charles Kingsley, originally published in the North British Review in 1856 and later collected in his Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays. Kingsley, the Victorian novelist, social reformer, and Anglican clergyman, was writing in defence of the seventeenth century English Puritans at a time when both their religious seriousness and their general cultural austerity were out of fashion among educated English readers.

The essay is partly a literary critical piece on the Caroline drama, the theater of the period between the closing of the playhouses in 1642 and the Restoration in 1660. Kingsley takes a position that surprised some readers of his other work. He argues that the late Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, which most Victorian readers were taught to admire, had become by the early Caroline period a coarse and morally indifferent enterprise that the Puritans were not wrong to oppose. He works through specific plays and playwrights, picking out passages that supported his case, and makes the broader argument that the Puritan opposition to the stage was a defensible response to a real cultural decline.

The second part of the essay is a wider defence of the Puritans as a religious and political movement. Kingsley argues that the standard Victorian picture of the Puritans as joyless and narrow was unfair and that the actual Puritan culture had real depth, moral seriousness, and even its own kinds of pleasure. He uses examples from Puritan letters, sermons, and family papers to make the point. The essay reflects his own complicated religious position as a Broad Church Anglican clergyman who was sympathetic to certain Puritan virtues even though he had no patience with their theology.

The essay is short, around eighty pages in the typical printing, and reads as a single long argument. For readers interested in Victorian responses to seventeenth century English history and culture, it is one of the more lively pieces of the period. It pairs naturally with Macaulay’s History of England and with Thomas Carlyle’s edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches, both of which Kingsley was responding to in his own way.