Note 828 — VIII HUMANISM AND PURITANISM

Divers persons were slain and others hurt and wounded in an attempt to pull down the Cockpit in Drury Lane on Shrove Tuesday 1617 (M. S. C. i. 374); cf. Camden, Annales (4 March 1617), 'Theatrum ludionum nuper erectum in Drury-Lane a furente multitudine diruitur, et apparatus dilaceratur'; John Taylor, Jack a Lent (1620, ed. Hindley), 'Put play houses to the sack and bawdy houses to the spoil'; The Owles Almanack (1618), 9, 'Shroue-tuesday falls on that day, on which the prentices plucked downe the cocke-pit, and on which they did alwayes vse to rifle Madam Leakes house, at the vpper end of Shorditch'. This was not Puritanism, but a traditional Saturnalia of apprentices at Shrovetide; cf. Earle, Microcosmography, char. 64 (A Player), 'Shrove-tuesday he feares as much as the bawdes'; Busino, Anglopotrida (1618, V. P. xv. 246), describing the bands of prentices, 3,000 or 4,000 strong, who on Shrove Tuesday and 1 May do outrages in all directions, especially the suburbs, where they destroy houses of correction; E. Gayton, Festivous Notes upon Don Quixote (1654), 271, 'I have known upon one of these festivals, but especially at Shrove-tide, where the players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bills to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to. Sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurtha, sometimes The Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these; and at last, none of the three taking, they were forced to undress and put off their tragick habits, and conclude the day with The Merry Milkmaides. And unless this were done, and the popular humour satisfied (as sometimes it so fortun'd that the players were refractory), the benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally; and as there were mechanicks of all professions, who fell every one to his trade, and dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruin of a stately fabric'.