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‘To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had the variety of our vain disguises? As if we had not wit enough to be foolish unless we were taught it. These dresses, being constant in their mutability, show us our masters. What is it that we have not learned of our neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap? whom would it not vex to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks and monsters of themselves? Whence come their (absurd fashions); but the one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the worse-minded courtesans of Italy? Whence else learned they to daub these mud-walls with apothecaries’ mortar; and those high washes, which are so cunningly licked on that the wet napkin of Phryne should he deceived? Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their borrowed hair? As if they were ashamed of the head of God’s making, and proud of the tire-woman’s. Where learned we that devilish art and practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men? Where had we that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the nose is no less pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than either? wherein the piles of dishes make barricadoes against the appetite, and with a pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry guest. Where those forms of ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make gods of others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason while they pretend to do reason? Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a wild tongue, that runs, with reins on the neck, through the bedchambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness? Where the change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some few butterflies? Where the art of dishonesty in practical Machiavelism, in false equivocations? Where the slight account of that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as not unnecessary? Where the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy in those formal compliments which do neither expect belief from others nor carry any from ourselves? Where’ (and here Bishop Hall begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of matters notorious and undeniable.) ‘Where that close Atheism, which secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe, wisdom to profess any religion? Where the bloody and tragical science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation hath endangered the infection of our peace?’–Bishop Hall’s ‘Quo Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,’ vol xii. sect. 22.

Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since the beginning of the sixteenth century. However much truth there may be in the common assertion that the old ‘miracle plays’ and ‘mysteries’ were the parents of the English drama (as they certainly were of the Spanish and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much our stage owed, from its first rise under Elizabeth, to direct importations from Italy. This is merely thrown out as a suggestion; to establish the fact would require a wide acquaintance with the early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due weight. The names of the characters in most of our early regular comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes, are the manners, at least they profess to be so. Next, the plots of many of the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where others found poison) went to Cinthio for ‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for Measure,’ to Bandello for ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and to Boccaccio for ‘Cymbeline,’ there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to the same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these profligate writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts adultery into a virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a duty; which revels in the horrible as freely as any French novelist of the romantic school; and whose only value is its pitiless exposure of the profligacy of the Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be valuable which makes a mock equally of things truly and falsely sacred, and leaves on the reader’s mind the fear that the writer saw nothing in heaven or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self- sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.