Page "William Prynne" Paragraph 3

Like many Puritans abhorring decadent celebrations he was strongly opposed to religious feast days, including Christmas, and revelry such as stage plays, and he included in his Histriomastix ( 1632 ) a denunciation of actresses which was widely felt to be an attack of Queen Henrietta Maria.

This led to the most famous incidents in his life, but the timing was accidental.

About 1624 Prynne had begun a book against stage-plays ; on 31 May 1630 he obtained a license to print it, and about November 1632 it was published.

Histriomastix is a volume of over a thousand pages, showing that plays were unlawful, incentives to immorality, and condemned by the scriptures, the fathers, modern Christian writers, and the wisest of the heathen philosophers.

By happenstance, the queen and her ladies, in January 1633, took part in the performance of Walter Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise: this was an innovation at court.

A passage reflecting on the character of female actors in general was construed as an aspersion on the queen ; passages which attacked the spectators of plays and magistrates who failed to suppress them, pointed by references to Nero and other tyrants, were taken as attacks on the king, Charles I.