The irony o f the attack on theatre and masquerades was that the stereotypes and characterisations rehed upon by zealous Calvinist physicians to make their point, were forged in the plays o f Marlowe and Webster, played-out in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres, and popularised still further by the ‘Multitude o f idle and superfluous pam phlets’ that they the Calvinist physicians disapproved o f so much.^^ Authors o f such works rarely made the distinctions that Galenist physicians tried so hard to enforce. They preferred instead to laugh at the very nature o f these distinctions. John Earle (1601P-65), in his series o f characterisations, portrayed the physician in the following way.
H e is distinguisht from an E/^pericke by a round velvet cap, and D octors gowne, yet no man takes degrees more superfluously, for he is a D octor how soever. H e is swarne to Gakfj and Hypocrates, as University m en to their statutes, though they never saw them, and his discourse is all Aphorismes, though his reading be only Alexis o f piedmont, or the Regiment of Health.
Characterisations such as this were not unique to cheap print. They were a com mon feature o f the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century fascination with hum an types and human failings. The roots o f this are tangled and widespread. They can be found in medieval writings on virtue and vice and in renderings o f the seven deadly sins. They are a feature o f the Renaissance revival o f Greek physiognomic texts such as Theophrastus’
Characters in which superstitious people are characterised by their raving and by their
frequent visits to soothsayers and diviners — a stock theme in Galenist attacks on popular medicine, and one which would also be present in eighteenth-century descriptions o f
<>7 James Hart, KAINIKH , p.l
<58 John Earle, Micro-Cosmographie or, A Piece of the World Discovered, (London: Methuen, 1904 reprinted from the 1633 edition), Sig. C.
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‘enthusiasm’.^^ Finally, they are part o f the popularisation o f Roman satire and rhetoric.^®
The function o f these works was pedagogic. By juxtaposing different character types - the virtuous with the profane, the superstitious with the devout, constancy with indifference — texts such as Nicholas Breton’s The Good and the Badde, or, Descriptions of the Worthies, and Ynworthies of this Age. Where the best may see their graces and the worst discerne their
basenesse (1616) provided terse moral lessons in a m anner that was com m on to sermons
and moralising broadsheets. Laid out as emblem books or com monplace books they also served to teach children the art o f rhetoric by supplying ready portraits o f different character types (which were often com pared to animals) as well as m etaphors, similes, or apt phrases.^^
Character books were part o f the literature o f estates. They provided a taxonomy o f man in which the shortcomings o f each type was highlighted. This said, certain faults were com m on to all. W orks such as Bishop Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiamm (1597-8), and later, Richard Flecknoe’s Collection of the choicest Epigrams and Characters (1673) criticised physicians for their avarice while the courtier Sit Thom as Overbury laughed at the presum ption o f the almanac maker noting that ‘any old shepheard shall make a dunce out o f him ’.^2 Superstition and profanity were traps into which the m ost learned could fall. As Hall noted in his portrait o f the profane man, ‘Appetite is his Lord, and Reason is his servant, and Religion is his drudge. Sense is the rule o f his beleefe; and if Pietie may be an advantage bee can at once counterfeit and deride it.’ Early m odern England was a hierarchical society in which those at the top were expected to set an example to those beneath them. Profanity, superstition, and vulgarity were all the worse if they came from ‘Statistes and Politicians’. As Thom as Browne noted in Pseudodoxia Epidemica,
Theophrastus, Characters, Loeb Classics (London: William Heinemann, 1967), pp.78-83; J.W. Smeed, The Theophrastan Character*. The Histoiy of a Uterary Genre, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p.35. As Smeed notes, heavy layers of Christian morality present in early modem character texts makes the direct influence of Theophrastus difficult to discern. For example, Theophrastus’ ideal, the happy man, is replaced by a wise man in Joseph Hall’s Characters of
Virtues and Vices, (1608)
Smeed, pp.11-12. The works of Horace and Martial were popularised in Henry Hutton,
Follie's Anatomie: or, Satyres and Satyricall Epigrams. With a Compendious Histoiy of Ixion's Wheele.,
(1619) Smeed, p.9
Edward F. Rimbault (ed.). The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Sir Thomas Overbuy,
C h ap ter 1
...whosoever shall resigne their reasons, either from the root o f deceit in themselves, or inabilitie to resist such triviall deceptions from others, although their condition and fortunes may place them many Spheres above the multitude, yet they are still within the line o f vulgaritie, and Democraticall enemies o f truth.^^
Browne had expressed this view ten years earlier in Religio Medici (1635). There was he noted,
...a rabble amongst the Gentry, a sort o f Plebeian heads whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these; m en in the same Level with Mechanicks, though their fortunes do somewhat guild their infirmities, and their purses com pound their follies.
Writing in a m anner typical o f contemporary attacks on worldly goods and vanity, Browne attacked the ‘corruption’ o f his times, and looked to a ‘Nobility without Heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another, another filed before him, according to the quality o f his D esert [i.e. his merit], and the pre-eminence o f his good parts.’^'* This may have been wishful thinking, but Browne, though in no way friendly to the ‘vulgar’ as a group at the bottom o f the social ladder, recognised that \nilgarity encompassed others who, as result o f birth and monetary wealth, were raised above the com m on people. In this sense, some o f Browne’s opinions would be mirrored in the early autobiographical works o f Robert Boyle and it is n ot without coincidence that Boyle probably read the Keligio Medici sometime before he began writing in the late 1640s. Boyle reacted negatively to what he saw as the vanity and wastefulness o f his brother Francis considering it as an offence to Christian ethics and a breach o f the gentlemanly code. As Boyle’s later medical writings would show, both he and Browne were aware that authority and position brought with them an obligation not to deceive people with errors and that this obligation had n ot always been fulfilled in the past.^^