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Updated: May 7, 2025
It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and had his ears cut off, and become one of the chief causes of our great civil wars, all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book containing more than a thousand. It was as far down in his very index as W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio-Mastix was found, under the head "Women actors."
Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his tract, The Unloveliness of Lovelocks, attacked the stage, in 1633, with Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge; an offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped.
The calamitous discovery of the sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible.
The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had.
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