On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,[205] though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions,[206] rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;[207] and the comedies of his contemporaries and successors[208] abound in caricatured reproductions of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the diversions of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Puritan opposition to all and any stage plays. A patient endeavour to reform instead of suppressing the drama was not to be looked for from such adversaries, should they ever possess the means of carrying out their views; and whenever Puritanism should victoriously assert itself in the state, the stage was doomed. Among the attacks directed against it in its careless heyday of prosperity Prynne's _Histrio-Mastix_ (1632), while it involved its author in shamefully cruel persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone of the dramatic literature of the subsequent period; but the quarrel between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep to end in any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of its protectors. The Civil War began in August 1642; and early in the following month was published the ordinance of the Lords and Commons, which, after a brief and solemn preamble, commanded "that while these sad causes and set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne." Many actors and playwrights followed the fortunes of the royal cause in the field; some may have gone into a more or less voluntary exile; upon those who lingered on in the familiar haunts the hand of power lay heavy; and, though there seems reason to believe that dramatic entertainments of one kind or another continued to be occasionally presented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to magistrates against any players found engaged in such proceedings (1647), and bade them treat all stage-players as rogues, and pull down all stage galleries, seats and boxes (1648). A few dramatic works were published in this period;[209] while at fairs about the country were acted farces called "drolls," consisting of the most vulgar scenes to be found in popular plays. Thus, the life of the drama was not absolutely extinguished; and its darkest day proved briefer than perhaps either its