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Full speech
SEe Brother how the wicked throng and crowd To works of Vanity! not a nook, or corner In all this house of sin, this cave of filthiness, This den of spiritual thieves, but it is stuffed, Stuffed, and stuffed full as is a cushion With the lewd Reprobate. aboundeth, though pure zeal Teach, preach, huff, puff and snuff at it, yet still Still it aboundeth. Had we seen a Church, A new built Church erected North and South, It had been something worth the wondering at. I say no works are Good. Good works are merely Popish and Apocryphal. Flat fornication! wonder any body takes delight To hear them prattle. Or you fell feathers brother. But are they not hanged for it? Is not this flat conjuring, To make our Ghosts to walk ere we be dead? Impiety! Oh that men endued with reason Should have no more grace in them! I have herd our Vicar Call Play-houses the College of Transgression, Wherein the seven deadly sins are studied. It was a zealous prayer I herd a Brother make, concerning Play-houses: That the Globe Wherein (quoth he) reigns a whole world of vice, Had been consumed! The Phoenix burned to Ashes. The Fortune whipped for a blind whore: Blackfriars He wonders how it scapd demolishing I'th' time of reformation: lastly he wished The Bull might cross the Thames to the Bear-garden, And there be soundly baited! Indeed it something pricks my Conscience, I come to fell they Pins and Looking-glasses. Pray sir what serve they for? And so impious? So unwarrantable? To live by sin? The sighed is able To unsanctify our eyes, and make they Carnal. I am content. That moralizing I do approve, it may be for instruction. How did she say? a Mass? Brother fly hence, Fly hence, Idolatry will overtake us. See Brother, if men's hearts and Consciences Had not been seared, and cauterized, how could they Affect these filthy harbingers of hell! These Proctors of Belzebub, Lucife's Hinch-bois! I thought you taught two vices for one virtue! For pity sake fret not the good old Gentleman. A good Doctrine mark it. Now shame take thee for A Lycia warm formalist. Base belly-God, licentious Libertine! Insooth it is the common shore of lewdness. Now out upon thee thou lewd reprobate! Thou man of sin, and shame, that sowest cushions Unto the elbows of iniquity. You shall have the devotions Of all the Elders. But this foppinesse Is weary some, I could at our Saint Antlings, Sleeping and all, fit twenty times as long, Pray sir continue still the moralizing. In sooth I ' have herd as wholesome instructions From a zealous wicker chair, as ever I did From the carved Idol of wainscoat. My Spirit within me too fumeth, I say Fumeth, and steemeth up, and runneth over With holy wrath, at these delights of flesh. Stay brother, I do find the spirit grow strong. I begin to think they lawful recreations. Very good insooth—la And edifying. Now verily I find the devout Be May suck the honey of good Doctrine thence, And bear it to the hive of her pure family, Whence the profane and irreligious spider Gathers her impious Venom! I have picked Out of the Garden of this Play, a good And wholesome salad of instruction! What do you next present? Will Virtues dance? I hate a Virtue in a Morrice-dance! Oh vile, absurd, may pole—maid-marrian virtue Who's this? Mother of Pearl I think, she is so gawdy She looks Like the Idol of Cheapside. Good Brother lets go see it! Saints may want something of perfection. We will go post to reformation. This ignorance even makes religion sin, Sets zeal upon the rack, and stretches her Beyond her length—Most blessed Looking-glass That didst instruct my blinded eyes to day, I might have gone to hell the Narrow-way! Why stays this reprobate Colax? Pride is a vanity worthy the correction. Philotimia Luparus Col . Indeed a Frock is not so Ceremonious. They seem to me the Family of Love, But is there such a Glass; good Roscius?
Plot summary
Plot — The Muses' Looking Glass
Bird and Mistress Flowerdew, Puritan residents of Blackfriars, bring their wares to the theatre, but are appalled when Roscius tells them they have been ordered for use as props in a filthy stage play. Roscius argues that they themselves make a living from the vice of vanity, and invites them to see the play before they condemn it; he will give them a running commentary on its moral import. Despite Roscius’ high claims, Comedy and Tragedy seem initially more concerned about the order of their precedence; they agree to spend a year in competition, staging examples of their respective genres, and whichever is adjudged the better will thereafter have the theatre to herself. The play is a series of episodes showing specific virtues to be the mean: an excess or a deficiency constitutes a vice. A lack of courtesy makes Dyscolus churlishly ready to pick quarrels, whereas too much of it makes Colax sycophantic, to such an extent that he hangs around for the rest of the play flattering all the other vices. Aphobus is over-confident and Deilus cowardly, afraid of his own shadow: they have respectively too much fortitude and too little. Temperance is the next example, illustrated by Acolastus the epicure and Anaisthetus the ascetic, followed by liberality, missing in Aneleutherus the miser and carried to excess in Asotus the prodigal. The over-ostentatious Banausus, full of extravagant schemes for public works, overdoes magnificence, whereas Microprepes balks at replacing a church steeple. (The Puritans in the audience 1630 approve.) Chaunus overvalues himself, and seeks inappropriate high offices, whereas Micropsychus thinks himself unsuited to even the meanest position. Meekness is quite absent from quarrelsome Orgylus, who persistently tries to provoke patient Aorgus to a fight, without success. The arrogant Alazon and the modest Eiron deviate from truth: one falsely claims personal qualities he lacks, the other denies those he does have. Philotimia is unduly fastidious about her appearance, whereas her slovenly husband Luparus would rather clothes had never been invented. The impudent bawd Anaiskyntia brings Kataplectus to visit Philotimia, but he is too bashful to speak to her in English. Philotimia appoints him her gentleman usher, and they go off together; it looks as if Luparus is going to be cuckolded, but he doesn’t care. The extremes of justice are next: Nimis is worldly and prone to accept bribes, adjudicating between litigants according to which can…