William Prynne, a lawyer and political writer, was b. in 1600, at Swanswick; was educated at Bath grammar school, and Oriel college, Oxford; studied the law at Lincoln’s Inn; and was successively made barrister, bencher, and reader. His “Histrio-Mastix,” a violent attack on the stage, and his “News from Ipswich,” twice brought on him, in 1633 and 1637, the vengeance of the infamous star-chamber. He was branded, deprived of his ears, pilloried, fined ten thousand pounds, and doomed to perpetual imprisonment. He obtained his liberty in 1640, was elected member for Newport, and bore a prominent part in the trial of Laud, his persecutor. After the overthrow of Charles, however, Prynne endeavored to effect an accommodation between him and his subjects; and he opposed Cromwell with such boldness that the protector imprisoned him. He joined in the restoration of Charles II.; was appointed keeper of the records in the Tower; and died 1669.

Personal

  To my Lord Treasurer’s … to have met my Lord Bellasses and Commissioners of Excise, but they did not meet me, he being abroad. However, Mr. Finch, one of the Commissioners, I met there, and he and I walked two houres together in the garden, talking of many things…. He told me Mr. Prin’s character; that he is a man of mighty labour and reading and memory, but the worst judge of matters, or layer together of what he hath read, in the world; which I do not, however, believe him in; that he believes him very true to the King in his heart, but can never be reconciled to episcopacy; that the House do not lay much weight upon him, or anything he says.

  He was a learned man, of immense reading, but is much blamed for his unfaithfull quotations. His manner of studie was thus: he wore a long quilt cap, which came, 2 or 3, at least, inches, over his eies, which served him as an umbrella to defend his eies from the light. About every 3 houres his man was to bring him a roll and a pott of ale to refocillate his wasted spirits. So he studied and dranke, and munched some bread; and this maintained him till night; and then he made a good supper. Now he did well not to dine, which breakes of one’s fancy, which will not presently be regained: and it’s with invention as a flux—when once it is flowing, it runnes amaine; if it is checked, flowes but guttim: and the like for perspiration—check it, and ’tis spoyled…. He was of a strange Saturnine complexion. Sir C. W. sayd once, that he had the countenance of a witch.

  The books and little pamphlets that he wrote, were theological, historical, political, controversial, &c., but very few of his own profession: all which are in number near 200,… bound up in about 40 volumes in fol. and qu. in Linc. Inn Library: To which an eminent sage of the law, [William Noy,] who had little respect for those published in his time, promised to give the works of John Taylor the water poet to accompany them. ’Twas not only he, but many others afterwards, especially royalists, that judged his books to be worth little or nothing, his proofs for no arguments, and affirmations for no testimonies, having several forgeries made in them for his and the ends of his brethren. They are all in the English tongue, and by the generality of scholars are looked upon to be rather rhapsodical and confused, than any way polite or concise, yet for antiquaries, critics, and sometimes for divines, they are useful. In most of them he shews great industry, but little judgment, especially in his large folios against the pope’s usurpations. He may be well intituled Voluminous Prynne, as Tostatus Albulensis was 200 years before his time called Voluminous Tostatus: for I verily believe, that if rightly computed, he wrote a sheet for every day of his life, reckoning from the time when he came to the use of reason and the state of man. His custom when he studied was to put on a long quilted cap which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light, and seldom eating a dinner, would every 3 hours or more be maunching a roll of bread, and now and then refresh his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant.

  His activity, and the firmness and intrepidity of his character in public life, were as ardent as they were in his study—his soul was Roman; and Eachard says, that Charles II., who could not but admire his earnest honesty, his copious learning, and the public persecutions he suffered, and the ten imprisonments he endured, inflicted by all parties, dignified him with the title of “the Cato of the Age;” and one of his own party facetiously described him as “William the Conqueror,” a title he had most hardly earned by his inflexible and invincible nature…. Such is the history of a man whose greatness of character was clouded over and lost in a fatal passion for scribbling; such is the history of a voluminous author whose genius was such that he could write a folio much easier than a page; and “seldom dined” that he might quote “squadrons of authorities.”

Histriomastix

  Histrio-Mastix: The Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragœdie, divided into two Parts: wherein it is largely evidenced by divers Arguments; by the concurring Authorities and Resolutions of sundry Texts of Scripture, of the whole Primitive Church both under the Law and the Gospel, of 55 Synods and Councils, of 71 Fathers and Christian writers before the year of our Lord 1200, of above 150 foreign and domestic Protestant and Popish authors since, of 40 heathen Philosophers, Historians, and Poets, of many heathen, many Christian Nations, Republics, Emperors, Princes, Magistrates; of sundry apostolical, canonical, imperial Constitutions; and of our own English Statutes, Magistrates, Universities, Writers, Preachers—That Popular Stage Plays (the very pomps of the Divell, which we renounce in Baptism, if we believe the Fathers) are sinful, heathenish, lewd, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions, condemned in all ages as intolerable mischiefs to Churches, to Republics, to the manners, minds, and souls of men; and that the profession of Play-poets, of Stage-Players, together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stage-plays, are unlawful, infamous, and misbeseeming Christians. All pretences to the contrary are here likewise fully answered, and the unlawfulness of acting or beholding academical Interludes briefly discussed; besides sundry other particulars concerning Dancing, Dicing, Health-drinking, etc., of which the Table will inform you. By William Prynne, an Utter Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn.

  Prynne’s literary character may be illustrated by his singular book, “Histriomastix,” where we observe how an author’s exuberant learning, like corn heaped in a granary, grows rank and musty, by a want of power to ventilate and stir about the heavy mass.

  Heylin, a bigoted enemy of everything puritanical, and not scrupulous as to veracity, may be suspected of having aggravated, if not misrepresented, the tendency of a book much more tiresome than seditious.

  This block of a book, on which Prynne had been busy for seven years, was to produce various consequences. Not only were dramatists, players, and all in any way connected with the theatrical interest to be roused in its behalf for personal reasons, but—on the plea that the character of the Queen had been attacked in the book for her patronage of stage-plays, and her performances personally in court-masques—there was to be a sudden rush of other classes of the community to the defence of the tottering institution. The courtiers were to get up masques and plays out of loyalty; the members of the Inns of Court were to do the same with all the more alacrity that it was one of their number that had struck the disloyal blow; the scholars in colleges were to catch the same enthusiasm; and those who had gone to the theatres for mere amusement before, were to go twice as often to spite Prynne and the Puritans.

  The tone of the work is in general dry and calm; but the author is capable of rising to eloquence, as in the final exhortation in act v of the Second Part. In the choice of the arguments themselves, as will be seen from the brief sketch of the book appended below the text, there is nothing new; but they are nowhere else developed with anything like the same fulness; and for the historian of the drama Prynne’s treatise furnishes an ample repository of much useful learning. It is to be observed that his acquaintance with the stage-plays of his own times was obviously of the most limited description.

  He was the author, in the course of his life, of no less than one hundred and eighty distinct works; many of them, it is true, were pamphlets, but others terribly bulky—an inextinguishable man; that onslaught on the drama and dramatic people, and play-goers, including people of the Court, called “Histriomastix,” was a foul-mouthed, close-printed, big quarto of a thousand pages. One would think such a book could do little harm; but he was tried for it, was heavily fined, and sentenced to stand in the pillory and lose his ears.

General

  A late hot querist for tythes, whom ye may know, by his wits lying ever beside him in the margin, to be ever beside his wits in the text. A fierce reformer once; now rankled with a contrary heat.

  Mr. Prynn’s books, having been made use of for wast paper, begin now to be scarce, and to be got into curious hands, purely for this reason, because he commonly cites his vouchers for what he delivers, and thereby gives his reader an opportunity of examining the truth of them. Mr. Baker, of Cambridge, believes his study hath more of Mr. Prynne’s books than any one of that university, and he well remembers, that he sent up his “Anti-Arminianism” to Mr. Strype, which he could not meet with at London, when he was writing one of his books, and yet it has two editions.

  The most terrible phenomenon as a Puritan pamphleteer was the lawyer, William Prynne.

  They are without style; they speak like business men; at most, here and there, a pamphlet of Prynne possesses a little vigour.

  In 1627 Prynne’s first book appeared, “The Perpetuity of a Regenerate Man’s Estate.” Under the forms of theological argument, Prynne’s contention is, in the main, a contention for the central idea of Calvinism, the immediate dependence of the individual soul upon God without the intervention of human or material agencies. But in Prynne’s hands the theme was stripped of all the imaginative grandeur with which it has been so often clothed. His pages, with their margins crowded with references, afforded a palpable evidence how much he owed to his reading and his memory. He had no formative genius, no broad culture, no sense of humour. He had no perception of the relative importance of things distasteful to him. “Health’s Sickness,” a violent diatribe on the supreme wickedness of drinking healths, was followed by “The Unloveliness of Lovelocks,” an equally violent diatribe on the supreme wickedness of the long lock of hair floating over the shoulder, which was the latest fashion amongst courtiers. The folly of the day was chastised with a torrent of learned objurgation which would not have been out of place in a harangue directed against the seven deadly sins. He had nothing worse to say when he sat down to prepare “A Brief Survey and Censure of Mr. Cosin’s Cozening Devotions.”

  A number of writers took part in the Puritan and Church controversies, among whom for graphic force William Prynne stands out clearly.

  In point of style Prynne’s historical works possess no merits. He apologises to his readers in the epistle to vol. ii. of his “Exact Chronological Vindication” for the absence of “elegant, lofty, eloquent language, embellishments, and transitions,” and he understates their defects. The arrangement of his works is equally careless. Yet, in spite of these deficiencies, the amount of historical material they contain and the number of records printed for the first time in his pages give his historical writings a lasting value.

  In their strong convictions, ponderous learning, and stupendous dulness, Prynne’s two hundred pamphlets, representing thirty-five years of unintermitted labour, are unique in the literature of the period.