Solon forewarned
Thespis, that the effects of such plays, as he saw him act, would become
in time injurious to the morals of mankind, and he forbade him to act
again. The Athenians, though such performances were afterwards allowed,
would never permit any of their judges to compose a comedy. The
Spartans under Lycurgus, who were the most virtuous of all the people of
Greece, would not suffer either tragedies or comedies to be acted at
all. Plato, as he had banished music, so he banished theatrical
exhibitions from his pure republic. Seneca considered, that vice made
insensible approaches by means of the stage, and that it stole on the
people in the disguise of pleasure. The Romans, in their purer times,
considered the stage to be so disgraceful, that every Roman was to be
degraded, who became an actor, and so pernicious to morals, that they
put it under the power of a censor, to control its effects.
But the stage, in the time of Charles the second, when the Quakers first
appeared in the world, was in a worse state than even in the Grecian or
Roman times. If there was ever a period in any country, when it was
noted as the school of profligate and corrupt morals, it was in this
reign. George Fox therefore, as a christian reformer, could not be
supposed to be behind the heathen philosophers, in a case where morality
was concerned.
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