Well, if it’s 1st March… yes, that’s right: it must be the anniversary of the publication of Philip Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses, a catalogue of such Very Bad Things as booze, dancing, fornication, gluttony, swearing, theatre…
(Or, at least, this was the day the great work was entered on the Stationers’ Register, which allowed publishers to assert their right to produce a particular work — copyright law before there was copyright law, basically)
Yes, it was basically Pious Pip raging against all the usual stuff people did to bring a tiny sliver of joy into their pinched 16th century lives. Whoredom and libertinism are bad, obvs, but guess which is banged on about at greater length? Well, to begin with, not these guys:
He does tell us that the theatre is a hotbed of filth:
But, come on – we knew that. Traditional festivals like May Day were also Very Bad, because people did things like have fun and jig about a bit.
Dirty bastards. It’s one small step from there to welcoming in the…
Fashion is obviously a Great Sin, too – especially for people who were not nobility, gentry or a magistrate. Obviously. Know your place, scum. Not that that was what Philip meant. No: extravagance might ruin the economy, you see.
(See also contemporary commentators asking why asylum seekers have mobile phones, or poor people have flatscreen TVs, even though no one’s seen a cathode ray tube in decades. But I digress.)
Also, women might wear men’s clothing, and then society as we know it would COLLAPSE.
So far, so bog-standard puritanical, but Fun-lovin’ Phil gets weirder the longer he goes on. Because, do you know what’s REALLY bad? Ruffs. Or rather “great and monstrous Ruffes”.
Not just because they’re ruffs, and “The deuill, as he in the fulnesse of his malice, first inuented these great Ruffes”, but because they keep getting bigger, which is A Bad Thing.
I mean, those of us who were alive in the 1980s knew that already, but…
…do you know why huge ruffs are so reprehensible? Because they require maintenance!
And starch was also invented by the Prince of Darkness himself.
Worse than all these, though, were the “scummes of the worlde” that Stubbs wrote about in a later work A motiue to good works, Or rather, To true Christianitie indeede — by which he meant the sort of people who attack others in print. Um, Phil…?
