Stubbs, John

Stubbs, John, was born about 1541, had his education at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Lincoln's Inn, and died about 1600. He wrote an answer to Cardinal Allen's Defence of the English Catholics, but is known by The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, wherein England is like to be swallowed up by another French Marriage (1579), against the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou. For his patriotism both himself and Page his printer had their right hands struck off. —PHILIP STUBBS, his near kinsman, was author of the Anatomy of Abuses (1583): conteyning a Discoverie or Brieve Summarie of such Notable Vices and Imperfections as now raigne in many Christian countreyes of the World: but especiale in a very famous Illande called Ailgna: Together with most fearful Examples of God's Judgementes executed upon the wicked for the same as well in Ailgna of late, as in other places elsewhere. Wood tells us that he was 'a most rigid Calvinist, a bitter enemy to popery, and a great corrector of the vices and abuses of his time; and though not in sacred orders, yet the books he wrote related to divinity and morality.' A second part of his book appeared the same year (1583). In form it is a dialogue between Philoponus and Spudeus; the substance is a vehement denunciation of the luxury of the times, valuable in the highest degree to us for the light it throws on the dress and habits of the age of Shakespeare. Stubbs is, himself, really a bigoted and splenetic old fool, and he inveighs with curious passion against all extravagances of dress—'the great ruffs, puffed out doublets of the men; the curling, frizzling, and crisping of the hair of the women; their great ruffs and neckerchers of holland, lawne, camerick, and such cloth, lest they should fall down, smeared and snirched in the devil's liquor—starch.' In his blindness he saps the very foundations of morality by pouring out his wrath alike on the mere extravagances of fashion and upon breaches of the weightier matters of the law. The work was reprinted by W. B. D. D. Turnbull in 1836, and by F. J. Furnivall in the New-Shakespeare Society's issues (1879, 1882).