Peter Hausted

Peter Hausted (c. 1605 – 20 July 1644), Doctor of Divinity, was a "playwright, poet, preacher" in early 17th-century England. In his own time, he was notorious as a flamboyant preacher against Puritan and sectarian dissent in the Church of England, and was remembered for the riot that accompanied the 1632 debut of his play The Rival Friends.

Hausted was born at Oundle, in Northamptonshire. He earned an M.A. at Queens' College, Cambridge, and pursued a career in the Church of England. For a time he was the curate at Uppingham in Rutland. Hausted participated in college theatricals as an actor; he was in the cast of the 1631 Cambridge production of Fucus Histriomastix, probably written by Queens' College's Robert Ward.

The scandal over The Rival Friends involved a visit by Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria to Cambridge and the University in March 1632. As part of the entertainment, the University scheduled a performance of Hausted's The Rival Friends, a seven-hour-long play filled with anti-Puritan and anti-sectarian satire. In preparation for the event, the University authorities issued an edict, warning the student body not to indulge in "...any rude or immodest exclamations...nor any humming, hawking, whistling, hissing, or laughing...or any stamping or knocking, nor any such uncivil or unscholarlike or boyish behavior...." And above all, "no tobacco."

The performance that ensued (and curiously, John Milton might have been in the audience) was a theatrical disaster, a near riot in the faces of the King and Queen. Reacting to the disgrace, the University's vice-chancellor Henry Butts committed suicide by hanging himself on Easter Sunday, which was also April Fool's Day.

When The Rival Friends was published later in the year, the title page stated that the play was "Cried down by boys, faction, envy, and confident ignorance, approv'd by the judicious, and now exposed to the public censure, by the author," which gives a taste of Hausted's style.

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