Afterword: Thinking Staged Transgression Literally

Abstract

When antitheatricalists railed against the early modern stage, they were largely railing against the facts of public performance.¹ It is worth recalling what some of those facts were and why antitheatrical writers found them so objectionable. First, until the mid-1580s, plays in London could be performed on Sundays. One of the first antitheatrical tracts, John Northbrooke’s A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Play es or Enterluäs. .. are reproved (London, 1577), takes the form of a dialogue between an old man coming from church service and a young man who has missed that service because of his addiction to vices such as playgoing. The young man has transgressed or sinned against the Sabbath by substituting a frivolous pastime for the serious religious observances that belong to that day. Even after Sunday playing was banned, going to the theater was continually linked by antitheatrical writers to idleness and whoredom. Both men and women who attended the theater were accused of the former, while women, in addition, were thought to be prostituted by the very conditions of daylight performance in large amphitheaters: ‘what safe garde of chastity can there be, where the woman is desired with so many eyes, where so many faces looke upon hir, and again she upon so manye? She must needes fire some, and her self also fired againe, and she be not a Stone’.²