Shakespeare

FROM THE VERY earliest moments of their emergence in the late 1570s, England's popular stages prompted fears that they were multiplying out of control. This was the case not only insofar as some people--including at one point Queen Elizabeth and her privy councilors--worried that the structures were growing too numerous and consequently that most should be tom down;(1) it was also the case insofar as the theater's most vocal opponents understood the institution to be capable of producing unruly hordes of dissolute persons. The anti-theatricalists argued that the theater did more than simply provide a venue for threatening multitudes to gather and "recreate themselves."(2) More pointedly, to their minds England's stages possessed a kind of monstrous fecundity, and thus were responsible for creating numbers of libertines and rogues, idle, disordered and hence dangerous persons who would violate England's laws, or would treasonously betray their monarch, or would give themselves over to s...