ABSTRACT
What is striking to me here is the absolutely clear demarcation between the dangers of public playing, involving the ‘Commen Collection of money of the Auditorie,’ and the acceptability of playing within a ‘pryvate hous, dwellinge, or lodginge’ where presumably no money was collected and where the audience had therefore not been transformed by a commercial transaction from guests to customers. As was to be true in a number of anti-theatrical tracts and petitions from the City, what is specified here as objectionable about certain kinds of theatrical activity is less the matter or content of plays per se, and more the practices surrounding public playing: specifically, the removal of the scene of playing from the controlled space of the nobleman’s house to a public venue; the dailiness of public playing versus its occasional use, for example, as part of a wedding festivity; the transformation of those who attend the play from guests or clients of a great man or wealthy citizen to paying customers; and, implicitly, the transformation of dramatists from straightforward servants of the nobility to something more akin to artisan entrepreneurs. In short, in this document public playing is presented as altering social relations by the emergent material practices attendant upon play production and attendance, quite apart from any consideration of the ideological import of the fictions enacted on the stage.
