ABSTRACT
William Prynne (1600–69) was an immensely prolific and savage Puritan pamphleteer. ‘Histrio-Mastix’ is the most conspicuous attack on the stage between Stephen Gosson's ‘Schoole of Abuse’ (1579) and Jeremy Collier's ‘Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage’ (1698). Another version of the fabricated tale reproduced below was ‘reported’ from Exeter; see E. K. Chambers, ‘The Elizabethan Stage’ (1923), III, 424.
