ABSTRACT
The author believes that censorship and the threat of it provides the most plausible explanation for a phenomenon; since the evidence for this belief is largely circumstantial, other possible hypotheses before ascribing the dearth of representation to censorship is first considered and eliminated. Woodrofe employs the discourse of the playhouse; his letter demonstrates two crucial points about literary representation. The first point is that the Lord Mayor's letter undermines the view proposed by Fink and others that the anti-alien sentiments of the commoners stood in opposition to the benevolent attitudes of the government; such a dichotomous view of history is both reductive and inaccurate. The second point is that the letter exposes the inadequacy of the reflectionist view of history and literature: neither the interludes nor the letter reflect the anti-alien attitudes prevalent in a society; instead, they are the attitudes, shaped by and in turn shaping other such attitudes in a complex exchange of what Greenblatt terms "social energy."
