ABSTRACT
Some measure of ambivalence towards theatre both by those who watch and whose who are engaged in it is inherent in the activity. At one moment it can encapsulate what is significant about experience; within the individual psyche, in personal relationships, or concerning man and the universe; at the next that sympathy and identification, so laboriously constructed and so intimately engaged, is betrayed, deliberately by farce, or unintentionally by incompetence, and we are reminded that theatre is only pretence, only 'playing'. The expression of mixed feelings towards theatre goes back at least as far as St Augustine, who, within a general condemnation in his Confessions, reviews his own early enthusiasm for the art. 1
Consciousness of the ambiguities inherent in playing perhaps in part accounts for the paucity of its defence in the Elizabethan period, and for a certain degree of disingenuousness that creeps in from time to time . It is all very well to justify a play in terms of being a 'mirror', but it all depends on what that mirror is made to reflect . 'A Play's a brief Epitome of time', John Taylor claims in his contribution to the host of dedicatory poems appended to Heywood's Apology:
Where man may see his virtue or his crime Laid open, either to their vices' shame, Or to their virtues' memorable fame .
