ABSTRACT
The commercializing culture which sustained the development of the public theater in early modern England also sustained a vigorous polemical literature, some of it taking the theater as one of its primary objects of attack. In this chapter I examine some of the antitheatrical tracts produced between the opening of the commercial theaters in 1576 and their closing in 1642. In these tracts the theater, which through its scripts and spectacles daily represented imagined worlds to its beholders, itself became an object of representation over whose meaning and value various partisans engaged in heated discursive struggle. In the process certain distinctive narratives about this institution were developed, as well as a dense tropology of denigration and praise by which to define its worth and social effects. In this chapter I look at how these tracts rendered the emergent institution of the theater intelligible, but I will also examine the silences, contradictions, and rhetorical sleights of hand by which this polemic revealed its own implication in the social and ideological struggles of Tudor and Stuart England.
