SchoolTube Community
You know that feeling when you're really into something, but everyone around you seems determined to rain on your parade? That's how theater lovers in Renaissance England must have felt. Just as playwriting was hitting its stride, a new force emerged, ready to dim the stage lights: the Puritans.
A Playwright's Worst Nightmare: Puritanical Anti-Theatricalism
The Puritans, known for their strict religious beliefs, weren't exactly fans of the theater. In fact, they really hated it. Imagine the most passionate dislike you can muster for something, then multiply that by a thousand, and you might start to approach the level of Puritan disdain for the stage.
Why all the hate? They saw theater as a den of sin, a breeding ground for immorality and vice. Plays were accused of corrupting youth, promoting laziness, and even spreading the plague (though we're pretty sure that last one was just bad hygiene).
"Plays... are a special cause of corrupting the youth, containing nothing but unchaste matters, lascivious devices, shifts of cozenage and other lewd and ungodly practices." - Letter from the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, 1597
Pamphlets circulated, railing against the evils of the stage. One particularly zealous Puritan, William Prynne, penned a 1,000-page anti-theater manifesto titled Histriomastix. He argued that plays taught people to sin, made men effeminate (those boys in pants playing female roles really set them off!), and went against God.
The irony? Theater had been used to enhance church services not long before. But for the Puritans, Renaissance theater was either not religious enough or too religious, depending on their argument. It seems the problem wasn't the theater itself, but how they chose to see it.
A King, a Civil War, and the Sound of Silence on Stage
While the Puritans were busy sharpening their rhetorical knives against the theater, King Charles I had bigger problems: money (or lack thereof). His constant wars were draining the royal coffers, and his battles with Parliament, largely controlled by Puritans, weren't helping.
When the English Civil War erupted in 1642, Parliament saw an opportunity. They used the conflict as justification to officially ban theater. Their reasoning?
"Public sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage plays with the seasons of humiliation... It is therefore thought fit and ordained... that... public stage plays shall cease and be forborn."
Basically, they were saying,
You may also like