Heretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They? « Clyde Fitch Report:
It began with a theater that was deeply controversial and embroiled in issues of belief and meaning. From the time the first wooden ‘O’ known as The Theatre was built in 1576 in the playing fields of Spitalfields, the ‘theater critics’ of the day had a very clear reaction. They recognized it as a theater of resistance, a challenge to religious orthodoxies and thus the very basis of state power. An entire generation of sermons and pamphlets criticized the plays and their players. In 1577, Thomas White complained in a sermon against the “common playes in London” and the “multitude that flocketh to them.” The same year, in his Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and Interludes, John Northbrooke claimed stage plays were “not tolerable” and wanted to ban actors from receiving the divine sacrament. In his Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Philip Stubbes claimed plays were “sucked out of the Devil’s teats, to nourish us in idolatry, heathenrie, and sin.”
A few years later, there would have been clear risks for players at The Rose in performing the plays of Christopher Marlowe. He was, after all, an atheist who had declared the sacred Gospels “all of one man’s making” and that the figure of Jesus was merely a “deceiver” in “vain and idle stories.” Although some 40% of the English population were nonbelievers in Christianity, such revolutionary ideas were, again, a direct threat to state power. So for Marlowe’s plays — which contain a straightforward anti-Christian allegory most easy to spot in Dr Faustus — as well as others, the secret service would carefully monitor performances. State Decipherers, as they were called, were seated in the audience trying to work out if secret allegorical meanings were concealed within the plays. From time to time, as with The Isle of Dogs, the spies thought they had found something untoward. Then the playwright and the entire acting company were hauled off to prison, perhaps to be tortured. So performing theater was dangerous work, like walking a literary tightrope without a net. And that was one exciting reason why audiences went to see it. The cast might be arrested, but no government could arrest a whole audience.
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