Foreword: Early Printed Responses to the Closing of London's Playhouses, 1641–43

Abstract

• In one of early modern England’s most unlikely volte-faces, the notorious antitheatricalist William Prynne penned a tract defending the public stage. Published in 1649, Mr William Prynn His Defence of Stage-Plays reversed the same author’s landmark denunciation of theater in his Histrio-mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragædie (1633).1 Prynne’s reference in the earlier work to “Women-Actors, notorious whores”2 was widely seen as glancing at Henrietta Maria’s participation in court plays; as a result, he was quickly condemned by the court of Star Chamber to stand in the pillory and have his ears “trimmed.” Prynne’s outrage in the 1630s at what he considered the growing authoritarianism of the king, and the threats from bishops and a Catholic queen, had turned by 1649 into alarm at “a Tyrannical, abominable, lewd, schismatical [and] hæretical Army”3 that not only held the king captive but also controlled Parliament following Pride’s Purge of its moderate members in December 1648. The specific occasion for Prynne’s defense of the stage was the removal of the “Players from their Houses”4 by groups of overzealous soldiers. For