Shakespeare regulated

How regulated was Shakespeare’s own theater? And for what reasons? Patterson highlights various reasons for closing or permitting theaters: audience composition, including the fear that a large collection of workers might be distruptive; public health; economic concerns; religious and moral concerns, especially Sabbatarian; and “a shifting and elusive imperative to political surveillance, shifting according to the relative stability or instabiity of the larger political environment.” Mostly, she finds that the regulation of the theater was sporadic and inconsistent: “The major agents change their position, and the emphases alter from year to year, from month to month.”

On the one hand, Elizabeth issued a proclamation in 1559, at the beginning of her reign, regarding “common Interludes in the English tongue” that required licensure by the major or justices of the peace. The proclamation prohibited religious and political issues from the stage: her officials should “permyt none to be played wherein either matters of religion or of the governaunce of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated, beyng no meete matters to be wrytten or treated upon, but by menne of aucthoritie, learning and wisedome, nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreete persons.” Three decades later, a church official was added to assist the Master of Revels in reforming the theater.

There was apparently some difference between the more negative attitudes of the bishop and mayor of London and the court. In 1582, five members of the Privy Council write the mayor of London instructing him “to revoke your late inhibition against their playeng on the said hollydaies . . . onely forbearing the Sabothe daie.” The Privy Council was not libertarian on the theater, instructing the mayor that “care be had that their comodies and enterludes be looked into, and that those which do containe mater that may bread corruption of maners and conversacion among the people . . . be forbidden.” A decade later, the Council closed all the theaters because they were suspected of encouraging an uprising among feltmakers. By 1600, however, London was so full of theaters that the council ordered restraint in the erection of new playhouses, htough the order conceded that “the use and exercise of suche plaies, not beinge evill in yt self, may with a good order and moderacion be suffered in a well governed estate.”