Treating the Public by Rachael Ball

Author:Rachael Ball [Ball, Rachael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Western Europe, Spain & Portugal
ISBN: 9780807165102
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

5

“The Plague of the Republic”

ANTITHEATRICAL SENTIMENT AND ITS LIMITS IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD

As the previous chapters have recounted, urban officials and city dwellers accommodated and enabled to various degrees the integration of commercial theater into the physical, social, and cultural landscapes of cities in Spain and England and their Atlantic realms during the early modern period. However, while many attended performances at the playhouses, some, like the Bishop Palafox, vehemently attacked the theaters, criticizing their pernicious, disturbing, corrupting, and effeminizing effects. Opponents of the stage might have felt the satisfaction of antitheatrical triumph in the 1640s, when both the Spanish monarchy and the English Long Parliament closed playhouses for long periods, during which civil war and revolts catalyzed an already existing sense of decline and made reforming legislation seem more necessary than usual. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, antitheatrical polemicists in the Spanish and Anglo Atlantic Worlds made many similar arguments despite their confessional differences. They drew on many of the same humanistic traditions and ancient authorities. In both cases, they had greater—if still ultimately limited—influence in the wake of serious political crises.1

In spite of the nearly synchronous timing of these long-term closures of the playhouses, there were some significant differences between the trajectories of English and Spanish antitheatricality. In particular, even though English antitheatrical writers, such as Stephen Gosson and William Prynne, are perhaps better known to American and Anglophone academics, the opponents of the stage in Spain were more numerous and wrote and published tracts and sermons opposing the playhouse with greater frequency than their counterparts in England. This was especially true during the first half of the seventeenth century, when printed English antitheatrical sentiment declined. Due to the limited extent of commercial drama and then the playhouse’s close connections to the court, little printed opposition to the stage emerged from colonial cities in the Anglo Atlantic, such as Dublin. Because there was not much professional drama in the North American colonies established by the English, there was little immediate reason for opposition to it until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when dramatic performances became somewhat more regular. Conversely, because the theater played such visible and important social, cultural, and economic roles in cities throughout the Spanish Atlantic, opposition to the corrales of cities in the domains of the universal Spanish monarch continued to appear at frequent intervals. These polemics contributed to perceptions that the state had once been a healthy organism but had developed a wasting and womanish disease. As a result, some opponents of the stages joined with other reformers in the Spanish Empire in expressing concerns over the health of an increasingly problematically gendered body politic.

The theater made a convenient target for anxieties felt during such periods of perceived degeneration and decline because public drama was such a regular and highly visible feature of urban life in cities throughout the Spanish Atlantic World. What is more, this visibility and prominence stemmed from the fact that the corrales de comedias found protection—not only in

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