Beautiful Serpents” and “Cathedras of Pestilence”

This article examines how, in both early modern Spain and England, antitheatrical polemicists responded to the increased popularity and visibility of playhouses by attacking them as pernicious, diabolical, and effeminizing. Antitheatrical tracts and sermons drew upon the authority of ancients and propagated understandings of the body politic as an organism that could be diagnosed with a corrupting and womanish disease. These arguments resonated during moments of political and social crisis. A historical analysis, however, demonstrates the different trajectories and impacts of antitheatrical writing in these kingdoms. By surveying antitheatrical polemics and legislation passed against the playhouses during long-term bans on public performance, this article contends that although there was more printed antitheatrical sentiment in Spain than in England, this opposition had a limited effect because of the charitable functions of Spanish playhouses that worked to care for the real bodies of members of the body politic

Economic history · Political crisis · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Gender Studies · History · Law · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• The Antitheatrical Criticism of Stephen Gosson

  Open Access•Heloise Senechal•Literature Compass•2004

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• Ideal Men

  Open Access•Elizabeth A Lehfeldt•Renaissance Quarterly•2008

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• Certain Phases of the Sumptuary Decrees of 1623 and Their Relation to Tirso's Theatre

  Ruth Lee Kennedy•Hispanic Review•1942

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• Datos históricos sobre los primeros teatros de Madrid

  John E Varey, N D Shergold•Bulletin Hispanique•1960

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• Transvestism and the Stage Controversy in Spain and England, 1580-1680

  Ursula K Heise•Theatre Journal•1992

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• Self-Perception and Decline in Earlyseventeenth-Century Spain

  J H Elliott•Past & Present•1977

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