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FROM THE VERY earliest moments of their emergence in the late 1570s, England's popular stages prompted fears that they were multiplying out of control. This was the case not only insofar as some people--including at one point Queen Elizabeth and her privy councilors--worried that the structures were growing too numerous and consequently that most should be tom down;(1) it was also the case insofar as the theater's most vocal opponents understood the institution to be capable of producing unruly hordes of dissolute persons. The anti-theatricalists argued that the theater did more than simply provide a venue for threatening multitudes to gather and "recreate themselves."(2) More pointedly, to their minds England's stages possessed a kind of monstrous fecundity, and thus were responsible for creating numbers of libertines and rogues, idle, disordered and hence dangerous persons who would violate England's laws, or would treasonously betray their monarch, or would give themselves over to sensual abominations, and thereby bring down the wrath of God upon a reprobate nation. By investigating these arguments in relation to Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth, this essay seeks to accomplish two things. First, it works to show how this play acknowledges and explores the limits of the cultural logic informing the above anxieties about the stage--a pedagogic dynamic in which imitative practices effect what is taken to be a kind of reproduction. Second, this essay describes how Shakespeare's attention to these issues represents an effort to consolidate the cultural authority of the popular theater. Engaging and reworking anti-theatrical fears, Henry the Eighth attempts to transform the stage's capacity for ungoverned generation from a deeply troubling threat into a source of pleasure and approval. Anti-theatricalist Henry Crosse offers a place to begin elaborating this analysis to the extent that his efforts to stigmatize playgoing enable a more detailed specification of the account of the stage as dangerously generative. Those who attend plays, he argues, are "the very scum, rascallitie, and baggage of the people, theeves, cut-purses, shifters, cousoners"(3) According to Crosse, these are nothing other than "an uncleane generation, and spaune of vipers," a "broode of hell-bred creatures" (Ql);(4) this genealogical identification situates theater-going as one act among many that transparently registers an unholy descent.
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