"Hostility to the theatre is as old as the theatre itself. Plato banished the theatre from his ideal republic. Church fathers from Tertullian to Augustine denounced it. Our colonial ancestors did their best to keep it out of America, and when it arrived, they greeted it with the kind of demonstration they usually reserved for British tax collectors. The Stamp Act riots of 1765 in New York were followed in 1766 by a riot against the attempt of a company of traveling players to open a theatre. In 1783 a rock-flinging crowd stormed into the pit of a newly opened theatre in Philadelphia. During the century that followed, as the theatre gradually won a grudging acceptance in the United States, pulpit and press continued to resound with denunciation, not simply of the kind of plays produced or of the acting, but of the very existence of theatres. Although these diatribes have been the constant accompaniment of theatrical performances-at least until the present century-most of us associate them with Puritanism. And not without reason. The longest most bitter, and most effective attacks on the theatre came from English Puritans, or at least from Englishmen living in the age of Puritanism. Beginning with a burst of books and pamphlets about 1579, the literature of denunciation reached its culmination in William Prynne's Histrio-mastrix in 1633. Prynne's work, a learned encyclopedia of invective, totaling more than a thousand pages, was culled from two thousand years of writings against the theatre, seasoned by Prynne's own tedious, repetitious, but often forceful arguments. Prynne lost his ears for his labors, because the king thought the book reflected on the royal taste for theatrical amusements; but Prynne has his way in 1642, when the Long Parliament closed the English theatres. As long as Puritans ran the government, the theatres stayed closed and arguments over them subsided. Playwrights preferred writing plays to defending them, and throughout history, the champions of the theatre have been notably less articulate than its enemies. When the king was restored in 1660, so was the theatre, and the attacks on it resumed, but somehow with less zest. The fin-de-siecle Histrio-mastix was written by Jeremy Collier, a pallid, polite, almost effete opponent, who strove unsuccessfully to match the wit and style of the plays he attacked. The assault never again gathered the force it had developed under the Puritans. The theatre thus met with the most intense hostility in England during the immediately after the age of the great English dramatists: the age of Marlowe, Johnson, and Shakespeare. Is this a coincidence?"