Introduction

In February 1592, three plays by William Gager (1555–1622), the Elizabethan era’s chief academic dramatist, were performed during the Shrovetide festival at Christ Church, Oxford. On the first night, Gager’s new play Ulysses Redux was presented; the second night featured a revival of his comedy Rivales, originally staged during the 1583 visit of a Polish official. ^{Footnote 1} Thomas Thornton (ca. 1541–1629), Gager’s friend and fellow member of Christ Church, had invited the Oxford academic and theologian John Rainolds (1549–1607) to attend the festivities, but Rainolds promptly declined. Upon receiving a second invitation, Rainolds wrote a letter to Thornton enumerating his reasons for finding academic drama inappropriate. ^{Footnote 2} When Gager’s version of Seneca’s Hippolytus was performed on the third night of the festival, it included the added character of Momus, who chided the preceding performance in language notably similar to Rainolds’s own. In response to this alleged caricature, Rainolds did not hesitate to assert his opinion in writing, and a lengthy correspondence between Rainolds and Gager on the appropriateness of academic drama ensued. Gager’s protestations that Momus had not been intended as a reference to any particular person fell on deaf ears, and Rainolds’s unrelenting attack, published in 1599 as Th’overthrow of stage-playes, cemented his reputation as what Frederick Boas has called “the fiercest and most powerful assailant of the University stage.” ^{Footnote 3}

Rainolds’s relationship to the theater has long appeared perplexing. He performed in front of Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603) to great acclaim during her first visit to Oxford in 1566: he was, in fact, one of only two student actors to receive Elizabeth’s personal commendation. ^{Footnote 4} When Elizabeth returned to Oxford in 1592, however, the tone of their interaction was quite different. Rainolds was embroiled in the most significant debate over theatrical performance ever realized in the university, and the queen, not at all pleased with his apparently disrespectful behavior, publicly scolded him. During an address to an audience of university leaders, she commanded his obedience and, according to the Oxford historian Anthony Wood (1632–95), “schooled [him] for his obstinate preciseness, willing him to follow her laws, and not run before them.” ^{Footnote 5} The degree to which these comments resulted directly from Rainolds’s publicly acknowledged disapproval of student performance is unclear, as she perceived his insubordination to extend well beyond his condemnation of drama. Nonetheless, she must not have appreciated Rainolds’s outspoken censure of an activity that she had actively encouraged—dramatic performances were a prominent feature of her royal visits—and it seems likely that the queen had him in mind when she spoke of the “overly curious and inquisitive intellects” in the oration that followed. ^{Footnote 6} In less than three decades, Rainolds had gone from receiving the queen’s compliments to being the primary object of her irritation. He had also developed from the university stage’s talented newcomer into its most notorious adversary.

Modern scholars have almost invariably viewed Rainolds as a symbol of staunch Puritan antitheatricalism. In E. K. Chambers’s classic study of the Elizabethan stage, Rainolds’s religious fervor is taken as a prime example of the opposition between Puritanism and humanism. ^{Footnote 7} In Jonas Barish’s seminal work on antitheatrical prejudice, Rainolds is portrayed as a raving antagonist, who “in the final decade of the [sixteenth] century . . . is found to be fulminating against all theatrical productions, of whatever origin, under whatever auspices, and against all plays, in whatever languages, of whatever apparent harmlessness of subject matter.” ^{Footnote 8} Certainly, rigid attitudes received from these and other twentieth-century critics have begun to be questioned: Thomas Postlewait and Mark Bayer have recently called into question Chambers’s overly neat division between theater and religion, ^{Footnote 9} while Peter Lake has convincingly asserted that generalized accounts like Barish’s would benefit from a more cautious treatment of the “complexities” involved. ^{Footnote 10} As yet, however, a nuanced account of Rainolds’s views on theatrical performance does not exist, nor has any study undertaken a careful consideration of the factors that occasioned his transformation from renowned performer to steadfast Reformer.

Aside from these general discussions, Rainolds’s opposition to drama has most frequently garnered mention in the past several decades within two critical contexts. The first is concerned with English antitheatricalists’ anxieties about effeminization and sexual desire, which the early modern stage was seen to promote through the biblically prohibited practice of cross-dressing. ^{Footnote 11} Scholars cite Rainolds as a prime example of this fear, ^{Footnote 12} usually in reference to his claim that “the putting of wemens attire on men” might stimulate “sparkles of lust” within both the actors and their audience. ^{Footnote 13} Also relevant are Rainolds’s worries about the homosexual impulses that might result from young boys acting while dressed as women, which, citing Xenophon and Clement of Alexandria, he compares to the sting of a poisonous spider. ^{Footnote 14} Rainolds’s vivid articulation of the lustfulness encouraged by theatrical performance has led him to receive attention in this area, and his rigid aversion to cross-dressing—which occupies a large portion of his correspondence with both Thornton and Gager—has repeatedly been asserted as the most significant aspect of his attack, often to the exclusion of other factors. ^{Footnote 15}

The second line of critical inquiry in which Rainolds often appears deals with anti-Catholic polemic, and the antitheatricalists’ equation of dramatic performance with idolatrous worship. ^{Footnote 16} In this context, a single excerpt from the end of Rainolds’s second letter to Gager is usually referenced, in which Rainolds compares theater to the Catholic Mass: “Popish Priests . . . have transformed the celebrating of the Sacrament of the Lords supper into a Masse-game, and all other partes of Ecclesiasticall service into theatricall sights; so, in steede of preaching the word, they cause it to be played.” ^{Footnote 17} To Protestant Reformers, popery and theater seemed dangerously similar, and even interchangeable in their mode of presentation and visual representation; the Jesuits’ regular employment of dramatic performance surely fueled this equation. Rainolds was a strong proponent of the Protestant cause—so much so, in fact, that he was sometimes called upon by prominent figures to publicly display his skills as a controversialist—and he was widely considered one of the fiercest polemicists in sixteenth-century England. ^{Footnote 18} These aspects of his career have led to the appealing assumption that his attack upon the theater was rooted in larger societal concerns about the remnants of Catholicism.

Both of the critical perspectives set forth here provide valuable insight into the antitheatrical writings of the period and the motivations that underlay them. The shared tendency of such studies, however, is to overlook the complexity and the specificity of Rainolds’s attack. They consistently place his writings against drama alongside those directed toward the professional stage, grouping his concerns together with those of English antitheatricalists—chiefly John Northbrooke (fl. 1567–89), Stephen Gosson (1554–1625), Philip Stubbes (ca. 1555–1610), and William Prynne (1600–69)—whose purposes and objectives, despite substantial overlap, differed significantly from his own. Rainolds’s primary concern lay not in professional theatricals but with plays staged by youth in the educational setting—specifically at the University of Oxford, where the nature of academic playing shifted significantly during the second half of the sixteenth century. In conflating his concerns with other contemporary attacks on the stage, analyses of the period’s antitheatrical critique tend to overshadow the concerns that were particular to Rainolds’s academic environment, thus precluding a complete understanding of his motivations and the theatrical culture that gave rise to them.

This article attempts to recover the institutional concerns that prompted Rainolds to assail the tradition of university drama. Two of these, it argues, shaped his attack most profoundly: first, drama’s potential to interfere with the academic curriculum and, in particular, rhetorical training; second, the increasing use of spectacle in university plays, which had begun to resemble an ancient tradition of festival entertainment. By restoring Rainolds’s attack to its institutional setting, this article shows that the controversy over theatrical performance in Elizabethan Oxford was not simply a matter of Puritan zeal, as it has so often been judged. It was instead an unparalleled investigation into the evolving role of drama within the university and its potential to either enhance or disturb the academic process.

Student Performers and Professional Players: An Oxford Debate

The issue of theatrical performance received a great deal of attention at the University of Oxford during the late sixteenth century. In 1584, students taking part in a disputation required for the degree of master of arts were given the following subject: “Should stage-plays be permitted in a well-governed community?” ^{Footnote 19} The subject of a 1593 disputation required for the degree of doctor of civil law followed on a similar theme: “Are actors infamous?” ^{Footnote 20} Disputations were an integral part of the sixteenth-century Oxford curriculum at all levels, and they were often featured during ceremonial occasions. ^{Footnote 21} That these issues should be selected for such important proceedings, especially across different faculties, indicates the degree to which this was a prevalent question throughout the university sphere. This is further emphasized by the fact that the subjects chosen for disputation are known to have sometimes reflected issues of contemporary concern. ^{Footnote 22}

While the suitability of drama had long been a matter of question within the university, increasing anxieties about the continued presence of traveling companies in Oxford, likely exacerbated by the opening of the London public playhouses in the 1570s, caused the debate to become more topical in the final decades of the sixteenth century. ^{Footnote 23} Oxford authorities felt a pressing need to distinguish professional dramatic performances from those put on by their fellow academics. In July 1584, the university passed a statute under the leadership of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (1532/33–1588), in his capacity as chancellor of Oxford, which banned professional players from performing within university precincts. ^{Footnote 24} In establishing this prohibition, however, Leicester went to great lengths to ensure that academic plays were exempted, declaring them to be “co[m]mendable and greate furderances of learning.” ^{Footnote 25} Leicester, a friend of Gager’s, officially endorsed academic drama on the grounds that it was an integral component of the educational process, even calling for the frequency of such plays to be increased.

The following year, a friend of both Leicester and Gager, John Case (1540/41?–1600), addressed the question in a similar vein in a section of his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, entitled Speculum Moralium Quaestionum in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis (Mirror of moral questions on the whole of Aristotle’s Ethics, 1585). ^{Footnote 26} The work itself was dedicated to Leicester, and Case posed the question of university performance in the manner of academic disputation, echoing the language of those proceedings discussed above: “Should stage-plays be permissible, and should they be placed under the category of virtue?” ^{Footnote 27} He begins by dividing all plays into two categories—“common and popular” and “academic”—and asserts the permissibility of the latter based on five principles. ^{Footnote 28} Boas rightly notes that these are all “of a utilitarian or edifying character,” and Case goes on to refute possible arguments against university performance. ^{Footnote 29} The format of the treatise reflects the Oxford curriculum, as each oppositio (objection) is met with a responsio (response), in the manner of formal academic discourse. In sum, this was an issue that occupied the minds of university members at all levels, from the chancellor to the faculty to students preparing to dispute. By the last two decades of the sixteenth century, then, the question of dramatic propriety occupied a central role in academic life. The surviving documents indicate that the official university position was clear: despite considerable discussion and debate over drama itself, academic drama’s educational value made it a clearly permissible activity.

It was against this backdrop that the debate between Rainolds and Gager unfolded. Far from believing that drama had the capacity to edify, Rainolds feared that participating in theatrical performance would “worketh in the actors a marvellous impression of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate.” ^{Footnote 30} To illustrate this danger, he draws examples not from the wide history of drama, but from Gager’s three Shrovetide plays, describing their scenes of drunkenness and lustfulness. ^{Footnote 31} This account of the plays’ scandalous moments is quickly followed by a reference to Cyprian, the church father: “S. Cyprian writing of a stage-player who made boyes effeminate by instructing then how to play the wemen, and to expresse & counterfeit unhonest wanton gestures, saith, he was a maister not of teaching but spilling children.” ^{Footnote 32} Passages like this one have been used to link Rainolds to attackers of the professional stage, focusing upon their shared censure of men playing the parts of women. Equally important, however, is the focus upon instruction, which distinguishes Rainolds’s reference to Cyprian from those commonly made by English antitheatricalists. ^{Footnote 33} Rainolds’s extensive discussion of drama’s potential power and its effect on both actors and audience is followed immediately by this anecdote about a “spilling” (i.e., spoiling, or corruptive) educational process. ^{Footnote 34} Rainolds is keenly aware of the danger of bringing drama into the academic setting; as his use of the Cyprian quotation shows, this is for Rainolds a pedagogical issue focused around plays in an educational environment.

Rainolds was not alone in arguing that drama had a potentially corruptive effect upon youth. The fear that children were particularly vulnerable and would readily imitate the vices portrayed onstage was a common refrain among sixteenth-century opponents of the theater. For instance, the clergyman Thomas Beard (ca. 1568–1632) wrote in a 1597 tract that plays “depraue and corrupt good manners . . . the ears of yong folke are there polluted with many filthy & dishonest speeches, their eies are there infected with lasciuious and vnchast gestures and countenances.” ^{Footnote 35} Rainolds, however, is unique in that he was concerned exclusively with the corruption of youth. His aim in Th’overthrow is not a generalized condemnation of drama, nor is his primary concern that children will be taken to public playhouses, as it was for Beard and others. Instead, Rainolds’s writings represent a condemnation of dramatic performance specifically in the academic setting, lest it corrupt both the impressionable young actors and those watching them.

Gager’s main defense of the academic stage, completely in line with the university’s position, rested upon its value for his students. In a frequently quoted passage, Gager justifies his endeavor as a pedagogical exercise that allows instructors “to embowlden owre yuthe; to trye their voyces, and confirme their memoryes; to frame their speeche; to conforme them to convenient action.” ^{Footnote 36} These remarks appear, unsurprisingly, in a series of statements concerned with distinguishing his own entertainments from those put on by professional actors. Following Leicester and Case, Gager adamantly denies that student actors who perform at most once a year should “be termed Scenici, or Histriones.” ^{Footnote 37} In drawing this distinction, however, Gager calls attention not only to academic drama’s comparatively high pedagogical value, but also to the comparatively low caliber of their inexpensive, unskillful performances. ^{Footnote 38} Many have observed Gager’s adherence to the university line, but Gager also goes a step further than any of his colleagues: he defends the enterprise of academic drama by proclaiming its low quality and lack of professionalism.

In fact, Gager’s letter spends significantly more time downplaying the worth and integrity of his theatrical endeavor than asserting its virtues. In defending his crafting of the character of Momus, for instance, he claims that he had little motivation beyond entertainment, having assumed that his audience would become bored with the tragedy. ^{Footnote 39} He goes on to assert the carelessness of his own composition: “I did not greatly care what I made hym to saye, as thinkinge any suche thinge became Momus well inoughe.” ^{Footnote 40} Most strikingly, Gager is willing to belittle the quality of his plays, even conceding that some of Momus’s objections were accurate. ^{Footnote 41} To some extent, the weakness of Gager’s reply should not be surprising. “The defenses of the stage that survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Barish writes, “tend to be feebler than the attacks on it,” as those defending the stage “usually share the assumptions of their opponents.” ^{Footnote 42} Yet Gager takes this one step further: he attempts to defend the academic stage by leveling further insults at it, responding to Rainolds’s invective not with a strong counterattack or a simple acceptance of his opponent’s propositions, but rather with largely unprovoked deprecation.

Gager’s apathy is similarly apparent in his defense of his actors’ cross-dressing, wherein he states that the actual problem of such a practice lies not in the donning of women’s clothing, but in “the lewde ende to deceyve” that can accompany it. ^{Footnote 43} This, however, is not a problem for his plays, since a student acting on the academic stage is “openly knowne” to be playing a part. ^{Footnote 44} Gager’s argument is based in the disillusioning of the entire theatrical enterprise. Cross-dressing is not a threat because his students’ poor acting could never lead anyone to take seriously the onstage fiction. He expounds this point several pages later, describing an instance where a student actor playing a female character should have “made a Conge like a woman,” but instead “made a legg like a man.” ^{Footnote 45} Karl Young calls this anecdote a “genial observation,” but it in fact serves to undercut Gager’s own endeavor. ^{Footnote 46} Gager’s defense here rests upon the notion that, because his plays are “base and meane,” Rainolds’s fears about theatrical performance do not apply in the case of academic drama. ^{Footnote 47} Beneath the dispute between Rainolds and Gager, therefore, lay a shared recognition of drama’s capacity to be a persuasive, powerful force. They disagreed about whether that power concerned plays being performed within the university, thus testing the neat division between academic and professional playing that had been established there.

Rainolds remained unsatisfied by Gager’s reply. His second letter begins with an accusation, and it is clear that his adversarial tendencies have come out in full force. Rainolds characteristically quotes Gager at length in order to refute him, and even implores Gager to make the dispute public. ^{Footnote 48} This letter is not so much about exposition as it is about clarification, expanding upon the points of his previous letter and laying out the ways in which Gager has misinterpreted them. Rainolds is careful, though, to make clear that his attack is not a broad one, repeatedly emphasizing the specificity of his claims. He says that Gager has charged him “with insinuating of [Gager’s] young men” and claiming that they are “cast away altogether by those exercises.” ^{Footnote 49} Rainolds goes to great lengths, however, to dispel the notion that the youth involved in Gager’s plays have already been corrupted beyond repair. They are not, as Gager has implied that Rainolds suggested, “dead, dead, past all recoverie.” Referring to his earlier citation of Cyprian, Rainolds writes that “the termes I used imported that they were in spilling, not spilt, much lesse spilt altogether.” ^{Footnote 50}

Continuing in a similar vein, Rainolds makes abundantly clear that his attack is centered upon theatrical practice, rather than any of Gager’s students themselves. Writing of the notoriety of stage players, he makes a point of saying that his words had been misconstrued. At once a sharp rebuke and a striking display of compassion, Rainolds asserts that his attack is centered upon the theater itself, not upon its performers. “I enforced it against the partes played by Histrio,” he states, “not against the Christchurch parties who played them.” ^{Footnote 51} In support of this claim, he reveals that he himself acted the “womans parte” of Hippolyta on the stage twenty-six years earlier. ^{Footnote 52} This moment is sometimes considered an acceptance of guilt, analogous to the “penitence” William Prynne perceived in Stephen Gosson’s admission of having acted on the stage. ^{Footnote 53} The context, however, reveals it to be a statement of quite a different nature. Rainolds uses the example of his own time on the stage not to suggest any degree of regret, but rather to prove the more significant point that he would be hypocritical to judge the students themselves for partaking in dramatic activity. Rainolds is reluctant to play the part of an antitheatricalist, fearing that he might be deemed an enemy to the students of the very academy he seeks to protect.

Anthony Wood recalls, in reference to pupils who were recipients in Rainolds’s will, that “Students of several Colleges and Halls in Oxon . . . sate at [Rainolds’s] feet and were his admirers.” ^{Footnote 54} This image of Rainolds is a far cry from the austere figure depicted in modern scholarship, and one that is almost entirely ignored in the existing literature concerning the controversy between Rainolds and Gager. It is nonetheless essential for understanding the motivations of his undeniably fierce attack: Rainolds sought to protect the integrity of the academic environment, thereby protecting the students themselves from what he perceived to be a dangerously powerful and potentially corruptive activity. While Gager tepidly fell back on the university position, Rainolds interrogated it, challenging the idea that drama could be beneficial to learning and objecting to the notion that the perils of professional playing did not apply to academic plays. At the heart of Rainolds’s sustained onslaught lay a central claim: drama’s potency was hazardous to the students involved in its performance, rendering it antithetical to the pedagogical purpose proclaimed by its defenders.

Rhetoric, Drama, and the Art of Representation

Several pages into his first letter to Gager, Rainolds recalls a pair of anecdotes found in the Roman historian Suetonius’s account of the emperor Nero. Rainolds cites Suetonius’s description of two tragedies staged during Nero’s reign, both of which featured Nero playing the title role. ^{Footnote 55} The first, entitled Hercules insanus (Hercules mad), focused on the frenzy of Hercules. Rainolds recounts how a soldier in Nero’s guard reacted to the onstage depiction of the emperor in chains, describing how “when hee sawe Nero attired and bound with Chaines, as the argument required, hee ranne to him to helpe him; thinking (poore freshwater creature) that his maister had bene chained in earnest.” ^{Footnote 56} A second anecdote about the performance of the tragedy Canace parturiens (Canace in labor), on Aeolus’s mythical daughter Canace, who conceives a child with her brother, follows the first in a similar vein. Rainolds describes how another soldier, when asked “what the Emperour was doing,” artlessly responded, “Hee is travailing with childe.” ^{Footnote 57} These two stories both provide examples of the same phenomenon—onlookers of drama being unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. As their inclusion in Th’overthrow suggests, Rainolds feared that drama might transform both actors and audience, causing their inability to properly perceive the boundary between their own world and the world of the play.

Rainolds was not the only writer for whom the stage’s power was fundamentally transformative in nature. Concerns about gender confusion, as discussed above, constituted a prominent facet of the antitheatricalists’ larger fear about personal character, whereby theatrical performance was seen to pervert an individual’s God-given identity. ^{Footnote 58} Prynne articulates the comprehensive nature of these anxieties: “This counterfeiting of persons, affections, manners, vices, sexes, and the like . . . it transformes the Actors into what they are not.” ^{Footnote 59} Munday confirms that this sense of transformation extends to audience as well as actors: unlike other “euils,” he asserts, “the filthines of plaies, and spectacles” can “pollute . . . the beholders” as well as “the doers.” ^{Footnote 60} Gosson, in his Playes confuted in fiue actions (1582), presents the account of this infectious phenomenon most similar to Rainolds’s in a passage citing the Greek historian Xenophon. Following closely the original source, Gosson describes a Syracusan banquet in which the story of Bacchus and Ariadne was played. The members of the audience became so absorbed in the performance that they lost track of their own reality: “when Bacchus rose up, tenderly lifting Ariadne from her seate . . . the beholders rose up, euery man stoode on tippe toe.” ^{Footnote 61} The audience response escalated, as Xenophon describes how when the characters “departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire, they that were married posted home to theire wiues; they that were single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded.” ^{Footnote 62} Drama’s power threatened instability: what was happening onstage might at any moment cease to be a fiction, causing humans to forget their own identities. ^{Footnote 63}

In the academic environment, this general threat had specific implications, particularly with regard to oratorical training. The passage mentioned earlier, in which Gager defends academic drama as a useful activity, focuses largely on its benefits for rhetorical delivery. ^{Footnote 64} In listing the specific ways drama might help students, he argues that it allows instructors to “trye [students’] voyces,” “frame their speeche,” and “conforme them to convenient action.” ^{Footnote 65} This was a common argument throughout the early modern period. When Thomas Heywood (ca. 1573–1641) issued a defense of drama two decades later, he used similar language to assert the value of university performances, claiming that academic drama “instructs [the student] to fit his phrases to his action, and his action to his phrase, and his pronuntiation to them both.” ^{Footnote 66} As in England, so too on the Continent, where the German philosopher Rudolph Goclenius (1547–1628), a professor at the University of Marburg, heavily emphasized rhetorical benefits in a printed discussion of whether academic drama belonged in a well-governed society. ^{Footnote 67} Answering in the affirmative, Goclenius argues that drama is extremely useful for learning correct pronunciation and other skills related to delivery, and he aligns drama closely enough with rhetorical instruction to suggest that “it is not by accident that in this part of Rhetoric actors were at one time used as teachers.” ^{Footnote 68} In defending drama on the basis of its rhetorical merit, Gager was in good company, both at home and abroad.

While this moment in Gager’s letter is often quoted, Rainolds’s reply has received little attention. Crucially, he claims that the university’s forerunners have already accounted for such practice by establishing exercises of “writing, pronouncing, declaiming, disputing, of questions in sundry faculties and artes.” ^{Footnote 69} The equation of drama with curricular activities emerges here as a serious concern, as Rainolds deplores Gager’s comparison of “scholasticall exercises with enterludes and playes.” ^{Footnote 70} Gager had apparently argued that, since an unnamed “godly & learned Preacher in the pulpitt” affirmed that “declamations, oppositions, suppositions, and such scholasticall exercises, are no better than vaine things,” such exercises would then be on the same level as the drama Rainolds was also claiming to be “vaine.” ^{Footnote 71} A tenuous argument, to be sure, but one that Rainolds perceives as dangerous not simply because of the denigration of formal academic exercises. It is instead Gager’s notion that plays are somehow equivalent to disputations and declamations that provokes Rainolds’s ire. “The artes . . . of Rhetorike & Logike are requisit to preaching of the woord,” Rainolds writes, “And the exercises of declaiming, answering, opposing, doe helpe to breede ripenes in those artes.” ^{Footnote 72} Drama, however, offers no such developmental training, and certainly should not be equated with those established academic exercises that do.

Rainolds also rejects Gager’s defense that scholars who act in plays infrequently are not, by definition, actors. Recall that Gager had written that coming on the stage once a year or less was not grounds for his students to “be termed Scenici, or Histriones.” Rainolds, however, sees no such distinction, arguing that “so are they stage-players, who play vpon the stage once in a yeare or two.” ^{Footnote 73} This is directly related to Gager’s sense of fluidity between different forms of academic presentation in that, for Gager, the kind of performance in which he is involved fosters rhetorical development in the same way that a disputation might, and thus does not fall into the realm that he sees as reserved for histriones, or professional actors. For Rainolds, however, the categorical boundaries are different. Academic activities are in one category, and theatrical activities are completely separate in another. Rainolds’s reaction is drawn from the singularity of the latter classification: Gager’s students are acting, and therefore are engaging in an activity that should be prohibited. The boundary is firm, and there can be no middle ground between theatrical performance (i.e., stage plays) and academic exercise (i.e., disputations, declamations, etc.). In rejecting Gager’s position, Rainolds is therefore claiming a contradiction in Gager’s argument, in that Gager has openly denounced theatrical performance but defends its permissibility for his own students.

The separation between theater and oratory is most fully developed in a lesser-known chapter of the Oxford controversy, in which Rainolds’s opponent was the noted legal scholar Alberico Gentili (1552–1608). Gentili became regius professor of civil law at Oxford in 1580, having been exiled from Italy on account of his Protestantism. ^{Footnote 74} His portion of the correspondence followed quickly on the heels of his friend Gager’s portion, as Gentili took up the cause after Gager—for reasons about which readers can only speculate—withdrew. ^{Footnote 75} Gentili was a logical successor to Gager, as he had previously advocated the lawfulness of theatrical performance. His Commentatio ad L[egem] III C[odicis] de prof[essoribus] et med[icis] (Commentary on the third law of the [Justinian] Code on teachers and doctors), which included a substantial defense of poetry and acting, was published in 1593, shortly before he sent his first letter to Rainolds. ^{Footnote 76} In that letter, he also claims that he has “publicly discussed the question of stageplayers, before [Rainolds and Gager] had this dispute, with another person.” ^{Footnote 77} Surprisingly, however, the correspondence between Rainolds and Gentili, which was carried out in Latin rather than English, has been all but ignored in critical literature concerning the controversy. While their first four letters are printed in Th’overthrow, their last four—occupying over ninety folio pages in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 352, the only surviving manuscript witness to the entire correspondence—have never been printed and have only rarely been mentioned in modern scholarship. ^{Footnote 78} Of these last four letters, Boas writes that they “throw very little additional light on academic stage-history”; the entire correspondence with Gentili is mentioned only in a footnote by Young, who says that it constitutes nothing more than a “highly technical continuation” of the controversy between Rainolds and Gager. ^{Footnote 79} On the contrary, however, this portion of Rainolds’s correspondence elucidates with remarkable depth and originality a central issue: the infringement of dramatic performance upon academic life and, in particular, oratorical practice.

A few pages into his first letter to Gentili, Rainolds calls attention to a portion of his opponent’s thinking that he finds particularly distasteful. “With the example of Theophrastus,” Rainolds writes, “who taught in school and employed every gesture appropriate to the matter which he treated so that the extended tongue licked his lips when he described the glutton, you demonstrate that the dramatic art is necessary for the orator.” ^{Footnote 80} The last part of this assertion—that dramatic technique is a necessary component of oratory—is one with which Rainolds takes serious issue. He cites two ancient authors, Quintilian and Macrobius, whose authority refutes this point. ^{Footnote 81} The issue to which Rainolds calls attention is hardly novel, and it is one on which Quintilian is indeed firm. According to his Institutio Oratoria, the sum of what an orator learns from an actor should be strictly limited to the realm of delivery. ^{Footnote 82} To this point in the correspondence, Rainolds has clearly drawn heavily on Quintilian, who fears that too much exposure to the actor’s art will lead students to imitate the vices an actor portrays. ^{Footnote 83} While Quintilian recognizes the rhetorical skills an orator can learn from an actor, he is adamant in his distinction between the two professions, and clear in his desire to prevent orators from engaging in any sort of theatrical practice. The ultimate fear is that an orator, lacking the appropriate weightiness, should seem to resemble an actor. He makes clear that orators should “keep well clear of staginess and of anything excessive in facial expression.” ^{Footnote 84} That “staginess” should be permitted to enter the realm of oratorical delivery is to be avoided at all costs.

The desire to keep oratory and theater separate derives from Cicero, in whose De Oratore the character Crassus makes the distinction extremely clear. Oratorical gesture should be “borrowed not from the stage and the theatrical profession but from the parade ground or even from wrestling”; the gesture he suggests for orators is specifically “not stagy.” ^{Footnote 85} Cicero is careful to limit the extent to which orators should make use of theatrical technique, fearing that, as Catherine Steel writes, “inappropriate use of gestures and language which seemed too actorly could compromise [orators’] dignity and thus their effectiveness.” ^{Footnote 86} While orators dealt in authenticity, actors dealt in counterfeiting; one form of performance was based in truth, the other in fiction. In a recent study, Adrian Streete suggests that resistance to the early modern theater involved fears about “the wiles of the orators”: “An actor was dangerous precisely because he used the tools of rhetoric . . . to persuade the viewer of the veracity of the imitation.” ^{Footnote 87} This is an important observation, as rhetorical proficiency certainly heightened fears about the believability of mimetic representation. In the academic setting, however, the tools of the actor were dangerous for the orator, as Rainolds feared that budding orators would be trained in the likeness of actors, thus diminishing their dignity, effectiveness, and capacity for speaking truth.

This issue is developed further in the first of Gentili’s unpublished letters to Rainolds. ^{Footnote 88} Gentili is perseverant in his desire to defend acting on the grounds of oratorical usefulness, and he states at greater length his point about the similarities between dramatic and oratorical practice: “The very essence of the stage is the representation of persons, and the representation of persons is not vicious. For even the orator represents persons—although not theatrically, as you think that I said, but rhetorically. Likewise the professor represents persons in lectures, not theatrically but scholastically.” ^{Footnote 89} If drama is based in the art of representation—which is, in Gentili’s view, the same art used by academic orators and professors—then it cannot be illicit, given the obvious permissibility of scholarly orations and lectures. But none of this, in his view, has anything to do with theatrical practice: Gentili, like Gager, is willing to bring dramatic practice into the academic realm because he sees it as distinct from the art of the professional actor. Academic acting is permissible because, for them, it is simply another form of scholarly discourse, alongside lectures, disputations, and any other form of academic performance. It is as acceptable within the university as any of those exercises because it is an activity entirely separate from professional playing.

Rainolds was inflamed by this argument, and he replied forcefully in his letter of January 1594 that Gentili’s distinction was unfounded. Citing Ulpian and Cicero, Rainolds argues that it is not required for those entering the stage to perform multiple times before they become histriones. Having thus established that academic actors are indeed stage players, Rainolds continues on to what he perceives as Gentili’s main point, as quoted above—that “dramatic art is necessary for the orator.” In refuting this notion, Rainolds puts forth a bizarre analogy: “Whereas the essence of the stage, you say, is the representation of persons, but the representation of persons is not immoral, since both the orator and the professor represent. In this you seem to me to prattle just like any of those who as best as they can adorn and clothe apes in the manner of men . . . deceiving those who are unskilled or inattentive, so that the ape is hailed as human.” ^{Footnote 90} Such a deceiver, according to Rainolds, would argue that “the animal is the essence of the ape; but the animal is not devoid of reason; for both the man and the child are animals.” ^{Footnote 91} “Do you think by that logic,” Rainolds asks sharply, “that the monkey is proven to be not devoid of reason?” ^{Footnote 92} Rainolds’s comparison is peculiar, but essentially understands Gentili to be claiming that theater is not immoral because the essence of theater—that is, the representation of persons—is practiced by those whom all agree to be respectable, such as orators and professors. According to Rainolds, that would be tantamount to saying that apes are not devoid of reason because the essence of the ape—that is, the condition of being an animal—is also practiced by those who obviously have reason, such as humans. The analogy is convoluted, but the message is clear: just as oratorical and theatrical representation must be kept separate, so too must oratorical training be kept separate from dramatic performances within the university.

Numerous scholars have addressed the regular exchange between oratory and drama, bringing forth the particularly close relationship between these two forms of performance in the Renaissance educational setting. ^{Footnote 93} Rainolds’s argument fervently opposes that relationship, insisting that rhetorical and theatrical presentation remain firmly divided within his university. Antitheatricalists commonly feared drama’s ability to blur the boundary between fiction and reality; Rainolds worried that the position propounded by Gager and Gentili threatened to blur the boundary between academic drama and academic oratory. His principal fear was not simply that students would imitate the vices depicted onstage, although this too was a major concern. It was that university students being trained as orators in preparation for careers in service of the church would develop the habits of actors in their manner of rhetorical delivery. The equation of theater with university exercises effectively placed academic oratory and academic drama under the same heading, conflating the categories that Rainolds was laboring to keep distinct. In Rainolds’s view, the inclusive university program envisioned by his protheatrical opponents allowed orators to essentially become actors, risking their transformation from persuasive, decorous speakers into dissembling, dishonorable performers. For Rainolds, therefore, unlike so many of his contemporaries, drama was not a suitable aid to rhetorical training, but rather a hindrance, threatening not only the curriculum but also the very foundation of the university itself.

Spectacle and Entertainment: The Hypocrisy of Gager’s Plays

In refuting the notion that dramatic art is necessary for the orator, Rainolds cites two ancient sources, Quintilian and Macrobius. His discussion of Quintilian is largely unsurprising, given Quintilian’s authority on matters of education and rhetoric, as well as his importance to Rainolds’s argument about the separation between oratory and drama. Rainolds’s mention of Macrobius, however, is more unusual. The passage he cites from Macrobius’s Saturnalia, a wide-ranging ancient dialogue, concerns a theatrical-performance competition that took place during Caesar’s Victory Games in 46 BCE. ^{Footnote 94} Caesar commanded that Decimus Laberius, an eques Romanus, participate in the competition; Laberius was resentful of the request, leading him to lash out onstage by directing a “caustic remark” toward Caesar. ^{Footnote 95} The whole affair was characterized by disorder and insubordination: Caesar compromised the status of a high-ranking citizen, and Laberius sharply scorned his superior in return. The story captures the undisciplined nature of Roman ludi, or games, occasions on which lavish spectacles—horse races, animal hunts, and stage plays (ludi scaenici)—were sanctioned for the enjoyment of the vulgar crowd. Like Greek games, they appeared in many different forms and were often, though not always, held in conjunction with state-run religious festivals. As Macrobius’s story implies, however, their primary purpose was entertainment rather than worship. The presence of this highly specific reference in his first letter to Gentili suggests a connection in Rainolds’s mind between these ancient events and the dramatic performances taking place within his university.

Rainolds’s interest in ancient games and festivals was extensive and long-standing, as two scarcely known pieces of archival evidence attest. The first appears in an undated manuscript tract responding to the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Sanders (ca. 1530–81), whose De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani (On the origin and progress of the Anglican schism, 1585) had caught Rainolds’s attention. In his response, Rainolds presents a characteristically learned argument against the notion that the English Reformation constituted a heretical act. He compares Sanders’s accusations against the English to those leveled historically against Christians, calling attention to a particular passage written by the Byzantine historian Zosimus, whose aversion to Christianity earned him the rebuke of several Christian writers. Rainolds deplores Zosimus, who condemns the Roman emperor Constantine for his acceptance of Christianity: “Zosimus argued that the Emperor Constantine brought about the subversion and the ruin of the Roman Empire with his impiety, because embracing the Christian faith he neglected to worship the gods with sacred families and secular games.” ^{Footnote 96} Rainolds chastises Zosimus for his criticism of Constantine, and specifically for the faith he places in “secular games.” The specific reference here is to the ludi saeculares, a pagan festival held in ancient Rome that featured, among other forms of entertainment, theatrical performances. These were occasions of great celebration and debauchery: as Zosimus records only a few pages away from the anecdote about Constantine, the ludi saeculares were advertised to the Roman people as “a spectacle, such as they had never witnessed and never would again.” ^{Footnote 97}

The second piece of evidence appears in a manuscript notebook, a portion of which Lawrence Green has identified as Rainolds’s lecture notes on various themes, including the works of Cicero and Pindar. ^{Footnote 98} Green makes no mention, however, of the two folios occupied by what appear to be notes for a lecture on ancient festivals and games. ^{Footnote 99} Here, Rainolds cites discussions of the topic in a variety of ancient texts, including, among numerous others, Strabo’s Geography and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities. ^{Footnote 100} Although these notes, like others in the volume, mainly consist of what Green calls “rough and cryptic jottings,” they confirm an extensive knowledge of the subject as well as the literature surrounding it. ^{Footnote 101} Rainolds’s preoccupation with these ancient occasions was thus significant enough that he was at some point preparing to deliver an academic lecture on them; although their date of composition is uncertain, the notes probably date from his time as Greek reader at Corpus Christi, Oxford, during the 1570s. ^{Footnote 102} Taken alongside Rainolds’s response to Sanders, these notes suggest that pagan entertainment was a topic to which Rainolds devoted significant attention at different stages throughout his career. Rainolds’s abiding interest would have its greatest bearing upon his correspondence with Gager, where he aimed to highlight the similar motivations behind Gager’s plays and the spectacular theatrical festivities of the ancient world.

While arguing in his second letter to Gager that theatrical performers were infamous in classical antiquity, ^{Footnote 103} Rainolds refers to the performance of plays on festival occasions such as the feast of Bacchus. Even though actors were condemned in society, Rainolds says, the ancients still allowed theatrical performance amid such occasions. He uses the example of how Aristotle banished “all unseemely speeches and spectacles out of his commo[n]wealth,” but still allowed festival performances “done in the honour of [the heathens’] Gods.” ^{Footnote 104} The main reference here is to the end of book 7 of Aristotle’s Politics, in which the author’s subject is the rearing of children. Aristotle forbids children from attending dramatic performances, fearing the potential corruption brought by early exposure to the sights and sounds of theatrical performance. ^{Footnote 105} Much like Rainolds, Aristotle recognizes the potential harm of the theater, aiming to shield the young from “indecency of speech” and urging the legislator always to “banish pictures or speeches from the stage which are indecent.” ^{Footnote 106} Despite this prohibition, however, Aristotle makes a specific exemption for those spectacular shows that were put on as part of pagan religious celebrations. ^{Footnote 107} Children should under no circumstances be permitted to attend these indecent performances, as Aristotle recognizes their “evil influences”; but he still maintains their permissibility for those of mature age during pagan festival occasions. ^{Footnote 108}

Following in the path of several church fathers, Rainolds detects hypocrisy in Aristotle’s exemption of these spectacular performances. The ancients, Rainolds writes, “thought it a necessarie devotion to sett them out, a statelie magnificence to sett them out bravelie; yet did they repute the plays thereof infamous.” ^{Footnote 109} In support of this claim, Rainolds cites Tertullian, the often acerbic writer of Christian antiquity, who argues in his De Spectaculis that Christians should avoid games and theatrical shows on account of their immorality, religious perversion, and basis in pagan ritual. The purpose of the section Rainolds cites is quite specific. After reciting a litany of contradictory behaviors, Tertullian declares: “These are the inconsistencies of men; it is thus they confuse and interchange the nature of good and evil, swayed by the fickleness of feeling, the wavering of judgement.” ^{Footnote 110} In citing this section of Tertullian alongside Aristotle, Rainolds’s purpose is clear: to highlight the hypocrisy of the ancients in recognizing the infamy of plays but still allowing their performance during festivals. Thus this section of Th’overthrow calls attention to Rainolds’s specific interest not only in the impermissibility of stage plays, but in stage plays deemed licit because of their participation in a spectacular, festival tradition. ^{Footnote 111} Herein lies the very essence of his argument against Gager’s plays: just as Tertullian condemned the ancients for allowing theatrical performances under certain circumstances—that is, during infrequent festival occasions—so too is Rainolds condemning Gager’s hypocrisy in recognizing the immorality of stage plays but still allowing them to take place during occasions like the 1592 Shrovetide festival.

Gager’s career, in fact, was based around these sorts of festival occasions. The earliest known performance of one of his plays, the neoclassical tragedy Meleager, occurred in 1582 during what has been identified as “a co-ordinated festival of drama” that involved at least seven theatrical performances at multiple Oxford colleges. ^{Footnote 112} Elaborate entertainments staged the following year during the visit of the Polish dignitary Alberto Laski included Gager’s tragedy Dido, which he was commissioned to write at short notice. ^{Footnote 113} Meleager was revived in 1585 in front of an audience that included, among other notables, the Earls of Pembroke and Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney. When Elizabeth returned to Oxford in 1592, university authorities turned to Gager, hoping that he would impress her with the kinds of extratextual elaborations that, as will be discussed below, had come to define his body of work—Senecan ghosts, descending deities, and remarkable special effects. Gager’s dramatic motivations at Christ Church were not unique: as Marion Turner observes with regards to Magdalen, the occasions for the increasingly secular theatrical performances at that college also “changed from religious festivals to the visits of dignitaries.” ^{Footnote 114} Gager’s plays were therefore emblematic of a larger trend in the purpose of playing throughout the university.

Although Gager’s works were ostensibly straightforward adaptations of classical texts, he incorporated tremendous spectacle into their presentation. He added songs and supernatural figures in order to appeal to the aural and visual sensibilities of his audience. Dido presents the best example, thanks to the survival of a contemporary account of its 1583 performance in Raphael Holinshed’s (1529–80) Chronicles. According to Holinshed’s report, which allows great insight into how Gager’s play functioned onstage, “the queenes banket (with Eneas narration of the destruction of Troie) was liuelie described in a marchpaine patterne, there was also a goodlie sight of hunters with full crie of a kennell of hounds, Mercurie and Iris descending and ascending from and to an high place, the tempest wherein it hailed small confects, rained rosewater, and snew an artificiall kind of snow, all strange, maruellous, & abundant.” ^{Footnote 115} This vividly detailed description represents the only surviving contemporary account of the play, likely derived from an audience member who witnessed the performance firsthand. Two of the stage effects mentioned are found in the text of the play—the marzipan (“marchpaine”) dessert visually depicting the fall of Troy, and the tempest, apparently complete with real rain and synthetic snow. According to Holinshed, however, the performance was even more spectacular than the printed text allows: the “full crie of a kennell of hounds” is directly reminiscent of an effect employed during Queen Elizabeth’s visit in 1566, while the descent of the godly figures foreshadows one of the entertainments produced for her visit in 1592. ^{Footnote 116} Remarkably, Holinshed’s description of Dido does not mention the text at all—there is nothing substantial about the play’s Virgilian source, the characters, or the obvious parallels between the titular heroine and the reigning English monarch. Holinshed’s account suggests that the most memorable part of the evening was not the text of the classical adaptation, but rather the spectacular elements employed for Laski’s amusement.

Gager was not alone in his abundant employment of spectacle. As Magdalen (which, along with Christ Church and St. John’s, was one of the leading producers of collegiate drama in sixteenth-century Oxford) continued its long-standing theatrical tradition from the 1560s through the 1580s, the performances listed in the college accounts began to sometimes denote not just comedies or tragedies, as had long been the case, but “spectacles.” ^{Footnote 117} This was also how Edward Gellibrand, a fellow of the college, referred to theatrical entertainments that he found offensive, which were enumerated along with other transgressions in a manuscript dubbed “A list of College abuses laid before the Chancellor.” ^{Footnote 118} His objections are comprehensive, ranging from the improper election of fellows to the illicit removal of books from the library. He condemns in particular Magdalen’s financial officers for “spending money on plaies, entertainment of great men,” shortly thereafter expressing disapproval for members of the college “resorting to . . . Spectacles.” ^{Footnote 119}

Rainolds’s surviving works from this period, which often express concern about the deteriorating state of university culture in general, likewise reflect a concern about the increasingly spectacular quality of plays. Writing to a student of divinity in the 1580s, for example, Rainolds outlines the path toward a godly life in the church while also chastising him for partaking in unseemly activities, including “sweet inticeme[n]ts of the flesh, seeing of vain spectacles, overmuch eating & drinking, banqueting, freque[n]ting of the town, deliting in vanity, resorting to tavernes, forgetting the word of God.” ^{Footnote 120} The language used to refer to dramatic performance here echoes Rainolds’s earlier Sex Theses de Sacra Scriptura et Ecclesia (Six theses concerning holy scripture and the church, 1580), which contains the first example of Rainolds’s aversion to drama in print. Lamenting the degraded state of education, Rainolds urges his readers to “destroy those temptations that lure men away from their studies,” including “theatrical spectacles” in a catalogue of enticements similar to those listed above. ^{Footnote 121} Spectacular entertainments had no intellectual or religious value: as Aristotle writes in his Poetics, spectacle “is emotionally potent but falls quite outside the art and is not integral to poetry . . . the costumier’s art has more scope than the poet’s for rendering effects of spectacle.” ^{Footnote 122} Despite Gager’s assertions to the contrary, Rainolds maintains his support for poetic recitation, objecting only to the theatrical elaborations that performance entailed. ^{Footnote 123} Gager’s dramatic productions were consistently outweighed by the spectacle accompanying them, bringing his plays into the same category as those spectacles Zosimus mentioned as being advertised for the Roman games. Rainolds felt that his university was becoming increasingly infected by a form of theatrical presentation that was more interested in the entertainment value of stagecraft than in academic edification.

These concerns were eloquently expressed by Rainolds’s colleague and fellow Reformer Laurence Humphrey (1527?–1590), who became president of Magdalen in 1561. Humphrey had been a vigorous proponent of academic drama in the early years of his presidency, actively inviting and engaging with its performance—particularly plays with a specific relation to Protestantism, such as those of John Bale and John Foxe. ^{Footnote 124} In his 1582 Ash Wednesday sermon, however, Humphrey’s sentiment was quite different. Speaking of the aforementioned play festival in which Gager made his theatrical debut, Humphrey begins his address with an exhortation: “Enough already, enough, listeners, have we amused (our) ears and eyes with theatrical shows; enough have we seen, have we heard of masks . . . and of ghosts; enough have we indulged comic laughter and tragic sorrow.” ^{Footnote 125} He urges his audience to move beyond amusement and indulgence toward a thoughtful search for illumination, hoping they will “pass from playful things to serious . . . from the profane to the sacred, from plays to the very search for and training in truth.” ^{Footnote 126} A generation earlier, Humphrey had been an instrumental proponent of university drama, yet he is uneasy about allowing performances to proceed in their current state, apparently divorced from religious solemnity and sacred truth. He implores his audience to search for plays’ morals and lessons, which had been obscured by the kinds of “ornate” elements that would only grow throughout Gager’s decade-long career. ^{Footnote 127} Given Humphrey’s own investment in academic drama earlier in his career, these remarks are emblematic of a major shift in the university’s theatrical culture.

Scholars of the English Reformation and its aftermath have argued that the antitheatricalists’ severest disapproval in the late sixteenth century was reserved for religious drama. ^{Footnote 128} Although the stage had earlier been a powerful tool for Protestantism, from roughly the late 1570s onward, it was no longer considered appropriate to combine sacred matters with theatrical practice. As Streete summarizes: “Writers attempted to highlight the fundamental incompatibility of human and divine signs in relation to the secular stage.” ^{Footnote 129} As Protestant attitudes toward drama shifted sharply, hardline opponents of the theater found the presence of sacred material on the secular stage particularly offensive and aimed for its complete removal. At the University of Oxford, however, the shift that occurred in the same period was precisely the opposite. The concern Humphrey articulated in 1582 was not the presence of sacred material onstage, but rather that the sacred material onstage was not prominent enough. The Christian lessons supposedly motivating the performances were being obscured by theatrical machinery; Humphrey aimed not to eradicate religious themes, but rather to emphasize them, and to shed the excessive material encasing them. This opposition to the newly extravagant, irreligious performances of the academic stage is at the heart of Rainolds’s attack against Gager, whose lavish theatrical productions were the leading offenders. For Rainolds, as for Humphrey, profane spectacle obscured truth. Rainolds’s aversion to ancient spectacle implies that his objection was not to the mixture of drama with Christianity, but rather to the aspects of pagan entertainment that had overtaken university performances. Gager’s plays had been overwhelmed by spectacle; their primary aim was not to teach, but to entertain.

Beneath Rainolds’s attack, therefore, lay a massive shift in the purpose and the nature of university theatrical performances between Elizabeth’s two Oxford visits. As the university’s leading dramatist, Gager was emblematic of this shift: he was repeatedly called upon not to edify audiences of students, but rather to impress audiences of dignitaries. To Rainolds, who had long been interested in festival occasions, his opponent’s plays resembled heathen performances in that they were spectacular, entertaining, and divorced from Christian worship. They also participated in the same sort of hypocrisy as the ancients, in that Rainolds felt they were being falsely defended. Hypocrisy was a major topic for those writing against the stage: the theater was dangerous because it allowed actors, in the words of Prynne, to “seeme that in outward appearance which they are not in truth.” ^{Footnote 130} It was in a similar spirit that Rainolds attacked the university stage. In addition to concerns about the pretending and the dissembling that theatrical performance involved, he detected a substantial discrepancy between Gager’s plays and the grounds on which they were being outwardly defended. As professional drama came under attack, Gager’s plays were allowed to continue under the guise of edification, even as their academic and religious goals had been left behind.

Conclusion

The concerns that motivated John Rainolds’s attack upon the stage differed from those of his antitheatrical contemporaries. His opposition to the theater arose not simply due to an increase in religious fervor, nor was its prime intention a general condemnation of dramatic performance. It was driven instead, as this essay suggests, by a specific desire to prevent students from engaging in an activity that, especially in its current form, stood in opposition to Rainolds’s idea of a university education. His citation of Macrobius alongside Quintilian confirms that his fears about the increasingly spectacular quality of plays were linked with those about how plays might infringe upon oratory, factors which in combination Rainolds perceived as a serious peril to both the university and its young inhabitants. The greatest threat to their disciplined training was not, in Rainolds’s view, the professional playing companies banned by university officials. It was allowing students to watch and participate in dramatic performance within university walls.

Rainolds’s attack did little to prevent the university stage from flourishing. The frequency of academic performances actually increased during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, ^{Footnote 131} and plays remained integral components of royal visits and other important Oxford occasions until the outbreak of civil war. Rainolds’s attack was also unsuccessful in changing the terms of debate, in England or elsewhere: nearly a century after the publication of Th’overthrow, as the French querelle du théâtre was fully underway, academic drama was repeatedly defended by religious moralists as an edifying exercise entirely separate from professional theater. ^{Footnote 132} Despite its inefficacy, however, Rainolds’s dispute with Gager and Gentili produced the deepest and most extensive exploration of the question of whether drama belonged in the university. Their exploration is certainly not applicable to every Renaissance academic setting: this essay has shown that Rainolds’s attack arose in response to a specific opponent and the theatrical culture he represented. While Rainolds’s situation at the University of Oxford is unique, however, the study undertaken here urges greater attention to the particular contexts—institutional, religious, temporal, and otherwise—in which debates about drama emerged in England and across Europe. Careful consideration of these circumstances promises a more complete picture not only of early modern attacks upon the theater, but also of the dramatic cultures that inspired them.