William Shakespeare (1564-1616) lived in a naughty time and worked in a naughty business. As he began his career in London, sometime in the late 1580s, civic leaders and religious authorities considered the theater extremely disreputable and even dangerous. In 1594, the Lord Mayor of London pleaded with Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council to tear down all the theaters, for they were "places of meeting for all vagrant persons and masterless men that hang about the City, thieves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, cozeners [cheaters], cony-catching persons [con men], practicers of treason, and other such like." (Gurr, 134)

Because London's city fathers were so vehemently opposed to the business, theatrical impresarios had to locate their playhouses beyond the reach of the aldermen. So they set up shop in seedy nearby suburbs ("liberties"), side by side with ale-houses, bordellos, and bear-baiting arenas.

The mayor had a point. The crowds at Elizabethan amphitheaters included a conspicuous number of idlers, ruffians, thieves, and prostitutes; the plays they watched (including Shakespeare's) were often violent, provocative, and bawdy. As far as London's authorities were concerned, playhouses were dens of potential crime, riot, and treason. In the eyes of many others, the whole experience was harmful to public morals.

Joining city leaders in the crusade against playhouses were Puritans and other conservative moralists. Their problem with the theaters went beyond public behavior to the larger problem of the moral influence. Plays had been defined for centuries-for a millennium-as a form of instruction; they please, but they also teach. By depicting virtue rewarded and vice punished, plays provide not only moral precepts but also patterns for better behavior. The Puritan critic Phillip Stubbes turns this argument on its head, and shakes it violently, in his antitheatrical tract The Anatomie of Abuses (1583):

You say there are good Examples to be learned in [plays]. Truly, so there are: if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, lie, and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh, and leer, to grin, to nod, and mow; if you will learn to play the vice, to swear, tear, and blaspheme both Heaven and Earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to devirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, flay, kill, pick, steal, rob, and row; if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures, to practice idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery; if you will learn to deride, scoff, mock, & flout, to flatter & smooth; if you will learn to play the whoremaster, the glutton, drunkard, or incestuous person; if you will learn to become proud, haughty, & arrogant; and, finally, if you will learn to contemn God and all his laws, to care neither for heaven nor hell, and to commit all kind of sin and mischief, you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays.

Modernized and slightly polished, this tirade would nicely suit our own self-appointed moral guardians as they rail against the evils of Hollywood. You may be wondering at this point why the government didn't simply shut the theaters down and save everyone a lot of trouble. The answer is that the Crown, that is, the monarch and her courtiers, found the public theaters useful. The drama's inherent persuasive power-its ability to make action look real-could serve the government's interests as much as anyone's. Numerous Elizabethan plays celebrated pious and patriotic values; the Crown may have regarded the favor as cheaply purchased, if the price was only a little titillation.

Besides, courtly audiences enjoyed titillation too. Many of the same plays Shakespeare's company staged for the public were also performed at court, where professional acting companies provided the main entertainment. If the queen or any of her cohorts ever objected to what they saw, we don't know about it. Not that playwrights could get away with anything; as we shall soon see, certain material was deemed off-limits. But as for broader complaints about the immorality of plays and the dangers of playgoing, the government largely brushed them off.

Stubbes was obviously a crank, but that's not the only reason the Court ignored him. The monarch required not just entertainment, but high-quality entertainment-that is, plays that had been tested and refined in performance, and players who were limber and well-rehearsed. Both Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) and her successor King James I (reigned 1603-25) were connoisseurs of the drama, and they would hardly have deprived themselves of crack performers by allowing the theaters to be closed. And while acting companies were paid handsomely for their courtly appearances, they had largely to support themselves. So playing to the public both kept them in practice and kept them in business.

On the other hand, while neither as paranoid as the mayor nor as puritanical as Stubbes, the Crown did agree that both players and playhouses had to be controlled. In times of plague or a serious political crisis, the government did close down the theaters, occasionally for extended periods. (Shakespeare wrote most of his poetry while the playhouses were shuttered in 1593.) Only in James's reign were adult players allowed back into London (where boys' companies had performed for a few years), and even then they were confined to smaller and more exclusive "private" halls. This compromise with city authorities lasted until 1642, when antitheatrical Puritan parliamentarians, having overthrown King Charles I, shut down all the theaters for twenty years.

Actors and other public performers were also subjected to official control. In the eyes of the law, they were little better than what the mayor called "vagrant persons and masterless men." This meant that to practice their trade they first had to find a "master," that is, a sponsor with a peerage. Shakespeare's company, for example, was sponsored in the years 1596-1603 by George Carey, Baron Hunsdon, who became Elizabeth's lord chamberlain. Thus they were known as "the Lord Chamberlain His Servants" or, more briefly, "the Lord Chamberlain's Men." (After 1603, King James adopted the company as his own, and they thus became "the King's Men.")

By tying the company's survival to the good graces of a powerful government official, the Crown more or less kept the players in line. But just to make sure, it required that all plays first be approved, and if necessary censored, by the Master of Revels, who booked entertainment at court and oversaw public spectacles. What was not acceptable for public consumption tended to vary with the political climate and the particular Master of Revels; but "sedition and heresy" would be a rough definition.

While censorship is a dirty word in the U.S., the British government has often found it a useful and flexible tool. The British public seems to live with it, having no special taste for things such as libel and incendiary speech. Preventing religious or political violence may take precedence over free discourse-whether it be the discourse of a playwright or the discourse of a guerrilla. The crowds at Shakespeare's theaters were reportedly given to emotional moods, and one can understand that the government might want to prevent their getting too emotional about extremely hot subjects.

One shouldn't confuse the idea of what is "dangerous" with the idea of what is "offensive." Elizabethans took personal insults very seriously, but they had a very different notion of personal offense. (It appears to have been a rather small notion, given the paltry evidence for it.) As we'll see in "Lost Scenes from Shakespeare's Histories" (page 51), the Master of Revels expunged a number of the Bard's politically sensitive scenes. But he apparently had no complaints about Shakespeare's "dirty" language ("talk of bawdy love and venery," as Stubbes put it). This may strike the reader as curious, and we shall return to the puzzle shortly.

One special case of "offensive" language was eventually barred, both from the stage and from print. Prior to 1606, published works were policed by the ecclesiastical courts, whose mandate paralleled that of the Master of Revels-they were mostly looking for sedition and heresy. The religious authorities weren't even as efficient and consistent as the Revels Office, but presumably printed matter required less scrutiny. It's one thing to stage the deeds (and misdeeds) of kings before a gaping illiterate crowd, and another thing entirely to present them for the sophisticated reflection of a literate elite.

In any case, the year 1606 brought a new act that consolidated these disparate censorial duties under the Revels Office. Titled the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, it also augmented the list of prohibited subjects with "jestingly or profanely" invoking "the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost or of the Trinity." All by itself, this act radically reduced the verbal impact of a few of Shakespeare's characters-such as Sir John Falstaff and Ancient Pistol-who were wretchedly profane in texts before 1606, and only terribly profane thereafter. (See "'God's Lid' and Other Offensive Oaths," page 79.)

Not that there was tons of material in Shakespeare's work blatant enough to censor. The Bard was a professional, and he was no dummy; he certainly had a fairly good idea of what would fly and what wouldn't. On the other hand, he sometimes pushed the limits, partly perhaps to test their extent, but mostly for the sake of maximum excitement. The thrills of conflict and controversy kept the crowds returning for more.

Shakespeare usually sidestepped the censor, but he managed to keep his plays emotionally provocative. His philosophical musings and soaring speeches are regularly punctuated by violence, slapstick, personal abuse, passionate outbursts, bawdy episodes, and other material we now find more "offensive" than anything the censor cut. Shakespeare's England, in the midst of a cultural renaissance and newly embarked on New World conquests, was full of energy, ambition, and newfound wealth. But it was also unsettled, violent, skeptical, and often paranoid. For better or for worse, it was a very dramatic age, a time when all the world seemed a stage.

This also meant that one was always in a sense "on display." Shakespeare's contemporaries were much less solitary, less interior, and (dare I say) less repressed than we are today. Scholars debate whether an Elizabethan would have understood what we mean by "privacy" (or even by "self"), but nobody doubts that it was a more fulsome, explicit, and demonstrative age.

Later commentators would deplore Elizabethans as "rude" and "unsophisticated," which meant that they had different standards of social and verbal propriety. But while it took more to offend them, Shakespeare's contemporaries were not entirely lacking in decency. Certain sorts of behavior and language were seen even then as low-class or puerile, and most of the powerful four-letter words had been tabooed for centuries.

Elizabethan propriety had mostly to do with class: it was a code of what certain sorts of people should and shouldn't do or say. What people were willing to hear is another matter entirely.Verbal extravagance, violence, bile, and bawdy were hallmarks of literature high and low. Passion, corruption, disease, and death were handled boldly and frankly. Scenes of anguish, terror, and lust were played to audiences of both sexes and all classes.

Even children were brought to the theaters, and many of the tradesmen's apprentices who flocked there were in their early teens. Though their bourgeois husbands were known to discourage them, city wives still ventured to the suburbs. This was a time when women and children were spared the sort of coddling they'd receive thereafter. By the 18th century, English society had evolved more "modern" notions of decency, and gentlemen better understood what was fit for ladies and children (especially daughters) to know.

The profanities excised from Shakespeare's texts were initially just those involving the deity-"God's bread," "'Zounds," and the like (page 79). By the turn of the 18th century, other defects had become more glaring, and they would be omitted from Shakespearean adaptations and later from the Bard's original texts, as they were revived. Critics and dramaturgs generally agreed that Shakespeare was much more presentable without the regrettable "barbarities" of language and action to which, as a rude Elizabethan, he was prone.