This book is a ground-breaking study of theater's controversial and contradictory place in the social transformations of the Tudor and Stuart period. In language both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, the author examines the gap between the overheated attacks on the stage and the theater's actual role in class, gender, and sexual conflict.

Jean E Howard, PH D (University of Michigan)

1 RENAISSANCE THEATER AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THEATRICAL PRACTICE A brief for political criticism 2 "SATHANS SYNAGOGUE" The theater as constructed by its enemies 3 ANTITHEATRICALITY STAGED The workings of ideology in Dekker's The Whore of Babylon Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing 4 THE MATERIALITY OF IDEOLOGY Women as spectators, spectacles, and paying customers in the English public theatre 5 POWER AND EROS Crossdressing in dramatic representation and theatrical 6 KINGS AND PRETENDERS Monarchical theatricality in the Shakespearean history play.