Along with the English dramatic criticism of Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham, that of Stephen Gosson was the most significant in the sixteenth century, and there is considerable evidence that it was more popular and at least as widely known. Gosson's criticism is important to intellectual and literary history, partly because he argued as coherently, concisely, and forcefully as any the reasons why many Elizabethans were dissatisfied with drama and in general distrusted all poetry, and partly because in isolating all the basic issues in his day he initiated one of the central critical debates in all of English literature. Writing a year or two after Richard Burbage opened his Theater in Southwark--where Gosson had his own plays staged--he attacked plays so decisively that his School of Abuse (1579) went through several editions, each in fifteen hundred copies, and called forth many plays and pamphlets in response. Even...