SOURCE: “Staging Government: Shakespeare's Life of King Henry the Eighth and the Government of Generations,” in Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 1, Winter, 1999, pp. 41-65.

In the following essay, Glimp discusses the interaction between political authority and anxieties regarding theatrical representation in the Elizabethan period, particularly in relation to Shakespeare's Henry VIII.

From the very earliest moments of their emergence in the late 1570s, England's popular stages prompted fears that they were multiplying out of control. This was the case not only insofar as some people—including at one point Queen Elizabeth and her privy councilors—worried that the structures were growing too numerous and consequently that most should be torn down;¹ it was also the case insofar as the theater's most vocal opponents understood the institution to be capable of producing unruly hordes of dissolute persons. The anti-theatricalists argued that the theater did more than simply provide a venue for...