Title:  Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704)

Author:  Anonymous

Release Date:  April 19, 2005 [EBook #15656]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Series Three:  Essays on the Stage

No. 2 Anon., Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704) and Anon., Some thoughts Concerning the Stage (1704)

With an Introduction by
Emmett L. Avery
and
a Bibliographical Note

Announcement of Publications for the Second Year

The Augustan Reprint Society
March, 1947
Price:  75c

General Editors:  Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;
Edward N. Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los
Angeles 24, California.

Membership in the Augustan Reprint Society entitles the subscriber to six publications issued each year.  The annual membership fee is $2.50.  Address subscriptions and communications to the Augustan Reprint Society, in care of one of the General Editors.

Editorial Advisors:  Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan; James L. Clifford, Columbia University; Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska; Cleanth Brooks, Louisiana State University; Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago; James R. Sutherland, Queen Mary College, University of London; Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington; Samuel Monk, Southwestern University.

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INTRODUCTION

Within two or three years after the appearance in 1698 of Jeremy Collier’s ’A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage’, the bitter exchanges of reply and counter-reply to the charges of gross licentiousness in the London theaters had subsided.  The controversy, however, was by no means ended, and around 1704 it flared again in a resurgence of attacks upon the stage.  Among the tracts opposing the theaters was an anonymous pamphlet entitled ’A Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage’, a piece which was published early in 1704 and which appeared in three editions before the end of that year.