“Of Stage-Plays, and Interludes, with Their Wickedness”:

A Selection from Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583)

A Critical Introduction and Annotated Edition

by Carrie Blais, University of British Columbia-Okanagan

THE LIFE OF PHILIP STUBBES (?1550-?1610)

Philip Stubbes [Stubbs], pamphleteer and poet, was born in or after 1550 and died sometime during or after 1610 (Walsham). Hiscareer as a writer is thought to have begun in the 1580s, and by 1590 Gabriel Harvey[1] and Thomas Nashe[2] reckoned Stubbes as one of the “common Pamfletters of London” (Walsham). It appears that Stubbes considered himself a “gentleman,” since he called himself this in his published works; however, it is not certain whether he did so for strictly literary purposes, or out of social pretensions. It has been said that Stubbes attended Cambridge for a short time but “having a restless and hot head, left that university, rambled thro-several parts of the nation, and settle for a time in Oxon [i.e., Oxford]” (Walsham). However, there is no record stating this is indeed true.

Stubbes is best known for his book The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) in which he forcefully attacks “public and private English life, exposing the supposed abuses of Elizabethan society” (Kidnie). This book offers a dialogue between Philoponus, the educated, worldly traveler, and Spudeus, the country yokel (Kidnie). While taking a walk the two become deeply engaged in a discussion about Elizabethan society. In the chapter “Of Stage-Plays, and Interludes, with Their Wickedness,” Philoponus and Spudeus reveal an unyielding disapproval of the theatre because “otia dant vitia” (to quote Stubbes): ‘leisure leads to vice.’ Philoponus states that “whosoever abuses this work of our God on stages in plays and interludes, abuses the majesty of God, in the same, making a mocking stock of him, and purchases to himself eternal damnation” (Stubbes 141). The Anatomie of Abuses was an instant success having four editions published before 1595. Because this book was so popular Stubbes then produced a sequel which was called The Display of Corruptions, “a taxonomical analysis of the vices of various profession and estates” (Walsham). These books provided Stubbes with a reputation as “a puritan spoilsport and killjoy” and Thomas Nashe “accused him of being a ‘holy brother’ and ‘privy Martinist[3]’” (Walsham).

Stubbes married Katherine Emmes, daughter of William and Katherine Emmes of London, when Katherine was just 15 years of age. Katherine’s mother was Dutch, but her maiden name is not known. Katherine, however, was the youngest of six children. Katherine’s father died sometime in 1583 and she inherited his property. Stubbes referred to Katherine as “a perfect paterne of true Christianitie and a mirrour of womanhood. Modest, virtuous, and an avid reader of the scriptures” (Walsham). Interestingly, Katherine prophesied her own death. She unfortunately died of postnatal complications after the birth of their first son, John (Kidnie): “The parish registers of St Modwen’s Burton upon Trent,[4] confirm the baptism of John Stubbes on 17

November 1590 and the burial of Katherine on 14 December” (Kidnie).

Within six months of Katherine’s death, Stubbes produced a biography entitled “A Christal Glasse for Christian Women Containing, A most excellent Discourse, of the godly life and Christian death of Mistresse Katherine Stubs.” This pamphlet became more successful than the Abuses, reaching at least “twenty-four editions by 1637.” The following year Stubbes assembled a collected work of prayers under the title “A perfect Pathway to Felicitie, Conteining godly Meditations, and praiers, fit for all times.” Stubbes’s last pamphlet was titled “A motive to good workes,” which contains material much like that found in The Anatomie of Abuses (Kidnie).

ANTI-THEATRICALISTS AND THEIR DISAPPROVAL OF THE THEATRE

In “Of Stage-Plays, and Interludes, with Their Wickedness,” Stubbes aggressively condemns the theatre:

All stage-plays, interludes, and comedies are either of

divine or profane matter: If they be of divine matter,

then they are most intolerable, or rather sacrilegious;

for that the blessed word of God, is to be handled

reverently, gravely, and sagely, with veneration to the

glorious majesty of God, which shines therein, and not

scoffingly, floutingly, and jibingly, as it is upon stages

in plays and interludes, without any reverence, worship,

or veneration to the same (140)

Stubbes andhis fellow anti-theatricalists had one common, tormenting fear of the theatre, that it“could structurally transform men into women” (Levine 10). Stubbes believed that “male actors who wore women’s clothing could literally“‘adulterate’ male gender” (Levine 10). This fear of transforming genders seems absurd to the twenty-first century reader, but during the Elizabethan period, it plagued the minds of anti-theatricalists. One of Stubbes’s contemporaries and a fellow hater of the theatre, Stephen Gosson says:

The Law of God very straightly forbids men to put

on women’s garments, garments are set downe for

signes distinctive between sexe and sexe, to take unto

us those garments that are manifest signes of another

sexe, is to falsify, forge and adulterate, contrarie to the

expresse rule of the words of God. Which forbiddeth

it by threatening a curse unto the same. (qtd. in Levine 20)

For these writers, garments then signified that which is male and that which is female, and thus to “cross-dress” was considereddepravity or moral corruption; an evil, immoral, or wicked habit; oran indulgence in a degrading pleasure. The antitheatricalists’ vilification of those who confused these signs meant to distinguish man from woman in turn reveals an acute anxiety aboutthat which lies beneath the garments: “the self.”

HOW ANTI-THEATRICALISTS SAW THE “SELF”

Anti-theatricalists saw the self as “fixed and stable, ‘uniforme’ and ‘distinct’” (Levine 10). Another of Stubbes’s fellow antitheatricalists, William Prynne, views the self as something God-given, consisting of “a uniforme, distinct and proper being to every creature.” This description of the self is, however, rather contradictory, because if the self is stable and fixed, why then should the antitheatricalists feel threatened by the theatre? If the self is stable, then a man cannot be transformed into a woman by the activity of theatrical cross-dressing. Stephen Greenblatt challenges this notion of an absolute self through what he refers to as Renaissance ‘self-fashioning,’ which completely rejects the idea that the self is fixed and stable. Rather, Greenblatt argues that the “fashioning of human identity [is] a manipulable, artful process,” and that there is (and indeed in the Renaissance there was)“‘no inherent self’” (Levine 11). Neither model of the self really explains Stubbes’s widely held fears of effeminization, and indeed the anti-theatricalists themselves have a very contradictory model of the self: on the one hand, they see the self as “inherently monstrous,” but “on the other [hand], [they see] the self [as] inherently nothing at all” (Levine 12). From this point of view “Stage-Plays and Actors” become the object of displacement, where “the male actor, dressed in women’s clothing, seems to lack an inherent gender” (Levine 12) and this is what transformshim into a monstrous being. In Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes refers to men who dress in women’s clothing as “monsters of both kinds, half women, half men” (Levine 19). Stubbes’s anxiety stems from the idea that this monstrous self has no “essential nature-because it has no essential gender” (Levine 19). Why is it, then, that anti-theatricalists fear that acting and watching plays can have the effect of men turning into women? Why is it only masculinity that needs to be enacted? (Levine 8). Femininity appears to be the default position, “the otherness one is always in danger of slipping into” (Levine 8). Why is there so much misplaced anxiety over the “slipping self,” if in the Renaissance the self wasviewed as “fixed,” “stable,” “uniform” and “distinct”? Why do these tracts so frequently imagine a man being magically transformed into a woman?

PLAYS ARE MAGIC

Anti-theatrical tracts are influenced by both “explicit and implicit claims about magic” (Levine 12). For these writers, this magic consists of the power to turn men into beasts (Levine 12). Stubbes and his fellow antitheatricalists represent plays as magic, because plays can turn men into aggressive beasts, but moreimportantly becausethey can turn men into “puppets, passive will-less robots” (Levine 12). More compelling, however, is Gosson’s notion that an actor can magically make an audience member into his “mirror image, a version of himself,” and that “the audience can be made compulsively to imitate what happens in the play” (Levine 13). If there are male actors cross-dressing in women’s clothing, the frantic fear is that the spectators will return to their safe homes where they will covertly transform themselves into the “monstrous beings” that have lain beneath the actors’ garments. Thus, ultimately there are two magical anxieties about the self in relation to the theatre, one being that underneath the costume is a monster, and the other, that underneath the costume there is nothing at all because the self is pliable, manipulable, and easily unshaped (Levine 14): “In other words, it is possible for anti-theatricalists to maintain a view of theatre as malignant magic bent on unshaping and animalizing the self, because they hold the contrary view of the self as shapless and animal-like to begin with” (Levine 17).

JUDITH BUTLER’S THEORY OF PERFORMATIVITY

If the self is shapeless, thenthe self is subject to being shaped, formed, and constructed through what Judith Butler refers to as “repetitious performative acts” (Sullivan 85). Judith Butler argues that:

[G]ender is neither natural or innate, but rather, is a social

construct which serves particular purposes and institutions. Gender, she says, is the performative effect of reiterative acts,

that is, acts that can be, and are repeated. These acts which are repeated in and through a highly rigid regulatory frame, ‘congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being.’ (Sullivan 82)

These reiterative acts create the idea of a gender, which is precisely what the anti-theatricalists fear. If a man is acting the role of a woman,then he can create the idea that he is a woman and ultimately engage in sexual acts with another man while performing the gender role of a woman. Stubbes’s description of the behavior of play-goers when the play is over reflects his belief in this sequence and its outcome: “every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves [i.e., covertly] they play the sodomites, or worse. And these be the fruits of plays and interludes, for the most part (145). Therefore, ‘doing,’ which is acting as a woman in stage-plays, leads to ‘being,’ being a monstrous ‘other,’ a woman. This theory then partly explains the anti-theatricalists’ anxiety that acting can indeed dissolve a person’s ‘true’ gender, leading to vice and sin (Levine 14). In “Of Stage-Plays, and Interludes, with Their Wickedness” Stubbes repetitively condemns the theatre and its actors because “the shameless gestures of actors serve to nothing so much as to move the self to lust and uncleanness,” stating that it was for this reason that “it was decreed that no Christian man, or woman should resort to plays or interludes where is nothing but blasphemy, scurrility, and whoredom maintained (142).

Stubbes’s claims again bring the modern reader face-to-face with the anti-theatricalists’ contradictory notion of the self as stable. According to Stubbes, the self is “moved” to “lust and uncleanness” through cross-dressing. If one is repetitiously performing on stage a gender that is not one’s own, what is created is “the illusion of an innate and stable (gender) core” (Sullivan 82). A man cross-dressing in woman’s garb indicates how illusory is the notion of an “innate and stable female gender core.” This is the magic which anti-theatricalists are referring to as the power to turn men into beasts, into the ‘other’ --- feminine, foreign, satanic (Levine 13). This is the fear “that representations can actually alter the things they are merely supposed to represent” (Levine 5). According to anti-theatricalists the Elizabethan stage was invented by the “Devil, practiced by the heathen gentiles, and dedicated to their false idols” (Stubbes 143). The stage became a filthy, corrupt and damnable place, where mischief and unspeakable acts made it “Satan’s synagogue”:

Oh intolerable blasphemy! Are filthy plays and

bawdy interludes comparable to the word of God, the

food of life, and life itself? It is all one, as if they had

said, bawdry, heathenry, paganry, scurrility, and

devilry itself, is equal with the word of God; or that

the Devil is equivalent with the Lord. (Stubbes 143)

CROSS-DRESSING, THE SELF AND SEXUAL DESIRE:

THE ISSUE OF SODOMY

Judith Butler sees gender identity ascreated through a process of performative acts, as “constituted in and through relations with others and with a world.” For Butler, “all action is contextual, uncertain, dispersed, inter-subjective, ‘in-process,’ and so on” (Sullivan 85). Butler’s theory articulates very well the wellsprings of antitheatrical fear. If there is noinherent self, as Greenblatt states, and if human identity is the contingent result of a manipulable, “artful process” (Levine 11), then the antitheatricalists’ anxiety over theatre’s ability to transform gender is clearly warranted. Those who are opposed to the theatre are the ones who are most threatened, because as men, as those who stand at the epitome of their society’s gender hierarchy, they have the most power and thus the most to lose in a world of gender fulidity. Arguably, the antotheatricalists also seem to feel most threatened because they are aware (on some level) of the very characteristics of self and identity that Butler has described some 400 years later: that the self is contingent, fluid, unstable. In this context, how is amodern reader to understand Renaissance representations of same-sex desire and erotic activities? What was a Renaissance man to do and how was he represented if he rejected the divine plan for human sexuality: compulsory heterosexuality? As Alan Bray has noted in his ground-breaking study Homosexuality in Renaissance England, “[h]omosexual behavior was viewed in terms of the sexual act and not an individual’s overall identity” (Bray 25). If this is the case, and if one’s identity is not stable and ‘doing’ becomes ‘being,’ we are further ahead as modern readers in understanding how and why Stubbes represents the final result of watching plays as engaging in ‘sodomy,’ to use the Renaissance for men who engaged in sexual acts with other men. For Stubbes, men who playedg women on the Renaissance stage, and men who watched other men play women on the stage, might well ‘play’ the woman’s role sexually off-stage. If gender identity is fluid, then any play-goer, whether male or female, according to Stubbes and his fellow anti-theatricalists, is subject to acting as a sodomite.

Ultimately, Stubbes’ representation of play-goers hasting home to homosexual relations has radical implications, since it makes the naturalness of heterosexuality simply another “cultural fiction” (Butler, cited in Sullivan 85): “If there is no inner core, there can be no such thing as hetero/homosexuality” (Sullivan 85). Even though the term ‘homosexual’ was not coined during this period, ‘sodomite’ and ‘tribade’ [i.e., women who engage in sexual acts with other women] were, and these terms and their use suggest that homoerotic and homosexual behaviors were viewed as corrupt and sinful, because they went against God’s divine plan: “they are not of God, who refuse to hear his word (for he that is of God hears God, his word says our savior Christ) but of the Devil, whose exercises they go to visit” (Stubbes 144). However, homosexual erotic activity also clearly disturbs Stubbes because it represents the dissolution of the play-goer’s self that he believes theatre affects.

ANTI-ANTI-THEATRICALITY: SHAKESPEARE

Although William Prynne describes stage plays as part of a “demonic tangle of obscene practices proliferating like a cancer in the body of society” (Greenblatt et al 36), Shakespeare’s plays, in particular his comedies and romances that feature cross-dressed heroines, “[re-]imagine the world the anti-theatricalists feared, one in which men really could be turned into women” (Levine 4), and they challenge and defend against these obsessive anti-theatricalist anxieties. Although Shakespeare’s own erotic preferences remain a matter of debate---his Sonnets suggest he may have been bisexual---his plays featuring cross-dressed heroines would have been viewed by Stubbes and Prynne as exactly the sort of dramas that provoke felonious sexual desires, both hetero- and homosexual in nature. Although stage cross-dressing was a necessity brought about by the all-male Elizabethan stage (women in England were barred from performing on the public stage until after 1660), critics have noted that Shakespeare’s use of cross-dressing in complex, and in fact may question the patriarchal structures of his time. Shakespeare attempts to undo the policing of gender boundaries and this attempt may perhaps be partly why the anti-theatricalists were so anxious about “real” gender boundaries.