The Politics of Playing

Plays might be promoted as a kind of opiate of the masses: Mass entertainment that keeps them from more violent entertainments like rioting and pillaging. This could be problematic, if the entertainments were too heady for most people to follow. Thomas Heywood (1612) suggested that playwrights should “ayme . . . to teach the subjects obedience to their King, to shew the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections, to present them with the flourishing estate of such as live in obedience.”

Montaigne offered another political argument for drama, one that treated drama as a kind of community-binding liturgy:

“I have never blamed those of injustice that refuse good and honest Comedians, or (as we call them) Players, to enter our good townes, and grudge the common people such publike sports. Politike and wel ordered common-wealths endevor rather carefully to unite and assemble their Citizens together; as in serious offices of devotion, so in honest exercises of recreation. Common societies and loving friendship is thereby cherished and increased. And besides, they cannot have more formall and regular pastimes allowed them, than such as are acted and represented in open view of all, and in the presence of the magistrates themselves: And if I might beare sway, I would thinke it reasonable, that Princes should sometimes, at their proper charges, gratifie the common people with them, as an argument of a fatherly affection, and loving goodnesse towards them; and that in populous and frequented cities, there should be Theatres and places appointed for such spectacles; as a diverting of worse inconveniences, and secret actions.”

Davenant, the Restoration adapter of Shakespeare, also offered a political defense of the stage against Puritan opponents. Some, he notes, argue that poetry on stage “is prejudicial to a State, as begetting Levity, and giving to the People too great a diversion by pleasure and mirth.” On the contrary, plays help to keep the populace too busy to think about their condition: “Whoever in Government endeavours to make the People serious and grave, which are attributes that may become the Peoples Representatives but not the People, doth practice a new way to enlarge the State, by making every Subject a Statesman; and he that means to govern so mournfully (as it were, without any Musick in his Dominion) must lay but light burdens on his Subjects, or else he wants the ordinary wisdome of those who to their Beasts that are much loaden whistle all the day to encourage their Travail.” Athens remained as long as it did because a third of public revenue was devoted to plays and shows “to divert the People from meeting to consult of their Rulers merit and the defects of Government.”