An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606)

Abstract

The Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606) prohibited spoken profanity in any dramatic production; it was the most precise and sweeping piece of censorship addressed to the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This article is the first full-length analysis of the contexts, content, and consequences of the act. It examines the nature and scope of the statute, how it came about, how it was part of a wider trend of regulation of public speech, and how it can be related to contemporary ideas about verbal profanity and improper speech in everyday life and in the drama, as those issues were aired in the writings of moralisers and polemicists. It considers how the law was enforced, how it relates to legislation concerning profanity in seventeenth-century society generally, and where the law sits in the general array of the practices and processes of official censorship of the drama. This article deals with the general framing and operation of the law; it is intended that a further article will analyse the nature of swearing, and the scale of the effects of the law, in play-texts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.