Dangerous ornaments: 'The Winter's Tale', anti-theater, and negotiation

Dangerous Ornaments examines William Shakespeare's late romance, The Winter's Tale, as part of a process of sociological negotiation between two arenas of discourse: the plays in the public theater and the antitheatrical writings that demanded the theater's abolition. With a nod to the critical theories of the New Historicism, Dangerous Ornaments assumes acceptance of plays and antitheatrical tracts as competing discursive sites and interprets The Winter's Tale in terms of how it responds to the specific complaints of the antitheatricalists. It concludes that Shakespeare responded to those complaints not by avoiding the controversial aspects but by showcasing them, and in most cases demonstrating their harmlessness.;From the early days of the professional public theater in England, antitheatrical writers campaigned against the theater and demanded its restriction or closing. They felt that the theater corrupted morals, encouraged promiscuous and deviant sexual activities, and wasted time and money. They found acting and actors to be essentially dishonest and prone to criminal activity, and they felt that actors and theater gatherings fostered inter-class mobility and status usurpation, especially by the wearing of inappropriate clothing. Dangerous Ornaments contends that The Winter's Tale features almost all these elements and shows how they can not only turn out to be harmless but can actually accomplish good. Key to this theme is the character Autolycus, a petty thief, con man and opportunist whose machinations become instrumental in the happy resolution of the conflict. Never one to do good intentionally he jokes that sometimes he does so "against my will.".;Dangerous Ornaments examines the antitheatrical writings of Stephen Gosson, Henry Crosse, Philip Stubbes and others, giving special attention to the works of Robert Greene, whose Pandosto served as the main source for The Winter's Tale, and who had turned to anti-theater after his repentance with A Groats-worth of Witte Bought with a Million in Repentance, the work that castigated the young Shakespeare as an "upstart crow." Dangerous Ornaments also speculates on some ironies in the Shakespeare-Greene relationship based on a study of models of imitation as developed by Harold Bloom, Thomas Greene, and G. W. Pigman III.