Preaching and playing at Paul's:: The Puritans, The Puritaine, and the closure of Paul's playhouse

Literary historians have linked the unexplained closure of Paul's playhouse and the disappearance of the company of boy actors known as the Children of Paul's to a public complaint made by the Puritan preacher W. Crashaw about the anti-puritan satire The Puritaine in a sermon at Paul's Cross in 1607. This paper aims to explore whether Crashaw's urging the magistrates to act could have led to an intervention of the authorities. Given the absence of a pervasive and repressive system of censorship and control of stage-plays in Early Modem England and in view of recent theories of censorship, the controversy about The Puritaine is examined as part of a struggle over discursive power characteristic of the politics and culture of the time. The play is shown to reflect and comment on the history of this struggle as well as the uneasy coexistence of players and puritans throughout London. It appears, however, that Paul's Boys were silenced neither through repression nor defamatory discourse but through market forces.