Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England

In this new socio-cultural study of the history of the theatre in early modern England, author Paola Pugliatti investigates the question of why, in the Tudor and early Stuart period, unregulated and unlicensed theatrical activities were equated by the English law to unregulated and unlicensed begging. Placing the topic in a European context and relying on the reading of primary documents in several languages, Pugliatti discusses efforts to control beggary from Justinian's Codex to seventeenth-century statutes, locates the origin of anti-vagrancy and antitheatrical writings in anxieties about idleness and disguise, and analyzes the ways in which various kinds of representation demonized both beggars and players. By carefully distinguishing between the traditions of rogue pamphlets, conny-catching pamphlets and the picaresque, she offers fresh readings of a number of texts which appear to have been entirely disregarded by recent scholarship, such as pamphlets by Walker, Harman, Greene and Dekker.