Article: "The Sanctuarie is become a plaiers stage": Chapel Stagings and Tudor "secular" drama.(Report)

WHEN Anthony Munday issued his oft-cited rebuke of players and theater in A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres (1580), the use of the church as a playing space received particular attention. While he railed against traveling household players who "are privileged to ... publish their mametree in euerie Temple of God, and that through England, vnto the horrible contempt of praier [; s]o that now the Sanctuarie is become a plaiers stage," (1) the sometime-playwright seemed to be implying that such a use of sacred space was "now" a new and troubling Elizabethan phenomenon. Despite Munday's relatively marginal status as a minor playwright and ...