COLIN MacCABE zyxwv Abusing self and others: puritan accounts of the Shakespearian stage Shakespeare remains a key element within the organisation and authorisa- tion of culture today. He continues to be the major named guarantor of both the dominant form of elite culture and the dominant form of literary education. And yet Shakespeare’s work finds its original context far from elite culture or literary texts zyxw - in the Elizabethan theatre which flourished in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Of course, the popularity of that theatre is part of the very function of the texts today - guaranteeing their ‘universality‘,but if the popularity is acknowledged, much else is not. Despite the enormous efforts of Chambers and his near contemporaries, and the veritable industry of scholarship that has flourished since the Second World War, we still do not clearly understand the social and symbolic func- tioning of the Elizabethan theatre. Nor is such an understanding merely an antiquarian pleasure. The particular ways in which elite and popular culture were defined in opposition in the seventeenth century continues to have a powerful contemporary legacy, as does the particular ways in which that division related to the organisation of sexuality. The only writers who have fully emphasised how important sexuality was to the Shakespearean theatre are those Puritan writers who campaigned for their closure. Those eminent, narrow-mindedand misogynistic divines have found unresponsive audiences in the twentieth century. JonasBarish may be taken to be stating a common response when he writes of them: ‘None of the pamphlets that dropped from the English presses during these years makes zyxwv an impressive dialectical contribution. Rarely do they pursue an argument closely; more often they disintegrate into free-associative rambles.’’ Barish‘sdistaste is widely shared and despite a recent edition of Gosson’s criticism there has been no attempt to provide any comprehen- sive account of the Puritan attack on the theatre.2 In many ways this is unsurprising, for there are few contemporary allegiances to which these Puritan writings appeal. For those whose lives are given over to, and whose living is provided by, literature they represent an embarrassing madness which it would be folly to consider. For the historian sympathetic to those forces which brought rebellion and revolt to England in the 164Os, they are equally unsympathetic culminating as they did with an act of political