“Glauncing or girding at the present government”

Abstract

This chapter explores the synergies between two venues that in their physical form and the experiences they cultivated were surprisingly alike. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, plays and sermons in Blackfriars might share the same ideological ground in the way they questioned the authorities of church and state. While Egerton’s sermons denounced an imperfectly reformed church and the mistreatment of allies like the Earl of Essex, Blackfriars playwrights also exposed political iniquities and derided an unpopular Scottish King in plays like Eastward Ho and The Ile of Guls. Egerton was punished for his transgressions and the boy actors evicted from the playhouse, but together their dissident activities helped solidify the Blackfriars’ standing as an oppositional space in London’s cultural geography.