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In a broad contextualization of ancient pantomime within cultural history, the reasons for the importance of research into ancient pantomime are explored: it represents a lost aesthetic of profound and widespread influence in ancient imperial culture; it played, quantitatively speaking, a more important role in educating the majority of inhabitants of the Roman empire in mythology than, for example, recitations of poetry; it was the main medium in which the prestigious tradition of classical tragedy was kept alive in the theatres of the Roman empire; it played a seminal role in the emergence of classical ballet, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, of avant‐garde Tanztheater (dance theatre). The theatrical spaces and the musical accompaniments (provided by the chorus and the hydraulis), of pantomime are given detailed attention. The hostile response that aspects of the perfomance: the dancer, his mask and the music, evoked from the Church Fathers and the place of pantomime in their rhetoric of anti‐theatricalism is also briefly explored.

This chapter looks at the renewal of anti-theatricalism in response to the extra-spectacular 19th-century theatre, the aversion to the cumbersome palpability of stage bodies and the turn towards the closet, and also at the simultaneous recognition of the inherent powers of the theatrical and the resulting articulation of an idealist aesthetics married to a theatricalism that could be key to the spectator's transcendent imagination.

Bridging from the dialectic of action explored in the previous chapters to the dialectic of figuration and appearance considered in those which follow, this chapter sketches a triangular historical relationship between plays of revenge, the professionalisation of theatre, and the figure known as the ‘Vice’. The common player became the Vice when that figure disappeared from English plays in the 1570s and 1580s. Those were the years in which the professional actor emerged and theatre became an object of greater suspicion. In this way the appearance of the actor and his agency within the fictional scene acquired a specific and complex moral value. For revenge tragedy this was significant because the Vice had been the origin and impetus of the revenge narrative since English playwrights had first shown interest in the theme of extra-judicial vengeance, in translations of Seneca in the 1560s. To ask whether revenge was a moral deviation or devilish concoction, as did more famous plays of later decades, was to question the agency of the player and his interest in producing dubious illusions.

This chapter analyzes the Virginia Company’s accusations that the players were the enemy of Virginia. The Company’s insistence on the players being diabolical, papist, and idle takes on renewed significance in the context of Virginia, precisely because the image of the adventurer as craven bankrupt chimed with two other types that were invested in New World exploration: the Spanish and the players themselves. While the Virginia Company distinguished between the ideal adventurer and the unholy trinity of devil, papist, and player, plays collapsed the adventurer, devil, papist, and player into one another. Through analyses of both Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), which unfavorably compares Virginia adventuring and the experience of playgoing, and of the promotion and ubiquity of tobacco in playhouse drama, we might begin to think of the playing companies as constructing and even celebrating a vision of the New World as anti-Virginian, albeit not anti-colonial.