Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. * A collection of the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. * Includes attacks on the stage by moralists, defences by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation. * Demonstrates just how heated debates about the theater became in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. * A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time. * Brings together in one volume texts that would otherwise be hard to locate. * Student-friendly - uses modern spelling and includes vocabulary glosses and annotation.