Chapter 5 considers the technical craft of theatrical performers, focusing on Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. This final chapter tracks habitual censure of performers’ skill that took place even whilst playgoers engaged imaginatively and emotively with fictional worlds. It traces frameworks drawn from grammar school or university education such as actio and pronuntio and even demonstrates widespread familiarity with these concepts, also brought to bear by those lacking privileged educational backgrounds. Just as importantly, close engagement with the demands of play-texts reveals many other modalities of actorly skill offered for censure alongside gesture and delivery. The Jew of Malta and The Roman Actor indicate a mixed culture of censure that encompassed action and accent but was not limited to this framework. Skills as varied as interrupting, falling over, and playing the lute all contribute to the conspicuous playhouse display of technical skill, alongside actio and pronuntio.

This chapter contextualises the rise of the stage Machiavel in the suppression of the Elizabethan Puritan movement in the late 1580s and early 1590s and the period’s distrust in the hidden, inward self of religious dissenters. The stage Machiavel of the early 1590s, most prominently embodied by Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, bears traces of anti-Puritan polemics that have been mostly overlooked so far. Hence, the stage Machiavel can be read as a predecessor of the stage Puritan and as a theatrical convention, most notably in his typical revelation of his plans to the audience, which showcases the theatre as an institution that grants access, or rather a fantasy of access, to the inward secrets of religious dissenters. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta can be read as an expression of such a desire to make windows into men’s hearts and as a poetological statement that flaunts the complicity of the theatre in this enterprise.