Antitheatricality is any form of opposition or hostility to theater. Such opposition is as old as theater itself, suggesting a deep-seated ambivalence in human nature about the dramatic arts. Jonas Barish's 1981 book, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, was, according to one of his Berkeley colleagues, immediately recognized as having given intellectual and historical definition to a phenomenon which up to that point had been only dimly observed and understood. The book earned the American Theater Association's Barnard Hewitt Award for outstanding research in theater history. Barish and some more recent commentators treat the anti-theatrical, not as an enemy to be overcome, but rather as an inevitable and valuable part of the theatrical dynamic.
Royalty Theatre, London – changing fashions
Plato, theater's first critic
Tertullian, second century Christian teacher and critic of theater
Engraving depicting an early Chester mystery play
Thomas Beccon or Becon was an English cleric and Protestant reformer from Norfolk.
Thomas Beccon
Illustration from the 1844 edition of Becon's works