Sometime in 1579, in a pamphlet which was to establish the terms of attack and defense for another sixty years, Stephen Gosson made the curious remark that theater effeminated the mind.1 Four years later, in a pamphlet twice the size, Phillip Stubbes clarified this claim even as he heightened it by insisting that male actors who wore women's clothing could literally adulterate male gender.2 Fifty years later in a one-thousand-page tract which may have hastened the closing of the theaters, William Prynne described a man whom women's clothing had literally caused to degenerate into a wo man.3 In the years of mounting pamphlet war about the stage, the vague sense that theater could somehow soften the responses of the audience had been replaced by the fear—expressed in virtually bio logical terms—that theater could structurally transform men into women. How can we account for this fear of effeminization? It at