Shakespeare's company get the cold shoulder from Norwich

The only two recorded visits of Shakespeare’s players to Norwich – then as the King’s Men – occurred after Shakespeare had passed away.

They weren't warmly welcomed in a city known for its Puritanical population.

Even then it is not clear if they actually performed. Certainly on the first visit recorded in St Andrew’s Guild Hall in June 1622 the actors were paid a total of 40 shillings not to perform, presumably so as not to upset the Puritans.

However, the same company does not appear to have been put off, returning again to Norwich at some point in 1622-3 – once more to St Andrew’s Hall – when they were paid the same amount, though it’s not clear whether they performed or were again paid to clear off.

By this time Shakespeare had been dead for more than six years, but his plays continued to form a staple part of the King’s Men’s repertory, and would therefore have been available for a performance in Norwich.

The players might have offered to perform for example, Twelfth Night, which is the play they chose to perform back at court in London during the Christmas season of 1622-3, although its satirical treatment of Lady Olivia’s puritanical steward, Malvolio, might have proved risqué in a city like Norwich, known as it was, for its own puritanical leanings.

Around the time of the late 16th century and early 1600s Norwich was one of the largest cities outside of London, with a population of around 10,000 people. No doubt these large numbers of people together with the relative prosperity brought by the wool trade and other local industries attracted early modern drama groups such as Shakespeare’s.

At the same time it was also a challenging region in which to perform, particularly from the middle part of the 16th century onwards, when Norwich became a well-known centre for Puritanism, a movement often associated with opposition to the theatre.

Although civic records show payments to visiting performers in the late sixteenth century, Shakespeare’s company of the time, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, is not listed among them.

By Dr Siobhan Keenan, Reader in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, De Montfort University, Leicester

One of the most peppery of the Puritans in Elizabethan times is the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes.

Stubbes is perhaps best known for his popular book The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) in which he claims to expose some of the supposed ‘abuses’ in Elizabethan society and the theatre comes in for particular stick.

In Shakespeare and other dramas of the day it is the men who also play female parts. Stubbes and his supporters, known as anti-theatricalists, refer to men who dress up as women as “monsters of both kinds, half women, half men”. They consider such cross-dressing as a depravity.

Carrie Blais, commentating on the life of Philip Stubbes, writes: “Although stage cross-dressing was a necessity brought about by the all-male Elizabethan stage (women in England were barred from performing on the public stage until after 1660), critics have noted that Shakespeare’s use of cross-dressing is complex, and in fact may question the patriarchal structures of his time.

“Shakespeare attempts to undo the policing of gender boundaries and this attempt may perhaps be partly why the anti-theatricalists were so anxious about 'real' gender boundaries.”

Stubbes also argued that plays were magic. They had the power to turn men into aggressive beasts on stage – and that audiences might be drawn into the magic by imitating what they see.

Dismissing them as "filthy plays and bawdy interludes" Stubbes goes so far as to accuse them of being the work of the devil.

His work was a big success – it had four editions – clearly striking a chord with like-minded Puritans who also believed, like Stubbes, that "leisure leads to vice".