The introduction makes the case that while theatre has tended to be ignored or marginalised in modernist studies, it deserves a central place in accounts of modernism alongside poetry, prose, cinema, and the visual arts. It further contends that while there is an impressive variety amongst its practitioners, the hallmarks of modernist theatre are antagonism and provocation. Indeed, modernist theatre-makers rebelled against dominant genres, conventions, institutions, and audiences by creating new artistic forms and advocating for different values and worldviews. In so doing, this chapter argues that scholars need to go beyond the usual Euro-American cultures to consider how modernist theatre was manifested in the wider world and to recalibrate the historical trajectory of modernism that such broader geographies demand.

This Introduction discusses why dissembling one’s faith in order to avoid religious persecution was, despite its ubiquity, such a contentious practice for the early moderns and how the controversies surrounding such dissimulation were informed by early modern views on lying. It further provides an account of the various points of contact between debates on the legitimacy of religious dissimulation and theatrical dissimulation, respectively, both of which were indebted to shared theological concerns. Plays that stage religious dissimulation as their subject matter are therefore also legible as meta-theatrical reflections on the political and religious implications of their medium. Finally, this Introduction provides an overview of scholarship on the early modern stage and its position vis-à-vis contemporary debates on conformity and nonconformity, which has frequently been thematised in the supposedly antagonistic relationship between the theatre and the Puritans. Arguably, however, the relationship between the stage and various contemporary positions on the question of religious dissimulation was more dynamic and unstable than previous scholarship has often suggested.