Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] In the same way we are commanded to put away all unchastity utterly. On this ground, too, then, we are cut off from the theater, which is the private meeting-hall of unchastity, where nothing wins approval except what would win approval nowhere else. [2] So its supreme charm has been concocted, in the main, out of filth — the filth the Atellan farce-actor mimes in his gestures, the filth the mime-actor even acts out through female roles, banishing all sense of sex and shame, so that they blush more easily at home than on the stage; the filth, finally, that the pantomime actor endures in his own body from boyhood, so that he may become an artist of it. [3] The very prostitutes, victims sacrificed to public lust, are paraded onto the stage — the poor wretches suffering it now in front of women too, before whom alone they used to lie hidden — and are marched before the eyes of every age, every rank. Their place, their price, their billing — even where none is needed — is proclaimed out loud; even (I say nothing of the rest) things that ought to have stayed hidden away in darkness and in their own dens, so as not to pollute the daylight. [4] Let the senate blush, let every order blush! Those very women who murder their own modesty, terrified at their own gestures brought before the light and the people, blush — once a year.
[5] But if every kind of unchastity is to be abhorred by us, why should it be allowed to hear what it is not allowed to speak, when we know that even scurrilous talk and every idle word is marked down by God? Why should it likewise be allowed to watch what it is a crime to do? Why should things that, spoken from the mouth, defile a man, be thought not to defile a man when let in through ears and eyes, since ears and eyes lie open to the spirit, and a man cannot be kept clean whose own doorkeepers are being fouled? [6] There, then, you have the theater's condemnation too, drawn from the condemnation of unchastity. And if we also spurn the learning of secular literature as something reckoned foolishness before God, that already sufficiently rules out for us those kinds of spectacles which secular literature marks off as the stage of comic play or of athletic contest. [7] But if tragedies and comedies are the instigators of crimes and of lusts, bloody and licentious, impious and prodigal, then no recollection of anything either horrible or worthless is any better for us: what is rejected in the deed is not to be received in the telling of it either.