How can we think of theatrical performance and the contexts of such performance in the 1640s? In September 1647 Mercurius Pragmaticus wrote of Hugh Peters: ‘Sam Rowley and he were a Plyades, and Orestes, when he played a womans part at the Curtaine Play-house, which is the reason his garbe is so emphaticall in the Pulpit.’ As Hotson notes, Peters was accused of everything. This charge makes the connection once again between the style of Puritan preaching and a role-playing which this newspaper associates not only with acting but with that focus of obsessive concern – the playing of a woman's part on stage. This turns against Puritans the usual ammunition of Prynne's pre-war critique of theatre as ‘not sufferable in any well-ordered Christian Republike’. However, cohabiting with such criticism of Puritan or sectarian behaviour as actorly, inauthentic and role-playing is another discourse punning on ‘acting’ and taking ‘action’.

Peters is both hypocritical and effective as a preacher. Such an accusation was facilitated in the 1640s because the contemporary discourse on acting and performance relied heavily on distinctions between related words like ‘acting’ and ‘action’, differences which enabled puns on shades of meaning or slippages between the two.