The embodied ambivalence that we saw in Milton's Vacation Exercise correlates with his view of the theatre as a cultural institution. Milton's writings about the stage distinguish, often uncertainly, between theatre as it was practised – in London, at court and in the colleges – and theatre as it could be practised if appropriately disciplined and mediated.

Milton's Commonplace Book, likely begun in the late 1630s, offers insight into his private hopes for theatre and objections against extreme anti-theatricality. Under the heading Spectacula, Milton works to distinguish between the wholesale repudiation of theatre, as represented by the anti-theatrical authorities Tertullian and Lactantius, and his own qualified embrace of the stage. He notes that Tertullian ‘condemns’ the ‘vogue’ of stage plays and ‘excludes’ Christians from them; however, he continues, the Church father's arguments ‘excoriate the pagan games only’ (italics mine). For Milton, the anti-theatrical argument is tiresome: ‘Cyprian, or whoever wrote the book that deals with the same subject, rolls the same stone’.

He has entered into the problem, into that crevice of ambivalence, where theatricality will pull in ongoing concerns of Milton the poet. He is actively pushing to open a space for the legitimacy of a Christian theatre. ‘Nevertheless’, he continues, as though with a tone of relief,

In his paraphrase of Tertullian, Milton seems deliberately to soften the Church father's condemnation of theatre, focusing instead on the promise of ‘better spectacles […] of a divine and heavenly character’. In De spectaculis, Tertullian unmistakably points to the divine spectacles of Apocalypse, which will show poets and players not staging religious drama but, rather, being adjudged to the flames: ‘lither of limb by far in the fire’ (‘solutiores multo per ignem’).