To live out one’s private life in public could be either a profound degradation or, equally, among the highest affirmations of status. This paradox hangs a porous curtain between public and private, and it shimmers like a night at the theatre or a dime in the gutter. The rise of theatre in early modern England is synchronous with the flowering of personal aspiration and private enterprise. Theatricality is a cipher of private ambition in an increasingly alienated, capitalist world. “Now I am alone” declares Hamlet before thousands each night, but he is no more alone than we, together in the darkness.