 The so-called “anti-theatrical prejudice” has been a feature of Western European theater since the very beginnings of both theater and philosophy. It is, moreover, an issue that theater studies and performance theory have focused a fair amount of attention upon. Jonas Barish identified its roots in the dispute, referred to in the Introduction to this entry, between Plato and Aristotle over the notion of mimesis and the value of theatrical practices within the good city (Barish 1966, 1981). Two later periods of philosophical reflection on human practices stand out as concerned nearly exclusively with the morality of theatrical practices themselves: during the period of the early Latin Church fathers, and during the eighteenth century (Tertullian and Jean Jacques Rousseau are good examples). The degree to which the distrust of theater in these periods was grounded in the earlier differences between the ways Plato and Aristotle had understood mimesis is still much debated (Puchner 2013). The interest in and estimations of the social and moral effects of theatrical practices, on which the alleged “prejudice” has been grounded, staged a resurgence in the literary and artistic period known as Romanticism (Friedrich Nietzsche and John S. Mill are good examples). And this worry about, or even a distrust of, theatricality has continued into the present, but interestingly enough, now among theater practitioners and theorists themselves (Schechner 1992, and both Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett provide good examples, see also Puchner 2001).