The Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines spoke out against the US president in 2003, infuriating conservative country music fans and broadcasters; within months, the Chicks’ music had virtually disappeared from country radio. While this made political sense, it made no economic sense because of the Chicks’ vast economic success. Why, then, target them? I argue the reaction was part of a broader regendering of the country music industry, catalyzed by legal challenges, technological changes, and the emergence of a new political conservatism. These changes ended women’s spotlighted place on country music stages where Shania Twain, The Chicks, and others had dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. This article thus begins a year earlier with the lawsuit the Dixie Chicks filed against Sony in April 2002. It is through this lawsuit – which challenged the company’s legal and economic authority over the Chicks – that this article examines the broader cultural, economic, and political shifts that characterized the substantial changes in country music performances and players.

This essay revisits the question of playgoing by apprentices in early modern London via analysis of Chapman, Jonson and Marston's 1605 play Eastward Ho! and a newly uncovered set of depositions deriving from a lawsuit over the apprenticeship of the stationer Richard Meighen. Although their origins, purposes and modes differ, these materials represent playgoing through a similar set of conventions, assumptions and clichés. Functioning like a cultural script, such conventions enable playwrights and deponents alike to articulate shared assumptions about apprenticeship and its relationship with playgoing. Simultaneously, however, they also reveal some of the fault-lines within those tropes. In neither case, is it easy to position playgoing as a misdemeanour that must be cast off in order for the apprentice to repent and be re-assimilated into the structures of civic trade and profit. On the contrary, Eastward Ho’s erring apprentice Francis Quicksilver and Richard Meighen present examples of apprentices who are able to turn their interest in theatre to profitable ends.