The stigma of print is the concept that an informal social convention restricted the literary works of aristocrats in the Tudor and Jacobean age to private and courtly audiences — as opposed to commercial endeavors — at the risk of social disgrace if violated, and which obliged the author to profess an abhorrence of the press and to restrict his works from publication. The stigma is usually confined to creative literature rather than to pious or scholarly works. It is assumed to apply especially to poetry and drama.