Chapter 6 turns to later revisions of Kydian revenge drama on the early Jacobean stage in the hands of idealistic playwrights who sought to reform the ambiguous theatrical experience of the original play by restoring its tragic dignity within a reconstituted Christian morality of patient suffering or rational Stoic forbearance. Looking to Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and its kindred play, Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, this chapter explores the resulting tension when playwrights reintroduce Stoic-Christian idealism into the theatrical experience of revenge which the play’s performance ethics utterly confound morally and causally. If Chettle and Middleton explore the violence underpinning any attempt to yoke Christian moral idealism onto living and suffering human subjects, in these later plays, this process is re-examined from the idealist point of view and its sustainability.

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.

Chapter 5 argues that food refusal resonates in the early modern theatre as a gendered mode of resistance. It begins by considering the contemporary phenomenon of 'miraculous maid' pamphlets, which recounted supposedly factual accounts of prodigious acts of religiously motivated food refusal. It then turns to Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) and George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604). It places these plays in the context of changes to religious practice, contemporary understandings of the female body and the space of the household. It argues that in the context of female food refusal, hunger has the capacity to function as a form of parodic obedience to the norms of contemporary gender ideology. By carrying dictates of privacy and closure to a point of often terminal excess, these texts query or satirise the double standard within early modern English society.

Prior to the appearance of his contemporary George Chapman’s translations, beginning in 1598, Shakespeare shows no knowledge of Homer. The single play that might show the influence of Chapman’s Homer is Troilus and Cressida (quarto 1609) and scholarly debate about the existence or extent of such influence continues. Here, however, the principal source is clearly Chaucer and outside of this play there is no reason to think that Shakespeare read Homer at all.