Chapter 3 concentrates on plays published by Nathaniel Butter during the early Jacobean period, and the conceptual overlap between ‘news’ and ‘history’ that was crucial for Butter and other early modern readers. Because Butter was so invested in ideas of ‘history’, it is possible to use his output to develop a clear profile of an early reader – one whose selection of texts with Protestant and union interests offers a distinctive perspective on history plays and introduces a slight tension with James I’s own political and religious policies. Alongside Butter’s non-dramatic output, this chapter focuses on Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me, Heywood’s 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, and Shakespeare’s King Lear to offer a fresh perspective on early Jacobean historical drama. It reveals that the genre did not decline at this time; and it considers the important but neglected parallels between plays that dramatize recent history and the legendary British past. Finally, the chapter argues that Butter’s investments were shaped by the geography of the book trade and his location, next to Matthew Law’s, at St Austin’s Gate in Paul’s Churchyard.

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.

The tradition that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s mouthpiece: almost universally accepted for reasons of tradition and prejudice towards the class and education of the princely speaker. The Player’s speech: a successful exercise in using Virgil to express emotion, as recommended by Quintilian. Hamlet’s advice: drawing essentially from Quintilian. The play-within-a-play: risibly poor dramaturgy, a display of dialectic rather than rhetoric, well suited to ensuring that Claudius is moved by the facts rather than by the fiction of the play. The pay-off: Hamlet as clown. In this chapter, I map a tension between two ideals of performance: moving the emotions of an audience versus an accurate mimesis of reality.