This chapter discusses how the overlapping practices of sport and theatre contributed to early modern boy actors' performances, arguing that sport and exercise formed a crucial part of boy actors' training for the professional stage. The first half of the chapter takes as its focus the educational writings and theatrical activity of the educational theorist and practitioner Richard Mulcaster, tracing the influence of his physically minded pedagogical ideals on the robustly physical Elizabethan and Jacobean boy company repertories. The second half of the chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the staging of sport in John Marston's What You Will and John Day's The Isle of Gulls, drawing on practical experiments with staging these scenes in the present-day Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to consider the processes by which a boy actor may have come to perform precise and physically challenging aspects of dramaturgy. It demonstrates that a practical approach to critically neglected plays offers new perspectives on the dramatic possibilities afforded to the first and youngest interpreters of early modern drama which keep the skilled performing body as the rightful centre of attention.

This chapter considers the appearance of the first monolingual dictionary of English at the beginning of the seventeenth century and its forebears in the late sixteenth century. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, a so-called ‘hard words’ dictionary, was first published in 1604, and was preceded by a list published as an addendum to the main predecessor, Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-Maister of 1596. Cawdrey’s work was addressed to a clientele which was literate but less than fully educated, and in particular, women who were sufficiently educated to teach others, especially in their own households, and to promulgate a religious agenda. Coote’s book was essentially a teaching manual aimed not merely at students, but at the teachers themselves, and was based on a clearly articulated method. These two dictionaries have a close relationship, Cawdrey employing a large percentage of Coote’s entries. This chapter explores that relationship in detail. While many entries are taken over largely unaltered, there are also numerous changes, including expansions, the provision of explanatory material, and new definitions. There are also many deletions from Coote, and the incorporation of terms from other works.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.