The epilogue situates the foregoing chapters in a longer theater history, tracing two early Stuart scenes of libel – in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (c.1605) and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) – to their late Elizabethan roots. In Nobody and Somebody, the titular characters reenact in a comic vein Heywood’s story of Jane Shore and Richard III from Edward IV. At once a folk hero and a figure for libel, Nobody plays on his constitutive anonymity to affiliate himself with the same seditious, defamatory talk of which he is falsely accused. The Roman Actor likewise revises the paradigm of libel formulated by its dramatic predecessor, in this case Jonson’s Poetaster. In the play’s metatheatrical opening scenes, the actor Paris rehearses Jonsonian arguments to vindicate himself from accusations of libel leveled by the corrupt tribune and spy, Aretinus. Yet the rest of Massinger’s play belies Paris’s defense of playing, laying bare the unresolved ironies at the heart of Jonson’s satirical project. Finally, the epilogue returns in closing to the constitutive tensions – between protest and threat, free speech and false news – that animated the early modern public sphere.

This chapter charts the affective-political communities that came together around the character of Jane Shore, the star of Thomas Heywood’s two-part history play Edward IV (1599). Not least of all in the theater, late Elizabethan Londoners increasingly came out to see and be seen. So too did their rulers, including notable forays to the Globe by the followers of the Earl of Essex and by the Duke of Buckingham. Across Heywood’s play, Jane Shore attains a similar degree of political celebrity. In the face of Edward’s incompetence and Richard III’s tyranny, Jane steadfastly defends the commons. Her popularity in the play’s medieval London was matched by her enthusiastic reception on the early modern stage. Edward IV was printed in both its parts six times between 1599 and 1626, and its heroine continued to hold the stage well into the seventeenth century. Together with the evidence of her reception in the theater, Heywood’s play maps Jane Shore’s public: the collectivity of strangers joined across time and space in defiance of royal tyranny and in pity for the beneficent Jane Shore, a populist heroine for the early modern age.

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.

This chapter considers two plays which draw explicitly on the broadside ballad tradition of merry world fiction: Thomas Heywood’s The First Part of Edward IV (c. 1599); and Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (c. 1598). While these play-texts quote from, allude to, and overlap with the ballad stories they dramatise in various ways, it is also possible to see a distinctively theatrical vocabulary emerging which adapts the merry world topos to the stage. As such, they presuppose a high degree of audience familiarity with the visual and verbal conventions of the genre on page, stage, and in performance. The theatrical literacy of this assumed audience allows both plays to be constructed around moments of recognition and repetition. This degree of stylistic self-consciousness is playfully knowing in Heywood’s Edward IV and a source of frustration in the Downfall, where it is the impetus for an elaborate meta-theatrical framework exploring audience desire and response.