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.

Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1591–94) stages both the proliferating texts and the religious violence of the early 1590s. These years saw a spate of sectarian libels from persecuted Puritans and Catholics alike. In Titus, the marginalized Andronici likewise launch ephemeral scraps of writing into the sky, texts that join appeals for redress with violent threats. These libels bear an especially close resemblance to those scattered in the streets by the Puritan extremist William Hacket and his accomplices in 1591. But the echoes are also cross-confessional, indicating a broader interest in the “manner” of religiopolitical speech. The play folds its topical allegory into a Tacitean-humanist history of political communication: the rise of the emperor, Saturninus, brings about the end of public oratory. Their speech silenced, the Andronici unleash a flurry of texts that takes the Tacitean story of rhetorical decline into its early modern future. By yoking libels not just to the pursuit of justice but also to factionalism and violence, Titus takes a hard look at the viral and virulent media of the late Elizabethan public sphere.