This chapter offers a new reading of Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), focusing on the role played by emotion in urban memory-making. Yarington’s play has sometimes been described as a conventional, homiletic domestic tragedy designed to castigate London’s unruly citizens with a frightening account of the murder of a chandler, Robert Beech, and his servant, Thomas Winchester. I argue instead that Yarington regards the urban soma as detached, or indifferent, and that this aspect of city life affects the ways real-life, traumatic events can be reexperienced in the theater. Yarington explores the Thames as a powerful but perverse channel for local memory-making, finding new and unpredictable forms of emotionalism in the dark, insalubrious places where the river meets the city. Exploring the play’s fascination with disordered personhood and prosthetic feeling, the chapter also rethinks connections between memory, affect, and theatrical culture more generally at the turn of the seventeenth century.

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.