The purpose of an inquest is to determine the four statutory questions: who, when, where and how. This chapter also looks at the difference between a traditional inquest (‘Jamieson Inquest’ or ‘Non-Article 2 Inquest’) and an Article 2 inquest (also known as a ‘Middleton Inquest’), the conclusions available to the coroner and when a jury is required.

Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

Chapter 3 rejects the previous characterisation by Godfrey Anstruther of the period from 1559 to 1655 as a hundred ’homeless’ years, to see how a few Englishmen joined Dominican houses on the continent and how some of these returned to work on the English mission where they frequently resided in their family homes. It notes the public apostasy of friars who lacked the support of an organised mission, and how attempts were made in the latter part of the period to put a stronger organisation in place.

This chapter argues that the interest Middleton shows in the levelling power of mortality in A Game at Chess reveals a consistent attitude towards fame and the eternizing powers of theatre. Rather than transcending the cultural practices and preoccupations of his own time, Middleton’s works in general and A Game at Chess in particular demonstrate an insistent effort to immerse themselves within them. Instead of setting the play apart from the plays for which he is best known, Middleton furnishes A Game at Chess with similar theatrical and thematic interests, many of which bring issues involving memorialization to the surface. While the allegorical surface of the play seems to indulge the eternizing designs of the White House, the more theatrically compelling characters of the Black House, like the moving monuments they resemble, pursue the approbation of the moment over the possibility of a more enduring legacy. Representing the pursuit of fame as a game, A Game at Chess appears designed to gain Middleton the immediate notoriety of the public stage rather than the eternizing admiration of posterity, even at the cost of the future of his career.

Chapter 4 considers the intersection of appetite and desire in plays such as Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. It argues that the elision of these two drives lends a gustatory logic to the theatre’s depiction of excessive desire. The chapter explores the extent to which this serves to associate desire with the excessive appetites unleashed by material excess and tyranny. But it also emphasises the vulnerability which the culinary logic instils in representations of desire, emphasising the period’s profound ambiguity regarding who, precisely, is being consumed in the context of a sexual relationship. Finally, the chapter emphasises the extent to which the imagery of appetite foregrounds the potentially debilitating consequences of sexual desire, at a time in which humoral theory asserted a model of the body as porous, and potentially vulnerable.