The Conclusion briefly addresses the Caroline publication of history plays, introducing three important points that clarify and expand the book’s main approach. First, by examining John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, it shows how Caroline playbooks regularly use their dedications, addresses to readers, and commendatory verses to put forward local readings of the histories they contain. Second, it suggests that patterns of investment shifted during the Caroline period and that dramatists and companies seem to become more involved in controlling the publication of their plays than in earlier periods. Finally, it evaluates the market for first and reprint editions, proposing that first-edition history plays catered to a demand for novelty and political relevance, whereas the reprinted history play editions published by Nathanial Butter and John Norton helped to establish an emerging canon of history plays that has continuing significance today.

Chapter 3 considers the representation of the food gift in Shakespeare’s Pericles and Timon of Athens, and Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat. It argues that attention to hunger enables recognition of the role played by use value in gift exchange and places this in the context of the declining significance of traditions of hospitality in the period. It considers the recurrence of figures such as the discharged soldier and suggests that the soldier’s hunger constitutes a key means by which contemporary texts commented on the policies of pacifism carried out by monarchs such as James I. It emphasises the nostalgic dimension to representations of hospitality, but argues that this nostalgia frequently marks the system itself as untenable. It demonstrates that these plays manifest anxiety not simply at the scarcity and want which was produced by the nascent capitalist mode of production, but also at the problems of plenty and excess.

Chapter 6 considers the depiction of hunger, appetite and imperialism. Food comprised an integral component of colonial discourse in the period, and the representation of hunger and appetite therefore provided a significant means by which the theatres could legitimise or critique England’s overseas expansion. The chapter focuses on the use of hunger and appetite as a means to critique or endorse emergent bourgeois ideologies of imperialist expansion, with an emphasis on how colonial adventures are constructed as both a solution to the problem of hunger and the object of new and occasionally unnatural appetites. It considers the cultural significance of cannibalism as an act which at this time was associated not only with subaltern native populations, but also with the expansive appetites of European colonisers, in a manner which could be deployed to express anxiety at the potential consequences of imperial expansion.

Chapter 2 explores the recurring dramatic stereotype of the hungry servant in plays such as John Lyly’s Campaspe, Massinger’s The Bashful Lover and The Picture, and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. It argues that the representation of hungry servants mystifies the conditions of the average servant’s existence, representing hunger resulting from deprivation as an insatiable appetite. It emphasises that this process of mystification is comic in function, binding the audience together through the production of normative laughter. But it also demonstrates that the servingman’s appetite could be deployed as a means to explore England’s nascent capitalist system. Lastly, the chapter considers the relationship between the hungry servant and gender. Although female servants are rarely driven by appetite, the representation of hungry male servants constitutes a significant means through which the theatre explored the complex relationships between husbands, wives and their servants.