Chapter 2 shifts from representation to reality by looking at how patients navigated the city in search of cures. We follow a student as he searches for a healing powder in the back room of a coffee shop and imagine patients navigating the city in search of cures, often armed with little more than a healer’s inexact address. Using promotional material and advertisements, the chapter charts 230 different shops, taverns, bathhouses, and homes where antivenereal remedies were sold between 1650 and 1750. Mapping an urban geography of pox cures exposes the sheer number of medicines for sale for a single disease and how purchasing them brought patients far from the neighborhoods and homes of specific healers. Venereal treatments could be had just about anywhere in early modern London, from upscale thoroughfares to cheese shops and bookstalls lining the Royal Exchange. What is more, patients could find the very same remedy at a range of retail establishments, a uniform shopping experience that historians tend to associate with department stores of the Victorian era.

The book opens with Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator living in London in the 1660s. His candid diary relates the fatal illness of his brother, Tom, who allegedly died of the pox - or did he? The Introduction uses Pepys’ complex reaction to his brother’s ailment, including attempts to get a doctor to make a new diagnosis to clear the family name, as a way into the book’s central themes of deception, shame, unlawful sex, and the essential unknowability of venereal disease. The Introduction provides an overview of the history of disease that lays the groundwork for why the stories in this book matter and how they present evidence of seemingly modern ways of viewing and responding to diseased bodies nearly a hundred years earlier than historians presumed. It then situates the book in the history of medical retailing, sexuality, and the print trade, and ends with a discussion about the history of everyday urban life amidst epidemic disease.

The introduction posits the centrality of local environments, and specifically precise London neighborhoods, on a confluence of English writers in the 1590s, including Thomas Nashe, John Donne, John Manningham, and John Marston. In the process, it asserts the importance of these urban localities to the genesis of the metaphysical style of writing, a style not normally associated with the city nor with nonpoetic writing. The methodological emphasis on local environment foregrounds the importance of everyday experience to the creation of literature, picking up on recent work in early modern literary studies in historical phenomenology and affect theory. The introduction also details the profound infleunce of skepticism on this group of writers and intellectuals working in and around the Inns of Court in the 1590s. It argues for the centrality of a specific community of disaffected and privileged young men coming to London in the 1590s to the advent of a particular way of seeing the city and a particular style of writing that we now identify as the metaphysical.

This chapter argues that Thomas Nashe created a novel role for the urban writer that also assumed an innovative set of aesthetic principles that we associate with the metaphysical and that was directly antagonistic to humanist ideals. The dissatisfaction that Nashe felt at his lack of advancement as a member of the supposed intellectual elite contributed to his deeply skeptical outlook on reality and on the efficacy of humanist writing more specifically. As I newly detail in this chapter, the precise quotidian realities of Nashe’s existence in London in the 1590s pushed him to formulate a novel advocacy of contention even as he pushed away the noisiness of the urban public world, an entirely ambivalent stance towards the city embodied in Nashe’s obsession with corners. In formulating a writing approach that corresponded with his objections to Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and to his urban reality, Nashe innovated his prose style into something less mimetic than affective, a style that foregrounded a speedy aimlessness, as well as a heterogeneous mixture of materialist images. Nashe’s prose thus takes up the very features that we now call the metaphysical.

This essay revisits the question of playgoing by apprentices in early modern London via analysis of Chapman, Jonson and Marston's 1605 play Eastward Ho! and a newly uncovered set of depositions deriving from a lawsuit over the apprenticeship of the stationer Richard Meighen. Although their origins, purposes and modes differ, these materials represent playgoing through a similar set of conventions, assumptions and clichés. Functioning like a cultural script, such conventions enable playwrights and deponents alike to articulate shared assumptions about apprenticeship and its relationship with playgoing. Simultaneously, however, they also reveal some of the fault-lines within those tropes. In neither case, is it easy to position playgoing as a misdemeanour that must be cast off in order for the apprentice to repent and be re-assimilated into the structures of civic trade and profit. On the contrary, Eastward Ho’s erring apprentice Francis Quicksilver and Richard Meighen present examples of apprentices who are able to turn their interest in theatre to profitable ends.