Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl also confronts London via language and as language, but in a different manner and mood compared with Jonson’s Epicoene.1 Middleton and Dekker’s play offers a compelling counterpoint to the latter’s darker anxieties about language in society, but signals its deep engagement, nonetheless, with questions of the vernacular. The distinction is crucial to emphasize, for my argument in this chapter is not that The Roaring Girl provides a similar rehearsal of Jonson’s concerns and commentary. The Roaring Girl’s particular staging suggests the diversity, rather, of city comedy’s generic project of interrogating the vernacular in society. Whereas Epicoene offers little resolution to the particular problems of the vernacular-and vernacular users-it raises, The Roaring Girl constructs a fantasy of legibility within the threateningly profuse city, rendering several otherwise ambiguous semiotics of the city knowable, if not ultimately containable.2 Such a fantasy betrays anxieties about representation and coherence observed in Epicoene and in the contemporary climate more generally. The Roaring Girl works hard-with its realistic settings and portrait of an actual and notorious figure-to offer an alternative London, an ideal vision that reveals its points of stress.