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Bale's Kynge Johan had created two paradigmatic characters with which to express its religious and political concerns, both embodied successively in John himself: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Chapter 7 considers the first of these, as employed in a series of plays from the early 1590s onwards. It emerges that the sanctified monarch on stage was never an entirely unshadowed figure, and that he or she was the focus of both the hopes and the anxieties of the subject.

The second of those paradigmatic characters, the martyred subject, provides the material for Chapter 8. The martyred subject was a character called into existence in order to address conflicts between the individual conscience and national religion. After an introductory discussion of martyrdom in general, and the sixteenth‐century debate on martyrdom in particular, the chapter analyses a series of plays in which we find this character used to identify and to test the point at which religious conviction and political loyalty begin to unravel.

This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.

This chapter attempts to identify the author of Pericles, Acts 1 and 2. George Wilkins, Thomas Heywood, John Day, William Rowley, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton have all been proposed as candidates of co-authorship, but Wilkins is the only one of these for whose association with Pericles, Acts 1-2, evidence of any worth has been brought forward. Wilkins is known to have been the author of just one unaided play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, published two years before Pericles, in 1607. Attribution studies are most persuasive when a variety of approaches all converge on the same conclusion. The chapter details findings which cover versification, rhymes, high-frequency words, stylistic quirks, linguistic forms, uses of the relative pronoun, and verbal parallels. Statistics are complemented by stylistic analysis along conventional literary-critical lines.

In seventeenth‐century England, masques inhabited two media, their dramatic occasions consistently delivered into a public culture of reading. This chapter details masques' material circulation in print culture: print and scribal reproduction, provenance, annotations, rights and reprints, marketing as sheet music. While bibliographic attention is crucial, it offers a starting point rather than a terminus for exploring masques' (or any texts') position in their culture. The chapter explores ways that scriptors address readers in the prefaces and margins, drawing examples from masques of Jonson, Campion, Daniel, Chapman, Shirley, William Browne, Thomas Jordan, Middleton/Rowley, and Heywood. It analyzes the hermeneutics of reading in two seventeenth‐century accounts: legal documents surrounding the prosecution of William Prynne, and an essay on the book trade by Newcastle bookseller William London, testing Habermas's theories of the public sphere against these early modern accounts.

This chapter compares the approaches to Boudica taken in the emerging history market of the late seventeenth century, against the backdrop of the emerging national narrative. It explores the relationship between historical fact, dramatic and poetic fictionalization, and the appeal to wider audiences in the period following the Restoration. It argues that authors who wrote about Boudica were fully aware of the permeable boundaries between historical fact and fictional accounts, and that they consciously exceeded these as a means of appealing to a wider range of readers and viewers. This awareness by early modern writers of the relationship between ‘true’ history and its fictionalized aspects—and the openness with which this was shared with readers—suggests the inherent complexity of historical production. This chapter further argues that the scholarly focus on the relationship between history and the novel has somewhat overshadowed the more enduring links between history and drama.

Using the two parts of Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, or a Girl Worth Gold as a case study, this chapter charts the emergence of ‘girl’ into early modern English, tracing two major shifts in the development of the vocabulary of female youth in dictionaries, midwifery manuals, literature, and drama. The first shift began in the early sixteenth century and involved the proliferation of specialised terms for female children. Following this period of elaboration, a second shift took place in the mid-seventeenth century, when ‘girl’ and the other terms in its semantic network began to be defined as separate categories of female youth.

This concluding chapter asks what the ‘mercantile dramaturgy’ outlined in the book can tell us about the performativity of economic discourse itself, about the degree to which economic models actively shape the world they represent. For a twenty-first-century audience or readership, mercantile dramaturgy can be most beneficial in pointing towards a performative understanding of the reciprocal creation of ‘economics’ and ‘the economy’. The chapter argues that the mercantile dramaturgy of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II and Philip Massinger's The Picture returns an awareness of mediation to the idealised models of mercantile treatises. Both plays engage with the problems of knowing about and intervening in events that occur at great distances via ‘the factor’, who serves as a figure of mediating agency, whose work is effaced when mercantile treatises promise an unmediated view of economic systems. These plays present economic models as the products of work which are themselves able to perform work. They show us not only that, in the phrase of Gaston Bachelard popularised by Bruno Latour, les faits sont faits (facts are manufactured), but also that facts are factors -- mediators that exert their own agency.

This chapter reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness alongside early modern letter-writing manuals. In the early seventeenth century, popular epistolary manuals began to include examples of letters begging for money and letters denying or extending loans. These fictional epistles offer a repository of stock phrases and rhetorical moves useful for eager borrowers and unwilling lenders alike, two positions most of the books’ users would occupy at one point or another over the course of their lives. Letter-writing guides teach their users the necessity of self-contradiction over time: of now adhering to one set of values and practices, now to another. Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s plays analyze their protagonists’ inability to do precisely this. In Merchant and A Woman Killed, tragedy or near-tragedy results from the failure to exercise the social flexibility necessary for balancing the demands of love with those of thrift.

This chapter considers how the epic underworld becomes accessible from the early modern London stage. It examines plays by Kyd, Dekker, and others, but the main focus is on Thomas Heywood’s The Silver Age (1613), where katabatic movement on stage successfully translocates the descent narratives of erudite classical poetry into popular dramatic performance. The Silver Age retells the myth of Proserpina’s abduction by Pluto but it reconfigures Ovid’s account to fit within an episodic drama based around the life story of the Theban hero, Hercules. Heywood’s play offers an unusually independent and sustained response to classical materials, and an additional literary interest in Statius will be proposed. The chapter also employs recent work by theatre historians to reflect on the collaborative nature of early modern dramatic production, and on the repertoire and specific skill-set developed at the Red Bull Playhouse in the early years of the Jacobean era.

In c.1537 Thersites made his entrance on the English stage, and declared himself as belonging to Homer at the start of a comic interlude that has typically been considered (like Thersites himself) as travestying high epic into low, scurrilous entertainment. This chapter examines the intersection between staged versions of the character Thersites and the early modern period’s ongoing reception of Homer’s Iliad. Considering the Thersites interlude as representative of a broader cultural conception of Thersites, the chapter argues that a peculiarly English, and explicitly metatheatrical, Thersites emerges from a series of receptions-within-receptions, as Homer’s character was approached via refractions across a number of later classical texts. Moreover, when resurrected on the public stage in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (c.1602) and Thomas Heywood’s two-part drama The Iron Age (c.1611), this alternative, composite Thersites offers a significant commentary on the offstage reception of Homer’s epic text.

This chapter argues that The Fair Maid of the West’s dramatic geography allows its playwright, Thomas Heywood, to join the intertheatrical conversation regarding the relationship between romance and commerce that had been initiated by Marlowe and Shakespeare, and to ask further questions concerning the relevance of chivalric ideals in late-Elizabethan England. Reading Heywood’s play as part of a wider debate about birth and nobility in early modern England, the chapter focuses in particular on how, by placing the working-class heroine Bess Bridges at the centre of a romance narrative, The Fair Maid is able to challenge the aristocratic and masculinist values generally inscribed within the tradition.

This chapter focuses on grief and sorrow arising from worldly misfortunes and the deeply negative effects many writers believed it could have on a person’s health—a conviction reflected most powerfully in the London Bills of Mortality. While much of the work in the field has read such passion within the context of deeply embodied Galenic humoralism, the chapter argues for a more pluralistic view, highlighting the interplay of holism and dualism in the period. It examines how several Renaissance plays, including Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Ford’s The Broken Heart, and Shakespeare’s Richard II, King John, and King Lear, questioned the wisdom of restraining ‘beastly’ passion and even suggested that grief might not always be as deeply connected to involuntary physiology as often thought. Instead, they positioned it as a form of wilful and rational desire in the intellective soul, and a powerful agent of self-knowledge and change.

This chapter addresses the role of economic chastity discourse in determining thevalue and subjectivity of racial others. Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West draws out the racial implications of city comedy’s invocation of chastity to articulate subject status. Although foreign men are judged unfavorably against Bess’s virtue, her mode of chaste agency—grounded as it is in her negotiation of market forces—is ostensibly available to Moors who regard her as a model for moral rehabilitation. Othello supplants Fair Maid’s assimilationist paradigm with an alternate discourse, expounded by Iago, that asserts chastity’s commodity value and then assesses racialised men in similar terms. In contrast to Fair Maid, Othello invokes chastity discourse to address the status of people who may, quite literally, be regarded as commodities. Reading Othello in conjunction with Fair Maid, therefore, illuminates how conceptions of chastity-as-subject and chastity-as-object converge in English assessments of racial value, and how a prevailing emphasis on commodity status proves central to the development of racist ideologies.

Starting from Dryden’s critique of Troilus and Cressida in the preface to his adaptation (1679), and invoking, for comparative purposes, other treatments of the love story by Chaucer, Henryson, and Thomas Heywood, this chapter looks at constancy in Shakespeare’s play, and at how it relates (as both a philosophical principle and an emotional aspiration) to vowing. Analysis centres on the scenes between Troilus and Cressida, and Diomedes and Cressida, at what is implied as well as what is said, and at what is conveyed by the giving of love tokens. Attention is also paid to Pandarus and Thersites, and to the play’s spiralling into male rivalry in the scenes of battle.