Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict (review)

Richard Rowland's Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict is a vital and comprehensive re-evaluation of Thomas Heywood's position in Early Modern theatre history. From the outset, it establishes grand claims about Heywood's status as a theatrical and artistic innovator. More importantly, it substantiates these assertions persuasively through a detailed and eloquent examination of Heywood's career spanning the theatrical, court and civic cultures of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline England.

The book is divided into three sections which reflect the titular emphasis on location, translation and conflict and which map the historical trajectory of Heywood's career. In the first section, Rowland explores Heywood's handling of urban, rural and domestic landscapes in his Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Evaluating the juxtaposition of familiar landmarks and unfamiliar actions in Parts one and two of Edward IV and the manipulation of urban spaces in If You Know Not Me You Know No Bodie, especially Part two, he claims that Heywood was the first dramatist to exploit the opportunities presented by John Stow's Survey of London to recreate the spaces of the metropolis on the stages of Early Modern London. In doing so, Rowland claims, Heywood initiated the Early Modern tradition in which familiar London settings functioned as geographical and theatrical spaces to address the concerns of the city's inhabitants.

Rowland follows this with an examination of domestic and rural settings in How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad and A Woman Killed with Kindness that evince Heywood's unconventional manipulation of the burgeoning genre of domestic tragedy. He further attends to Heywood's careful deployment of location and of generic conventions through an examination of the playwright's distinct practices as a translator in Part II of the study. Contending that Heywood brought new comic energy to the theatrical dynamics of his classical sources, this section offers fascinating analyses of The Captives, The English Traveller, and Loves Mistris and their respective explorations of the ethics of trade and international relations, the purposes of playing and Caroline court culture between 1624 and 1634. Finally, Rowland turns to Heywood's civic pageants of the 1630s in Part III to argue that he reinvented genre in this context to deploy further the spaces of the city as a means of foregrounding the conflicts which preoccupied the citizens of London. Instead of engaging with all of Heywood's theatrical works, which would, Rowland points out in his introduction, prevent doing justice to any, this study provides a series of close readings of these selected texts in relation to a range of social, literary and historical contexts to persuasively convey Heywood's politicized manipulation of genre, setting and performance context throughout his varied career.

Performance is a pervasive theme of this monograph. Acknowledging that the 'book of the play' alone cannot provide a reliable guide to any drama, Rowland argues that the 'difficulty of establishing the relationship between text and performance is perhaps more acute with Heywood than it is with any of his contemporaries' (p. 3). Identifying the three main reasons for this as the limited modern performance tradition of Heywood's plays, the lack of knowledge about his playhouses (even in comparison to other Early Modern performance contexts) and the absence of a reliable complete edition of Heywood's work, Rowland offers detailed case studies of a number of these plays in performance. Through an analysis of a 2005 performance of The Rape of Lucrece in the introductory chapter, Rowland establishes his argument that the abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing subject matter of Heywood's plays can only be fully explored through performance. He builds on this throughout the study by moving fluently between Early Modern theatre history and recent productions. His analysis of Loves Mistris, for instance, considers the particular dynamics of Queen Henrietta's Men and the potential differences between...