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

In his recent study of Thomas Heywood's commercial and civic drama, published as part of Ashgate's Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama series, Richard Rowland argues that "for anyone interested in discovering, or recapturing, the essence of Heywood's theatre, the 'book of the play' … cannot alone provide a reliable guide" (3). The revelation of meaning through an analysis of actual or imagined performance is not unique to Heywood, of course; but it is especially pressing in his case, according to Rowland: "there are many occasions where without that process taking place the texts he left us make no sense at all" (4). In his analysis of "the distinct characteristics of Heywood's dramaturgy" (11), Rowland draws extensively on other texts and contexts as well, including poetry and politics. From this multiplicity of practices and discourses emerges the aptness of Rowland's title.

Rowland likewise directs readers' attention to the multiplicity of venues in which Heywood's plays were presented. Yet whether performed on the public stage, at court or in the street, Heywood's theatre spoke to and for the "populous Throng," as he wrote in The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635) (qtd. 339), not royal or civic elites. Simply put, Heywood's theatre was the people's theatre. Rowland foregrounds this view in his choice of the play and pageant that temporally frame his study. In 1599 Edward IV premiered at the Boar's Head. Like the other commercial playhouses for which Heywood wrote—the Rose, the Red Bull, and the Cockpit—the Boar's Head was associated, then as now, with lower class, semi-literate spectators demanding noisy, violent spectacle and unsophisticated, bawdy comedy. While Heywood was surely aware of these contemptuous (and, Rowland insists, erroneous) associations, his plays reject them completely: Heywood "clearly expected spectators to follow [his plays'] dizzying alternations of tone rapidly and appreciatively" (16). In 1639 Heywood wrote Londini Status Pacatus, his last civic pageant and the last mayoral show "realized in print or performance before the outbreak of civil war" (345). Taking the city as its stage, this pageant imposed similar cognitive and emotional demands upon "a heterogeneous body of people, participants and spectators alike" (363). Rowland's sampling of other plays and pageants demonstrates that, for forty years, Heywood deployed his considerable learning, subtle contemporary references, and rapid "tonal shifts" (16) to create a truly popular theatre.

Rowland's subtitle refers to the principal concerns of his study's three parts. Part 1 focuses on representations of urban and domestic locations; part 2 examines Heywood's translations of classical texts; and part 3 demonstrates Heywood's polemical emphasis on conflict in his mayoral shows. Practices of Heywood's that reappear throughout all three parts include: purposeful modernization of source material; strident defense of the people's economic, religious, and moral interests; and blunt rejection of neoclassical rules that required generic segregation. Indeed, one of Rowland's principal goals is to show that Heywood repeatedly used comedy, or "mirth," to communicate political, social, cultural, and aesthetic critique, or "matter" (18, passim).

In part 1, which contributes to current conversations about early modern representations of space, Rowland credits Heywood with radical innovations in the dramatization of both London and the household. In chapter 1 he makes the bold argument that Heywood was the first playwright to recognize the implications of John Stow's 1598 Survey of London and to produce plays—1 and 2 Edward IV—in which London's neighborhoods, customs, and history are staged with specificity and purpose. By invoking a familiar cityscape, Heywood, like Stow, "open[ed] up new forms of cultural and political awareness, by which affiliations within and to the communities in which citizens lived and worked were privileged at the expense of the structures and strictures of subjecthood imposed by the crown" (24). Heywood achieves a similar effect in his reworking of chronicle history in 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me You...