Thomas Heywood and London Exceptionalism

We misread Thomas Heywood’s city plays, I argue, when we read them as city plays, or as plays concerned with the city as a distinctly urban space separate from the world beyond its walls. Instead, Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II and Wise Woman of Hoxton resist this sense of “London exceptionalism” by drawing attention to the complicated ways that London fits within the extra-civic nation or kingdom. By exploring the curious social, cultural, and political position of the city in Heywood’s plays, this article draws attention to the confused status of the early modern city within its world: Was London the metropolitical center of a nation? Was it a key node in a cosmopolitical network of relatively de-nationalized “world cities”? Was it a semi-autonomous city-state thanks to its historic liberties and economic might? In some sense, it was all of the above, and Heywood’s plays help to make this fraught space ideologically knowable to their audiences.