A Critical Edition of Thomas Heywood's The Wise Woman of Hogsdon

by Thomas Heywood, Leonard

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264 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1980

About the author

Thomas Heywood (early 1570s – 16 August 1641) was an English playwright, actor, and author. His main contributions were to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre. He is best known for his masterpiece A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic tragedy, which was first performed in 1603 at the Rose Theatre by the Worcester's Men company.
He was a prolific writer, claiming to have had "an entire hand or at least a maine finger in two hundred and twenty plays", although only a fraction of his work has survived.

Reviews

[Katheryn Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

15 November 2021

Another quick reread of the 1638 edn. (through EEBO), and I've decided to add an extra star to my rating. I would love to see a modern production of this very funny play.

04 November 2021
Read at Early English Books Online (1638 edn.)

This little-read play is very useful for my research interests, and similar in a lot of ways to The Witch of Edmonton. It is also surprisingly funny.

December 2019
Read in Three Marriage Plays.

[Jessie Brockmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

just a few highlights:

‘ - thou hast hit it, sweet lad; thou hast hit it.
- what is it you say, sir?
- thou hast hit it. ‘

‘how where when why whom what. feeding sure makes me lean, and fasting fat.

‘- how look i?
- as well as e’er you did — fat and fresh.
- you lie, boy; pocket that, and now be gone.’

[amyleigh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Meh. Just another day in the city of London. Some boy actors playing girls disguised as boys then pretending to be girls in order to enact a very convoluted marriage plot to show how all the men are incompetent and awful.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

what???

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read again after a year, and I'm getting it so much better (gets an extra star). I don't think it will change your life, but this is a very funny, very silly piece of fluff, with a lead like a young Leslie Philips: one can easily see young Chartley saying "Oooh: be-have!" Everything he says is smutty. I knew someone like that at college: the woman he was with was the only woman in the world: the fact that he had another girlfriend in the room next door seemed irrelevant.

Comments below (from June 24) still relevant, but I enjoyed it more the second time through.

**

Another rollicking City Comedy, and not as filthy as some of the others out there, though it does have some good smutty bits. It's kind of like Taming of the Shrew with the Petruchio-Katherine narrative taken out, two young women called Luce and some very silly Latin, where one character thinks everything being said is rude (and sometimes it is).

What is interesting about it, though, is the shop stuff, which is very reminiscent of the early Jane Shore scenes in Edward IV, and one gets the feeling that this was what Heywood was really interested in: how far does the beautiful woman have to flirt to make a sale? How much do these men know the flirtation is part of the plan, and how much do they think it will lead to something else? How much can they, can't they accept?

The Wise Woman, too, is a con artist, but she makes people around her happy. It doesn't matter that we know she's a fake, as she gets good results. I don't want to go all Matthew Arnold on this, but is it better to know we're being conned, of we get happy as a result? Religion, much?