The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV

by Thomas Heywood, Richard Rowland (Editor)

This is the first new edition of Edward IV to be issued since the 1870s. The text of this edition was used by the actors at The Globe when they gave the first London performance of the play in more than four centuries. By demonstrating the playwright's dextrous marshalling of a remarkable range of sources, and by examining afresh the dramatist's singular theatrical technique, this volume reopens an exciting if difficult play to a new generation of scholars and performers.

Genres: Plays, Classics

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1599

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

[jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

came for the historical figures relevant to my dissertation, stayed for the jane shore plotline, lost my entire mind at the jane and elizabeth scene. and the portrayals of edward iv (incredibly sinister, and all the more so because he doesn't seem to view himself as malevolent at all) and matthew shore (honestly one of the most interesting and least punchable husbands in early modern drama re: responding to his wife's adultery) were also great. but the rest of these plays did pretty much nothing for me. i'd give part 1 two stars and part 2 four stars, averaging out to a respectable three.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A how-to guide on galloping through a LOT of Lancaster and York history at great speed. There is a good level of social representation and nobility speak to them (when they're not bedding them). Women have the kind of agency usually found in a rare feminist text - wives and mistresses become friends, but they can still be u-turning backstabbers too. And what is this all for? So Shakespeare can 'borrow' and number of lines and ideas and so create "Richard III"

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third time through: Oooh, this play is brilliant. So moving, so powerful, so republican.

Second time of reading this play, and it just gets better: I would so love to see this play performed.

As an image of a "merry monarch", Edward IV is a monster, playing jokes with people's lives (twice he lets people get to the point of execution before reprieving them), "seducing" married women (to the extent of saying "I'm King. I am ordering you to have sex with me"), and both the military campaigns shown in the play are won by other people's effort and by trickery: the aristocracy are horrible in this play, and only the working people have any morality at all.

Come on, Royal Heywood Company: do this play!

last time's review:

Oh my, this is a good play(s)! If you only know Edward IV from Shakespeare, you are missing out on a manipulative, Machiavellian, priapic seducer and trickster, part Boris Johnson, part Donald Trump, with just a dash of Vladimir Putin (invading other people's countries cause he thinks he can get away with it) thrown in. Epistemically insouciant: this is a man who neither knows nor cares where the line is between truth and lies, he has stepped over it so much.

And at the moral heart of the story, his mistress, Jane Shore, a woman forced into being the King's concubine who feels so guilty about it she spends all her chances doing good, destroyed by people who will only judge her for adultery (and because she didn't do good to them).

A wonderfully subtle portrayal of the power of the patriarchy in action. Funny, moving etc.

Why is this play not better known? Why is this play not performed much more often (if at all)?

Wow!