Heywood, Thomas | Lindsay Davies (essay date 1995)
Lindsay Davies (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Davies, Lindsay. “Neither Maids nor Wives in The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon.” In Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, edited by Alvin Vos, pp. 69-86. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.
[In the following essay, Davies discusses Heywood's play as a response to ambiguities in the marriage laws that left women in a vulnerable, but also potentially transgressive, position.]
Thomas Heywood's comedy, The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (1604), is often called a prodigal comedy because of Chartley, its compulsively prodigal male lead.1 As Barbara Baines has put it, Chartley “out-prodigals the worst prodigals of this dramatic kind,” for in addition to committing the usual sins of drinking and gambling, he is an incorrigibly promiscuous bigamist.2 Robert Turner has pointed out that “the new prodigal son plays [i.e., those of 1601-6] are...
[The entire page is 7080 words long]
Navigate
