"Speaking some words, but of no importance"? Stage directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV.

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses

IN 1635, approaching the end of a career in the theater that had already spanned more than forty years, Thomas Heywood interrupted the bizarre concoction of folklore and spiritual wisdom he called The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells to deliver an uncharacteristically bitter attack on those who had, he felt, appropriated and undermined the native dramatic tradition. In this unlikely context, Heywood denounced writers who wished to restrict the playgoing public to an elite few--he has in his sights courtier poets like Carew and Davenant who "dare to measure mouthes for every bit / The Muse shall tast"--and insisted on the legitimacy of artistic judgments passed by "the populous Throng / Of Auditors." (1) Two years later, in the pages of a very different kind of text, his pageant for the new lord mayor of London, Heywood expanded the constituency of people who had a right to be entertained to include those "who are better delighted with that which pleaseth the eye, than contenteth the eare," and he went on to defend this position with some vehemence: such "gesticulations, dances, and other Mimicke postures" were not, he insisted, "to be vilefied by the most supercilious, and censorious, especially in such a confluence, where all Degrees, Ages, and Sexes are assembled." (2) It is with the visual dimension of Heywood's stagecraft that I want to engage here. I am going to argue that Heywood attempted, through the construction of elaborate stage directions, to control the movements and gestures of the players for whom he wrote, in a style--and to an extent--that was unusual, if not unique in the period. And I shall also explore the possibility that an examination of this evidence might shed some light on the identity of the playwright (or playwrights) who helped to create one of the most successful, most often printed, and most politically explosive plays to appear on the early modern stage.

None of the six early printed texts of Edward IV attributes the play to a named author. (3) Yet, by the Restoration, the earliest historians of the English theater were designating the play unequivocally as the work of Thomas Heywood, and this attribution has gone more or less unquestioned ever since. (4) The first writer to name Heywood as the creator of the play was also among the earliest of his detractors: Francis Kirkman, whose second Catalogue would ungraciously suggest that all Heywood's plays were "written loosely in Taverns," ascribed Edward IV to him in his first Catalogue of 1661. (5) In 1675 Edward Phillips continued the combination of attribution and denigration, including Edward IV in his Theatrum Poetarum among a list of "many but vulgar Comedies." (6) In 1687 William Winstanley went one better than Kirkman, asserting that Heywood wrote his plays "on the back-side of Tavern Bills"; he also confidently categorized Edward IV as just such a composition. (7) The cataloger and critic Gerard Langbaine followed suit in the playlist he published in 1688, and he went on to confirm the attribution in his seminal Account of the English Dramatick Poets three years later. (8) Those eighteenth-century critics who bothered with such issues at all reiterated Langbaine's assertion, and thus the situation remained until the late Victorian period, when the acerbic F. G. Fleay challenged virtually any unproven assumption about the Renaissance drama that he could find, including this one. (9)

At the beginning of the last century E. K. Chambers still expressed reservations about Heywood's authorship, partly because of the dramatist's authorization of Henslowe's payments to Chettle and Day for "the Booke of Shoare, now newly to be written for the Earle of worcesters players"; "if this was a revision of his own play," Chambers argued, "he would hardly have left it to others." (10) But Sir Walter Greg regarded Edward IV "on internal evidence, as unquestionably Heywood's," and it is this view which has prevailed with critics up to the present day. (11) A. M. Clark, the author of the first book devoted to Heywood, had "no hesitation in accepting Edward IV as at least in part his," F. S. Boas in the second argued that the play could be "confidently attributed on internal evidence in whole or part" to Heywood, and Kathleen McLuskie, in the most recent book-length study, writes of the play as if questions surrounding its authorship did not exist at all. (12)

In the introduction to the Revels edition of Edward IV I have set out the external evidence for the play's authorship, and offered the tentative conclusion that Heywood was indeed likely to have been involved in its composition. The probability of Heywood's having contributed to the repertoire of the fleetingly prominent company known as the Earl of Derby's Players in their new (and tempestuous) home at the Boar's Head playhouse in Whitechapel is suggested primarily by his unusual and temporary absence from the records of Philip Henslowe, the entrepreneur to whose theater operation Heywood was nominally contracted. I also noted, however, that a similar (and equally inexplicable) hiatus in the contributions from Anthony Munday to the Henslowe outfit occurred at precisely the same moment. I intend in this article to supplement those findings by a venture into the more precarious territory of "internal" evidence. I do so not because of any particular preoccupation with the notion of "authorship" itself--I continue to find persuasive many of Jeffrey Masten's observations on the essentially collaborative nature of early modern drama, and I remain unconvinced of the theatrical awareness and credibility displayed by the latest wave of "disintegrationists" (13)--but because I believe not only that the mechanics of stagecraft deployed in Edward IV are extraordinary in themselves, but also that they demonstrate ways of conceiving movement and gesture onstage that are instinctive to Heywood (and perhaps to Munday), but that are seldom entertained by their contemporaries.

In launching this investigation I am aware that I am venturing into waters around which modern scholarship has placed warning signs that need to be taken seriously. In a recent volume of this journal Michela Calore chooses to exclude the terms "playwright" and "book-keeper" from her illuminating discussion of the stage directions found in the plays in the repertory of the Queen's Men because she has come to believe that it is impossible to discern "the exact origins and function of some of the most obscure and unusual stage directions encountered in the texts under discussion." Indeed, Calore reaches the exceptionally cautious conclusion that the unambiguous evidence proving that the majority of late Elizabethan plays were the products of collaborative authorship has rendered "any attempt to rigorously categorize the different signs in Elizabethan dramatic works [...] pointless." (14) Even Alan Dessen, whose pioneering work has set the agenda for this area of study for almost three decades, has pithily described the use of stage directions as evidence as "building mosaics from snippets in italics." (15)

It has also been argued that all such evidence is invalidated unless the scribe and/or compositor(s) who have contributed to the final shape of a text can be proven to have been working directly from authorial copy. (16) But evidence concerning stage directions drawn from transcribed or theatrically annotated texts is not a priori inadmissable since it seems certain that most of a play's original directions did survive the process of transcription or editing essentially unaltered. There is evidence to suggest that non-authorial tinkering with stage directions was, if very rarely, undertaken by bookkeepers, and possibly by scribes; there is scarcely any to suggest that compositors were prone to such interference. Half a century ago Greg maintained that it is the playwrights "who supply the foundation; the book-keeper, however much he is concerned with [stage directions], does no more than modify and supplement," and he concluded that if "[n]ot all these directions were necessarily written by the author,... there is no doubt that the great majority were." (17) If some of Greg's suppositions have failed to stand the test of time, this one has not. In a series of important articles on the extant manuscript playbooks William Long has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that so "infrequently do theatrical alterations occur that if a stage direction exists in a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century play text, manuscript or printed, it is most likely a playwright's," and most recently he has insisted further that "[n]one of the theatrical personnel who add notations to the surviving playbooks show any inclination to clarify, particularize, or regularize either stage directions or speech headings." (18)

My own examination of manuscript playbooks--particularly Thomas Heywood's The Captives, or The Lost Recovered and Philip Massinger's Believe as You...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.