George Chapman

The Nick Hern Books RSC Classics - a series of rarely performed plays from the 16th and 17th centuries, published alongside their resurrection by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and the West End. Eastward Ho! is a collaboratively written City Comedy by Ben Jonson, John Marston and George Chapman, which sees true love and virtue triumphing over social-climbing, deception and trickery. Teeming with energy and larger than life characters, Eastward Ho! sees Touchstone, a London goldsmith, preparing to marry off his two daughters. Touchstone's two apprentices lead the wooing until the rakish fop Sir Petronel Flash arrives on the scene. Eastward Ho! was first performed at the Blackfriars Theatre, London, in 1605. This edition of the play is edited with an introduction by Helen Ostovich and preface by Gregory Doran. The plays in the RSC Classics series reflect the diversity of styles, themes and subjects of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and include a 'new' addition to the Shakespeare canon.

This collaborative masterpiece of hilarious city comedy was performed by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars playhouse in 1605. The story is of an allegorical simplicity that lends itself to satire of civic mores and traditions as well as to parody of the sentimental, idealising London comedy presented at the amphitheatres in the suburbs: Goldsmith Touchstone, an upright London citizen, has one modest and one ambitious daughter, one righteous and one disreputable apprentice; virtue is rewarded, ruthlessness comes to grief - and receives a drenching in the muddy Thames. The introduction to this edition discusses various methods of establishing authorship and highlights the irony of the collaborators' comic vision of contemporary London life.