Thomas Heywood

A main theme in early modern domestic tragedy was not marital discord as such but violent - usually unreasonably violent - behaviour on the husband's part. At a time when husbands were not only allowed but obliged to rule their families, including their wives, the definition of 'lawful and reasonable' measures of punishment were opened to debate. The marriage of John Frankford, a middling country gentleman, and his wife Anne is comfortable if uneventful, until Wendoll, an acquaintance of her husband's, confesses his passionate love to her. Anne yields to him; they are discovered. Instead of killing the two adulterers on the spot - a vengeance that society would condone - Frankford banishes his wife from the house and their two children. Racked by guilt and remorse, Anne starves herself to death; but Heywood allows a scene of deathbed reconciliation to wife and husband.

Part of the Nick Hern Books Globe Quartos series, co-published with Shakespeare's Globe, marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Thomas Heywood's play The Wise Woman of Hoxton is a city comedy complete with cross-dressing and disguise, dating from around 1605. The eponymous 'wise woman' is alternately dismissed as a charlatan or cursed as a she-devil, but she outsmarts gullible citizens and rakish gentlemen alike as the action moves through colourful Cheapside and the Exchange to its festive climax in Hoxton. This edition of the play is edited by Sonia Massai.

Part of the Nick Hern Books Globe Quartos series, co-published with Shakespeare's Globe, marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's play The Witches of Lancashire is a sensational dramatisation of the seventeenth-century witch trials, first performed at the original Globe in 1634. When everything goes wrong at a wedding, everyone starts to believe that a local coven is to blame. The play mocks the naïveté of those who cannot see what is under their noses, i.e. organised witchcraft and its double, Roman Catholicism. This edition of The Witches of Lancashire is edited by Gabriel Egan.

Thomas Heywood (1574?-1641), a professional English actor and one of the most prolific playwrights of the seventeenth century, is most famous for his plays written about contemporary English life. The Fair Maid of the West recalls typical Elizabethan bourgeois literature, but its primary relationship is with all adventure narratives regardless of their era. This romantic comedy features vivid pictures of English seaport life and travel to exotic locales by English sea captains. The plot is filled with pirate battles, a shipwreck, courageous adventures, and devoted love. If boredom is the perennial disability of men, adventure stories are the perennial therapy, operating as a restorative by encouraging an intermission in the ordinary powers and interests of the mind.