Mini Symposium: The Wise Woman of Hoxton

Scholars will present talks on The Wise Woman of Hoxton, a vibrant, early 17th-century English city comedy by playwright Thomas Heywood that centers on a shrewd, cunning title character who operates in the shady, festive outskirts of London. This event complements Lord Denney’s Players' production of the play, which will be performed the same weekend.

Written around 1604, the play follows the exploits of a slippery con artist and fortune teller who routinely outsmarts both gullible citizens and rakish gentlemen. Through clever use of disguises and theatrical trickery, the eponymous "wise woman" navigates the complexities of class conflict and marital deception to expose the wrongdoings of the young male leads. Its significance lies in its vivid, gritty portrayal of low-level early modern London life, serving as a celebrated example of domestic comedy that frequently draws comparisons to the works of Ben Jonson.

This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. Co-sponsored by Lord Denney's Players, the Department of English, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Humanities Institute.

Let us know you're interested!

Event Speakers and Topics

Heywood’s Hoxton and the Politics of Suburban Comedy 

Christopher Highley

This paper begins with the observation that the plot of Heywood’s play reverses the usual direction of travel in London-based drama of the period whereby characters move inexorably from urban periphery to urban center.  In WW though the momentum of the action is decidedly centrifugal—consistently pulling characters to the suburban setting of Hoxton, where the action culminates.  

But where was Hoxton and what did it signify to the play’s first audiences? Why was it important enough for Heywood to include it in his title?  Highley will show that at a time of rapid change, dislocation, and development in London’s hinterland, Hoxton occupied a liminal position, perched on the cartographic horizon, at the cusp of the urban and the rural. Heywood’s play thus participates in complex discourse of the suburban, one dominated by polemical voices excoriating the suburbs as repositories of sin and disease that threatened to infect the healthy body politic within the city walls.

In Hoxton, however, Heywood imagines a suburban community which rather than threatening or polluting a supposedly well-governed urban center offers solutions to the problems generated at the civic center.  The gynocentric world of Hoxton with the Wise Woman’s house at its center becomes a laboratory in which the deficiencies of official structures of authority are remedied by unofficial, bottom-up means.  Taking a satirical swipe at the inadequacies of magisterial and ecclesiastical governance, Heywood celebrates the informal and unlicensed forms of self-regulation that emerge within face-to-face neighborhoods.

Christopher Highley is a professor of English and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University. He specializes in Early Modern literature, culture and history. He has written three books: Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Blackfriars in Early Modern London: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood (Oxford University Press, 2022). He continues to work on Early Modern London, as well as on the posthumous image of Henry VIII. Highley is also the Department of English's Study Abroad Programs Coordinator and an Editorial Board Member of The Map of Early Modern London.

Heywood’s Dramaturgy of Repetition and Invention in The Wise Woman of Hoxton 

Jean Howard

This paper explores how Heywood constructs plays for performance by relying on a dramaturgy of repetition and invention.  By this, Howard means that Heywood developed distinctive techniques for the engaging theatrical staging of social life, such as structurally highlighting the pathos of abandoned or abused women; and he used these techniques across his body of work and across individual plays as well. Heywood nonetheless repeatedly created disruptions and innovations within his distinctive repertoire of performance tropes and structures. The Wise Woman of Hoxton, Howard will argue, repeats some of Heywood’s familiar dramaturgical moves, but hyperbolizes them. Disguise and shapeshifting organize dramatic climaxes, not once, but twice; structures of onlooker observation and comment repeatedly invite spectators into metadramatic awareness, but comic turns undermine theatrical distancing effects. In this paper Howard explores some of the dramatic techniques by which Heywood, the assumed naif among early modern English playwrights, creates an impressive performance script for The Wise Woman of Hoxton.  

Jean Howard is a George Delacorte Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University. Specializing in Shakespeare and early modern drama, her research involves feminist and Marxist theory, new historicism and the history play. Her award-winning scholarship includes Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642, which received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Theater History, as well as Engendering a Nation (with Phyllis Rackin), The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England, Marxist Shakespeares (with Scott Shershow) and King Lear: Language and Writing. She is completing Staging History, on the history play in contemporary Britain and the US. 

“Married you vizarded”: Staging Intersectional Impersonation with The Wise Woman of Hoxton 

Elizabeth E. Tavares

Elizabeth E. Tavares is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. Specializing in early English drama, her research involves playing companies, theatre history and Shakespeare in performance. Her award-winning research has appeared in Early Theatre and Shakespeare Quarterly. Playing the Repertory Before Shakespeare, her book on the origins and affordances of the repertory system—in movement and music, for prop- and race-making—is coming this spring from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Tavares is also the director of research for the Alabama Shakespeare Project.