Book contents
- Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England
- Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Seeds of Sedition
- Part I The Scene of Libel
- Part II Libels on the Elizabethan Stage
- Chapter 3 Libels Supplicatory: Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus
- Chapter 4 Libel, Equity, and Law in Sir Thomas More
- Chapter 5 Jane Shore’s Public: Pity and Politics in Heywood’s Edward IV
- Chapter 6 Turning Plays into Libels: Satire and Sedition in Jonson’s Poetaster
- Epilogue Staging Libel in Early Stuart England
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Jane Shore’s Public: Pity and Politics in Heywood’s Edward IV
from Part II - Libels on the Elizabethan Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2023
- Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England
- Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Seeds of Sedition
- Part I The Scene of Libel
- Part II Libels on the Elizabethan Stage
- Chapter 3 Libels Supplicatory: Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus
- Chapter 4 Libel, Equity, and Law in Sir Thomas More
- Chapter 5 Jane Shore’s Public: Pity and Politics in Heywood’s Edward IV
- Chapter 6 Turning Plays into Libels: Satire and Sedition in Jonson’s Poetaster
- Epilogue Staging Libel in Early Stuart England
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter charts the affective-political communities that came together around the character of Jane Shore, the star of Thomas Heywood’s two-part history play Edward IV (1599). Not least of all in the theater, late Elizabethan Londoners increasingly came out to see and be seen. So too did their rulers, including notable forays to the Globe by the followers of the Earl of Essex and by the Duke of Buckingham. Across Heywood’s play, Jane Shore attains a similar degree of political celebrity. In the face of Edward’s incompetence and Richard III’s tyranny, Jane steadfastly defends the commons. Her popularity in the play’s medieval London was matched by her enthusiastic reception on the early modern stage. Edward IV was printed in both its parts six times between 1599 and 1626, and its heroine continued to hold the stage well into the seventeenth century. Together with the evidence of her reception in the theater, Heywood’s play maps Jane Shore’s public: the collectivity of strangers joined across time and space in defiance of royal tyranny and in pity for the beneficent Jane Shore, a populist heroine for the early modern age.
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- Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's EnglandPublics, Politics, Performance, pp. 144 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023