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SOURCE: Rowland, Richard. “‘Thou teachest me humanitie’: Thomas Heywood's The English Traveller.” In English Comedy, edited by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan, pp. 137-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
In the following essay, Rowland considers The English Traveller as a response to Philip Massinger's play The Roman Actor.
At the Blackfriars theatre in 1626 the King's Men gave several performances of Philip Massinger's tragedy The Roman Actor, a play which Anne Barton has rightly characterised as ‘more pessimistic about the power of art to correct and inform its audience than any other play written between 1580 and 1642’.1 It seems likely that as avid a playgoer as Thomas Heywood would have made the short trip from his home in Clerkenwell to see it. If he did, the experience may have been a disconcerting one. He would have heard Joseph Taylor as the eponymous hero defending the theatre, eloquently and at...
This section contains 8,234 words (approx. 28 pages at 300 words per page) |
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