SOURCE: Davies, Lindsay. “Neither Maids nor Wives in The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon.” In Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, edited by Alvin Vos, pp. 69-86. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.

In the following essay, Davies discusses Heywood's play as a response to ambiguities in the marriage laws that left women in a vulnerable, but also potentially transgressive, position.

Thomas Heywood's comedy, The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (1604), is often called a prodigal comedy because of Chartley, its compulsively prodigal male lead.¹ As Barbara Baines has put it, Chartley “out-prodigals the worst prodigals of this dramatic kind,” for in addition to committing the usual sins of drinking and gambling, he is an incorrigibly promiscuous bigamist.² Robert Turner has pointed out that “the new prodigal son plays [i.e., those of 1601-6] are distinguished from the old [e.g., Lusty Juventus] because the purgation prepares the sinner not for heaven...