SOURCE: Courtland, Joseph. “A Cultural Rereading of The Fair Maid of the West: Part I.” In A Cultural Studies Approach to Two Exotic Citizen Romances by Thomas Heywood, pp. 91-121. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Courtland examines Heywood's play within the context of Elizabethan colonialism.

Scholars have long recognized Thomas Heywood's exotic fantasy, The Fair Maid of the West: Part l, as one of the best citizen adventure dramas ever written: Frederick S. Boas has called it one of Heywood's most attractive and accomplished pieces of work,¹ Arthur Melville Clark judged it to be a “breezy masterpiece,”² while Mowbray Velte considered it as among the finest of its own rank: “a really splendid blending of realism and romantic adventure, a tale with an appeal to all ages and all red-blooded peoples.”³ Yet in spite of such recognition, most available commentary consists of nothing more than...