Abstract
Following the re-opening of London’s commercial theatres in the 1590s, and against a background of significant commercial and demographic change, the playhouses began to develop plays in which the city staged itself to its inhabitants. One of the first plays to do this was Thomas Heywood’s King Edward IV (1599). This is a play in which, as this chapter demonstrates, the themes of change, exchange and inter-changeability (fungibility) feature prominently, and in which audiences are presented with important questions about worth and value. The play’s innovative depiction of Matthew and Jane Shore as a bourgeois tragic hero and heroine invites audiences to recognise, evaluate and question economic change as an ethical challenge.
The research supporting this essay was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 617849. I am extremely grateful to Rachel E. Holmes, Lizzie Swann and Katherine Hunt for their careful readings of drafts of this chapter. Any errors or omissions that remain are of course entirely my own.
The First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth, hereafter referred to as Edward IV.
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Tomlin, R. (2020). ‘Her Tongue Hath Guilded It’: Speaking Economically in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV. In: Mukherji, S., Roberts, D., Tomlin, R., Oppitz-Trotman, G. (eds) Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, vol 2. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_7
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