The Wise Woman of Hoxton is a city comedy by the early modern English playwright Thomas Heywood. It was published under the title The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon in 1638, though it was probably first performed c. 1604 by the Queen's Men company (of which Heywood was a shareholder), either at The Curtain or perhaps The Red Bull.Massai (2002, xi–xii) and McLuskie (1994, 2). The location is spelt both "Hogsdon" and "Hogsden" in the text published in 1638. The play is set in Hoxton, an area that at the time was outside the boundaries of the city of London and notorious for its entertainments and recreations.Massai (2002, 98). Hogsdon was an alternative spelling of Hoxton that was in use until the first half of the eighteenth century. References to the area in other early modern plays include Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (5.2.17–20) and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (4.1.446–447). The Victorian critic F. G. Fleay suggested that Heywood, who was also an actor, originally played the part of Sencer.Massai (2002, xiv). It has often been compared with Ben Jonson's comic masterpiece The Alchemist (1610)—the poet T. S. Eliot, for example, argued that with this play Heywood "succeeds with something not too far below Jonson to be comparable to that master's work".Quoted by Massai (2002, xii–xiii).
Characters
Young Robin Chartley, a wild-headed gentleman Boyster, a blunt fellow Sencer, a conceited gentleman Haringfield, a civil gentleman Luce, a goldsmith's daughter Luce's father, a goldsmith Joseph, the goldsmith's apprentice Old Master Chartley, Robin Chartley's father, a country gentleman Serving-man 1, Young Chartley's man Giles, Old Chartley's man Sir Harry, a knight who is no piece of a scholar Gratiana, Sir Harry's daughter Tabor, Sir Harry's man Sir Boniface, an ignorant pedant, or schoolmaster The Wise Woman of Hoxton, who bears the name of the drama A Countryman, client to the Wise Woman A Kitchen Maid, who comes to the Wise Woman for counsel Two Citizen's Wives, who also come to the Wise Woman for counsel Luce 2, a young country gentlewoman Serving-man 2, Gratiana's man
Text and composition
Printing The play consists of thirteen scenes divided into five acts, the longest of which is the final dénouement.Act five, scene two consists of 276 lines (12 percent of the whole); the play in total has 2,282 lines; see Heywood (2002). This segmentation seems to be authorial, since Heywood appears to have been involved in the preparation of the play for publication in quarto in 1638, in which the act divisions appear.The editor of the modern Globe edition, Sonia Massai, concludes that "[i]nternal evidence supports the theory of Heywood's involvement with the printing"; see Heywood (2002, 133–134). Henry Shepard, who had a shop "at the sign of the Bible" in Chancery Lane between Sergeant's Inn and Fleet Street (according to the play's title-page), published this first edition, on whose behalf "M. P." printed it (the printer is assumed to be Marmaduke Parsons).According to Massai, Parsons had been appointed as a "master printer" in 1637; see Heywood (2002, 131). The .
Dramatic composition The play employs both blank verse and prose, with a character's speech often switching between modes during a scene as its dramatic function changes. It also makes substantial use of audience contact and direct address. Many characters adopt disguises—particularly Luce 2, who is cross-dressed as a male (the page, "Jack"), who is subsequently cross-dressed again as a female for the pivotal masked wedding in the middle of the play.The secret wedding-ceremony is enacted just offstage, in the "withdrawing-room" in the Wise Woman's house in Hoxton, during the first scene of act three (3.1.79). When Boyster meets Luce 2 on the street outside in the confusion of its immediate aftermath, he asks her (mistakenly thinking that this is the person he has just married) "What art thou, girl or boy?", to which she/he replies: Both and neither: I was a lad last night, but in the morning I was conjured into a lass, and being a girl now, I shall be translated into a boy anon. Here's all I can at this time say for myself. Farewell. (3.2.35–38) As with the majority of female roles on the public stages of the early modern English theatre, Luce 2 would have been played by a boy player when the play was first performed.Orgel qualifies the claim that no women appeared onstage in England in this period, by pointing to non-professional participation in court masques, the records of professional female performers in the Lord Mayor of London pageants of 1523 and 1534, and various foreign professional female performers on the London stage in this period (1996, 4–9).
Structure and presentation of space With only three exceptions, the scenes alternate between interior and exterior dramatic locations.After act two, scene one, which takes place on the street outside the Wise Woman's house in Hoxton, the following two scenes are both indoors (in Sir Harry's house on Grace Street and inside the house of the Wise Woman in Hoxton, respectively); after that, there are two exterior scenes (one outside the Wise Woman's house again and the other presumably on the street near to Luce's shop); two exterior scenes also follow the interior setting of act four, scene one. The interior of the Wise Woman's house in Hoxton is shown only twice—though, in each case, they are the most theatrical and significant scenes in the play (act three, scene one and act five, scene two). The central crisis in the play's dramatic structure is staged there (the secret wedding-ceremony, in which two pairs of disguised participants are married by the pedantical scholar and deacon, Sir Boniface, only to be abruptly dispersed when the Wise Woman interrupts with a false alarm).The pairs of characters who are married in act three, scene one are: Luce and Boyster; Chartley and Luce 2. At the time, the first member of each pair thinks that they are marrying one another. The Wise Woman ensures that she waits long enough for the ceremony to be completed before disrupting it with her repeated cries (attempting to sound "like a madwoman") of "Shift for yourselves, warrants and pursuivants! Away!" (3.1.36–38). It is also the site of the complex dénouement in the final scene (whose sophisticated patterning of comic revelations from all sides has drawn the praise of many critics).
The Wise Woman The play delineates the social identities of its characters clearly and locates them within a hierarchical system of relations with one another.McLuskie (1998, 132). The two aristocratic fathers are distributed according to the traditional opposition of the rural and the urban, since one of them lives in the country and the other in the city. Gratiana's father, Sir Harry, lives on Grace Street in London. The protagonist's father, Old Master Chartley, is introduced at the beginning of act five with his exclamation that "London is a stranger grown and out of my acquaintance", since for "seven years I have not seen Paul's steeple or Cheap Cross" (5.1.1–3). The old cathedral of St Paul's was known at the time as a site frequented by beggars, thieves, and prostitutes, where one would go to pick up gossip, topical jokes, or the latest news of current affairs, war, religion, parliament, and the court. The conspirators of the Gunpowder plot were executed in front of the cathedral in 1605. Its steeple was destroyed in a fire on 4 June 1561 and was never rebuilt—Old Chartley's familiarity with the city may be more out-of-date than he admits. Cheap Cross was a landmark in Cheapside that was removed in 1643 by Puritans; see Massai in Heywood (2002, 121). The illiterate Wise Woman's "cunning" ignorance, which "can fool so many that think themselves wise" (as Luce 2 puts it in one of her frequent deflationary asides to the audience), is contrasted with the impenetrable learning of the "ignorant pedant" Sir Boniface, whose habit of conversing in Latin generates the significant comic action of the subplot.Sir Boniface is described in the dramatis personæ as "an ignorant pedant, or schoolmaster" and as "a deacon" by the Wise Woman (3.1.30).
The liminality of the Wise Woman's house, located in the disreputable suburbs outside the jurisdiction of the city of London, is also expressed in the marginality of the character herself and in her dramatic function. She is the enabling figure who steers the play towards its comic resolution, driven by the antagonistic action of the play's crossed-dressed heroine, Luce 2, which tempers and contains the disruptive forces released by the dissolute and intemperate protagonist, Young Chartley.
At the end of act four, scene three—having whispered her plan for the complex climax of the drama to Luce, Sencer, and Boyster, each in turn—the Wise Woman encourages them all to place responsibility for their fates in her ability to manage what she has called "a plot to make a play on."See (3.1.157) and (4.3.81–83). She promises that "if I fail in any of these or the rest, I lay myself open to all your displeasures."(4.3.81–83). The Wise Woman functions as the comedy's stage-manager, master of ceremonies, or book-holder.
The two Luces That the only two female characters to appear in act one share the same name—Luce—is not revealed to the audience until act three, just before the secret wedding, when Luce 2 explains as much in an aside.Luce 2 remarks that "it happens so luckily, that my name should be Luce too, to make the marriage more firm!" (3.1.88–90). Despite this, the two are also clearly distinguished, both in social terms and in terms of the dramatic functions each serves.
Luce 2 has disguised herself as a page and offers herself as a servant to the Wise Woman, though in reality she is an aristocrat. The first appearance of her namesake, Luce 1, shows her at work, sewing.(1.2.1–12). The stage direction at the beginning of the scene indicates that Luce is on display "in a sempster's shop" (1.2.1 SD), though she is described as the daughter of a goldsmith (2.1.149). Presumably this is the same goldsmith from whom Gratiana, later in the play, orders her servant Tabor to fetch her fan (3.3.28). In Luce's first long speech to Joseph, she suggests that her father is forcing her to sit in public view while she works. The line "Do you attend the shop, I'll ply my work" (1.2.7) indicates that Joseph is her addressee, though McLuskie misidentifies it as audience address; see McLuskie (1998, 129). When her father arrives to endorse her precipitous proposed marriage to the aristocratic protagonist, Young Chartley, the older man is identified as "a plain citizen".(1.2.134 SD). Luce 1's father explains that he rejoices to hear that his daughter "is preferred / And raised to such a match" with a gentleman who, as Chartley claims, is worth ten thousand pounds.See (1.2.143–144; 171–172).
Throughout the play, the citizen Luce frequently stresses her lack of agency and self-determination. She is presented as a patient to the actions of others. She passively endures the pathos of the paradoxical state that the secrecy of the marriage creates, in which the meaningful social distinction between "maid" and "wife" is suspended for her. For the aristocratic Luce , in contrast, her disguise—and its ability to 'conjure' and 'translate' appearance—allows her far greater scope than her poorer namesake enjoys.