"Speaking some words, but of no importance"? Stage directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV.

IN 1635, approaching the end of a career in the theater that had already spanned more than forty years, Thomas Heywood interrupted the bizarre concoction of folklore and spiritual wisdom he called The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells to deliver an uncharacteristically bitter attack on those who had, he felt, appropriated and undermined the native dramatic tradition. In this unlikely context, Heywood denounced writers who wished to restrict the playgoing public to an elite few--he has in his sights courtier poets like Carew and Davenant who "dare to measure mouthes for every bit / The Muse shall tast"--and insisted on the legitimacy of artistic judgments passed by "the populous Throng / Of Auditors." (1) Two years later, in the pages of a very different kind of text, his pageant for the new lord mayor of London, Heywood expanded the constituency of people who had a right to be entertained to include those "who are better delighted with that which pleaseth the eye, than contenteth the eare," and he went on to defend this position with some vehemence: such "gesticulations, dances, and other Mimicke postures" were not, he insisted, "to be vilefied by the most supercilious, and censorious, especially in such a confluence, where all Degrees, Ages, and Sexes are assembled." (2) It is with the visual dimension of Heywood's stagecraft that I want to engage here. I am going to argue that Heywood attempted, through the construction of elaborate stage directions, to control the movements and gestures of the players for whom he wrote, in a style--and to an extent--that was unusual, if not unique in the period. And I shall also explore the possibility that an examination of this evidence might shed some light on the identity of the playwright (or playwrights) who helped to create one of the most successful, most often printed, and most politically explosive plays to appear on the early modern stage.

None of the six early printed texts of Edward IV attributes the play to a named author. (3) Yet, by the Restoration, the earliest historians of the English theater were designating the play unequivocally as the work of Thomas Heywood, and this attribution has gone more or less unquestioned ever since. (4) The first writer to name Heywood as the creator of the play was also among the earliest of his detractors: Francis Kirkman, whose second Catalogue would ungraciously suggest that all Heywood's plays were "written loosely in Taverns," ascribed Edward IV to him in his first Catalogue of 1661. (5) In 1675 Edward Phillips continued the combination of attribution and denigration, including Edward IV in his Theatrum Poetarum among a list of "many but vulgar Comedies." (6) In 1687 William Winstanley went one better than Kirkman, asserting that Heywood wrote his plays "on the back-side of Tavern Bills"; he also confidently categorized Edward IV as just such a composition. (7) The cataloger and critic Gerard Langbaine followed suit in the playlist he published in 1688, and he went on to confirm the attribution in his seminal Account of the English Dramatick Poets three years later. (8) Those eighteenth-century critics who bothered with such issues at all reiterated Langbaine's assertion, and thus the situation remained until the late Victorian period, when the acerbic F. G. Fleay challenged virtually any unproven assumption about the Renaissance drama that he could find, including this one. (9)

At the beginning of the last century E. K. Chambers still expressed reservations about Heywood's authorship, partly because of the dramatist's authorization of Henslowe's payments to Chettle and Day for "the Booke of Shoare, now newly to be written for the Earle of worcesters players"; "if this was a revision of his own play," Chambers argued, "he would hardly have left it to others." (10) But Sir Walter Greg regarded Edward IV "on internal evidence, as unquestionably Heywood's," and it is this view which has prevailed with critics up to the present day. (11) A. M. Clark, the author of the first book devoted to Heywood, had "no hesitation in accepting Edward IV as at least in part his," F. S. Boas in the second argued that the play could be "confidently attributed on internal evidence in whole or part" to Heywood, and Kathleen McLuskie, in the most recent book-length study, writes of the play as if questions surrounding its authorship did not exist at all. (12)

In the introduction to the Revels edition of Edward IV I have set out the external evidence for the play's authorship, and offered the tentative conclusion that Heywood was indeed likely to have been involved in its composition. The probability of Heywood's having contributed to the repertoire of the fleetingly prominent company known as the Earl of Derby's Players in their new (and tempestuous) home at the Boar's Head playhouse in Whitechapel is suggested primarily by his unusual and temporary absence from the records of Philip Henslowe, the entrepreneur to whose theater operation Heywood was nominally contracted. I also noted, however, that a similar (and equally inexplicable) hiatus in the contributions from Anthony Munday to the Henslowe outfit occurred at precisely the same moment. I intend in this article to supplement those findings by a venture into the more precarious territory of "internal" evidence. I do so not because of any particular preoccupation with the notion of "authorship" itself--I continue to find persuasive many of Jeffrey Masten's observations on the essentially collaborative nature of early modern drama, and I remain unconvinced of the theatrical awareness and credibility displayed by the latest wave of "disintegrationists" (13)--but because I believe not only that the mechanics of stagecraft deployed in Edward IV are extraordinary in themselves, but also that they demonstrate ways of conceiving movement and gesture onstage that are instinctive to Heywood (and perhaps to Munday), but that are seldom entertained by their contemporaries.

In launching this investigation I am aware that I am venturing into waters around which modern scholarship has placed warning signs that need to be taken seriously. In a recent volume of this journal Michela Calore chooses to exclude the terms "playwright" and "book-keeper" from her illuminating discussion of the stage directions found in the plays in the repertory of the Queen's Men because she has come to believe that it is impossible to discern "the exact origins and function of some of the most obscure and unusual stage directions encountered in the texts under discussion." Indeed, Calore reaches the exceptionally cautious conclusion that the unambiguous evidence proving that the majority of late Elizabethan plays were the products of collaborative authorship has rendered "any attempt to rigorously categorize the different signs in Elizabethan dramatic works [...] pointless." (14) Even Alan Dessen, whose pioneering work has set the agenda for this area of study for almost three decades, has pithily described the use of stage directions as evidence as "building mosaics from snippets in italics." (15)

It has also been argued that all such evidence is invalidated unless the scribe and/or compositor(s) who have contributed to the final shape of a text can be proven to have been working directly from authorial copy. (16) But evidence concerning stage directions drawn from transcribed or theatrically annotated texts is not a priori inadmissable since it seems certain that most of a play's original directions did survive the process of transcription or editing essentially unaltered. There is evidence to suggest that non-authorial tinkering with stage directions was, if very rarely, undertaken by bookkeepers, and possibly by scribes; there is scarcely any to suggest that compositors were prone to such interference. Half a century ago Greg maintained that it is the playwrights "who supply the foundation; the book-keeper, however much he is concerned with [stage directions], does no more than modify and supplement," and he concluded that if "[n]ot all these directions were necessarily written by the author,... there is no doubt that the great majority were." (17) If some of Greg's suppositions have failed to stand the test of time, this one has not. In a series of important articles on the extant manuscript playbooks William Long has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that so "infrequently do theatrical alterations occur that if a stage direction exists in a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century play text, manuscript or printed, it is most likely a playwright's," and most recently he has insisted further that "[n]one of the theatrical personnel who add notations to the surviving playbooks show any inclination to clarify, particularize, or regularize either stage directions or speech headings." (18)

My own examination of manuscript playbooks--particularly Thomas Heywood's The Captives, or The Lost Recovered and Philip Massinger's Believe as You List--has convinced me not only that Long is correct in his analysis, but also that stage directions can reveal as much about an individual playwright's approach to spatial organization, to the physical appearance of his actors, and to the importance of gesture in establishing the characterization of a role or of a scene, as the dialogue itself. Moreover, in "their form and diction, directions directing even the most common kinds of event can differ sharply, and in ways that could well reflect the habitual and distinctive preferences of particular dramatists." (19)

So, I want to take a look at some of the more unusual stage directions found in Edward IV, and to explore the possibility that they might share some of the conceptual and lexical characteristics of directions found in plays from the undisputed Heywood canon. I am not the first to have observed that Heywood's "habitual preferences" are singular. Linda McJannet, in her richly rewarding study of the "voice" of Elizabethan stage directions, repeatedly notes that "Heywood's directions are often idiosyncratic," and she offers some telling evidence to support such a view; deducing, for instance, that the prevalence of marginal mid-scene directions reflects the state of a printer's copy--and thus the format in which an author has laid out both his dialogue and his instructions--she documents the prominence of such "marginalia" in Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know No Body. (20) But I am going to suggest that Heywood not only writes directions in a style that distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries, but that he also thinks differently about the space of the stage and the ways in which his (fellow) actors are to perform upon it.

Bearing in mind David Bradley's polemical assertion that "[i]t is not an exaggeration to say that the action of an Elizabethan play consists of entrances," (21) I shall begin with these, ostensibly the simplest of all directions; in particular I want to examine those entrances that require characters or groups of characters to "meet" on stage. The first, found in part 2 (sig.Piv; scene 9, lines 0.1-2), reads: "Enter Mistris Shoare with Iockie her man, and some attendants more, and is met by Sir Robert Brakenburie." The second reads thus: "The Lord Louell and Doctor Shaw meet on the Stage" (sig.R4r; scene 13, lines 0.1-2); the third has "then enter king Lewes, and his traine, and meete with k. Edward, the kinges embrace" (sig.N4r; Scene 5, lines 0.2-3). The first of these is unusual in itself. In a survey of every play listed in Harbage's Annals of English Drama for the period 1580-1642 (plus the more recently discovered manuscript play Tom a Lincoln) it emerges that the construction met by appears in the stage directions of only twelve plays, from a total of 662. (22) One of the other eleven examples is in a play definitely by Heywood: part 1 of The Iron Age (1633 quarto, sig. E2r). Another occurs in a text for which Heywood wrote a prologue, epilogue, and dedication, and upon which he may have made substantial revisions: The Jew of Malta (1633 quarto, sig. B4r). The fact that a quarter of all the incidences of this in any case extremely rare construction occur in texts in which Heywood's hand has been detected is striking--although Dekker's involvement in four of the remaining nine examples is perhaps no less so. (23)

But there is a further peculiarity attached to this direction and it is one shared by the third direction cited from N4r: the concept of "meeting" on the stage deployed here most unusually does not imply or require that the characters who are to "meet" also "enter" at this moment. Six lines of dialogue follow the first direction before Sir Robert Brackenbury enters; conversely, when the French king enters at N4r, the English king he "meets" with has already been onstage for some time. This way of conceiving and describing stage business appears remarkably infrequently in the period. The statistics which document the incidence of the formulation "Enter A meeting B" in stage directions are surprising in themselves. In the texts examined--and again the range is the same--the direction occurs thirty-eight times. Ten of these examples occur in plays unquestionably by Middleton and a further four in plays which the forthcoming Oxford edition will attribute to him; of the remaining twenty-four examples ten appear in plays of which Heywood was either sole author or, in the case of Fortune By Land And Sea, principal co-author (with Rowley). (24) But when these directions are subdivided into those that require a mutual entry to fulfill the "meeting" and those that do not, the results are even more remarkable: only ten such instances of the latter kind occur at all and no less than five of these instances are found in the plays of Heywood. (25)

The idiosyncratic nature of Heywood's usage here can usefully be compared with the very different ways in which, for instance, Middleton and Shakespeare conceive stage encounters. Middleton, as has been shown, although very partial to the "meeting" formulation, always requires a simultaneous entry onto a cleared stage for both characters (or groups of characters) who are to "meet." "Meet(e)," "meet(e)s," or "meeting" occur in stage directions in the Shakespeare canon (including variant texts and "bad" quartos) just fifteen times. Many of these instances appear in places where the "stability" of the texts in question are contested: two occur in the third act of Timon of Athens, and two in Macbeth, both plays to which Middleton is now thought to have made a significant contribution; one each in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both collaborations with Fletcher; one that appears in only the quarto text of King Lear (a text in which the stage directions have been attributed to a spectator rather than the author); (26) and one in the notoriously difficult quarto of Pericles. But even disregarding the problematic status of these texts--and the further reservation that in two of the other instances Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor (quartos only) "meetes" a basket rather than a human being--there are still only two cases in a canon roughly similar in size to Heywood's where directions requiring characters to meet do not also demand a simultaneous entry. In Antony and Cleopatra (4.3) two soldiers already onstage "meete other Soldiers" who only speak several lines after the direction; and in 1 Henry IV (3.3, Q and F) Falstaff, having abused Prince Henry behind his back, "meetes him, playing upon his truncheon like a fife," an elaborate piece of buffoonery designed to camouflage his effrontery. In both cases, the characters already onstage are required to do the "meeting," whereas the opposite is true in the instances cited in Heywood and in Edward IV.

It remains to be seen if and how Heywood's other contemporaries deploy this formulation. The construction "met by," as has been shown, occurs with surprising frequency in Dekker's output; "meeting" and "meet" in his stage directions are, however, rather rare. In all of the extant plays of which he was either sole author or joint author "meeting" occurs just four times, and in each case the directions require the characters to make a synchronized entrance onto a cleared stage. (27) The incidence of "meet" or "meets" is only marginally greater; it occurs five times, and in just two plays. On three of these occasions a simultaneous entry by the meeting characters is unequivocally required; these are the directions that open I.ii and V.i of 2 Honest Whore, and V.ii of Satiromastix. The latter play also has one direction which stipulates that characters already onstage meet an oncoming figure (II.i.83.01), and one in which two characters in the midst of their dialogue are asked to "meete" (II.i.140.01), but the first of these initiates an extended dumb show and the second describes a measure of a dance (both of which are elements in a playtext that seem to have generated a syntactical decorum of their own). (28) In neither instance is an oncoming character required to do the "meeting," as is the case so frequently in Heywood--and twice in Edward IV.

Among other writers who were in a position to be involved with Edward IV the evidence is slender. Sir John Oldcastle, the sole surviving example of a dramatic work to which Drayton, Hathway, and Wilson all contributed, contains no directions with this formulation at all. In the five extant plays of which John Day was sole or part author "meeting" occurs just once, and there it is used as a variant form of a customary instruction requiring characters to enter at several doors to begin a new scene. (29) Not unusually, Munday's work offers the most interesting comparative usage. There is a conventional entry to a cleared stage when the Sherriff and a Messenger "meete" in a section of Sir Thomas More in Munday's hand. A less common example occurs in The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon when the text marks an exit for Prince John and then immediately afterward has a direction specifying an entry for Queen Elinor, Marian (and several others) that concludes: "As they meete, Iohn whispers with Marian." (30) But John's unspoken menaces as he leaves the stage essentially constitute a miniature dumb show and the direction is thus differentiated from those in Edward IV; and it is undoubtedly with Heywood's habitual practice that the play's uncommon conceptualization of spatial organization and movement has most in common.

It is perhaps worth pausing to observe that Heywood's distinctive usage here does not merely reflect a lexical or syntactical preference. In each instance from Edward IV under discussion the direction signals a dynamic change of theatrical momentum. When Brackenbury enters in scene 9 of part two, the audience, only "returned" from the French scenes some twenty lines previously, is abruptly reminded that the efficacy of Jane Shore's ministrations to "the poor prisoners in the common jail / Of the White Lion and the King's Bench" (lines 2-3) must henceforth be seen in the context of the nation's most important prison, the Tower, and the struggle to control it politically--a struggle which Brackenbury, for all his (ahistorical) integrity, will lose. Similarly, the entrance of King Lewis in scene 5 marks a reversal in King Edward's political and theatrical fortunes. For all that France ends this interlude in considerable debt to the English crown, Lewis will be in increasingly secure possession of his own dominions (and the dark comedy of his enemies' demise) from this moment on, whereas Edward will very soon become politically and dramatically redundant; his last words in the play--an unjust and ineffectual death sentence passed upon the sea captain Stranguidge and (the disguised) Matthew Shore--are not far away.

The pattern already encountered in Heywood's deployment of the directions featuring the constructions "met by" or "meeting with" are repeated in his use of the simpler "meets" directions. Examples of the conventional formula requiring a mid-stage confrontation between newly arrived characters are evident in Heywood's undisputed plays, and indeed Russell West has written illuminatingly about the complex ways in which, for instance, Heywood figures the interior-exterior dynamic in The Fair Maid of the West "iconically in the opening of the two stage doors which quite concretely open onto the spaces of contiguity flanking the stage." (31)

But there are also further instances of the singular imperatives of the Edward IV directions: The Silver Age has the direction "Enter Amphitrio, beating before him his seruants, the two Captaines, they meet with Ganimed" (Quarto 1613, sig. E3r), when Ganimed is already on stage abusing Socia; 1 If You Know Not Me has "Sennet about the stage in order, the Maior of London meets them" (Quarto 1605, sig. G3v), where again the oncoming mayor is required to meet the queen and her courtiers; and 2 If You Know Not Me has "As they [the queen and her army] march about the Stage, Sir Frances Drake and Sir Martine Furbusher meete them with Spanish Ensignes" (1633 Quarto only, sig. K3v), where once more the naval men arriving in triumph are asked to "meet" characters already involved in the action, just as Brackenbury and the French king are instructed in 2 Edward IV. (32) So, both the frequency with which this construction appears in Heywood's undisputed plays, and the idiosyncratic way in which the diction of the directions expresses his visualization of such encounters, and perhaps too the clustering of the formulation in his earlier works--it does not feature at all in the plays he composed in the 1630s--all suggest the presence of Heywood in Edward IV. Scrutiny of other unusual stage directions in the play invites the same conclusion.

Edward IV contains a number of other stage directions that are worded and conceived in ways rarely found in other dramatic literature of the period. Scene 9 of part one, for instance, opens with the direction "Enter Falconbridge with his troupes marching, as being at Mileend" (sig.C4r). This could be described as an "overdetermining" intrusion by the playwright: Spicing and Falconbridge have said they are going to encamp there (scene 6, lines 48-49), the mayor has acknowledged the insurgents' retirement to the place (scene 7, line 5), his Officer has told Shore that the rebels are "ensconcde" there (scene 8, line 37), and, in case the audience is in any doubt, Falconbridge will refer to his situation "here on Mileend Greene" soon after the direction (scene 9, line 17). Besides being expressive of the dramatist's (here uncharacteristically clumsy) insistence on topographical specificity, the construction "as being at Mileend" is also a classic example of what scholars have called, since Richard Hosley coined the term in the 1950s, a "fictional" direction. (33) But it is also significant that the phrase "as ... at" is very rarely found in the stage directions of the period: Dessen and Thomson's Dictionary offers just five other examples, and one of these is from a play, The Late Lancashire Witches, of which Heywood was the co-author. (34)

Shakespeare provides one of the remaining examples (from Antony and Cleopatra, 4.12), but elsewhere in his canon there is only one direction that uses the word "as" in an attempt to define location--in Coriolanus Martius and his army enter "as before the City Corialus" (I.4)--and only four further instances in which the word is deployed in any kind of similar fashion: in Cymbeline Shakespeare instructs the actor playing Leonatus to enter "as in an Apparition" (5.4), in The Winter's Tale (3.2) Hermione is required to enter "as to her Triall," and in Antony and Cleopatra Ventidius must enter "as it were in triumph" (3.1). (35) It is perhaps significant that all these examples derive from Shakespearean texts that survive only in the Folio; just as important as the guidance offered to the actor in these directions is the attempt to influence the reader's imagination. (36) This inference is arguably strengthened by consideration of the remaining example: the opening direction of act 4, scene 1 in the Folio text of Richard II reads "Enter as to the Parliament," a construction not found in any of the five quarto texts of the play.

In directions found in the twenty-one extant plays of which Dekker was either sole or coauthor a descriptive phrase introduced by the qualifying "as" appears just four times, and this is especially striking in the work of a dramatist whose stage directions are frequently even more elaborate (if more "permissive") than those found in Edward IV. In If This Be Not A Good Play The Devil Is In It the "Subprior holds his head downe as fast asleepe" (IV.iv.16.01), and in The Witch of Edmonton (written with Rowley and Ford) the scene of Mother Sawyer's demise begins "Enter as to see the Execution" (V.iii.0.2). Both the remaining examples are found in The Roaring Girl, a collaborative play in which the stage directions may well derive from Middleton. (37) The incidence of this formulation in Dekker, then, is similar to that found in Shakespeare. The same is true with the much smaller corpus of John Day's surviving works, which provides just one example: the opening direction of The Ile of Guls (1606) reads: "Enter seuerally 3 Gentlemen as to see a play" (sig. A2r).

The situation is very different with the extant plays of Heywood, where stage directions that include the qualifying "as" appear with such frequency that they figure as a kind of trademark. Importantly, the formulation occurs in both of the plays that survive in Heywood's own hand: "Enter Calisto as affrighted" is found in The Escapes of Jupiter (line 109), (38) and "Enter palestra, all wett as newly shipwracke and escapt the ffury off the Seas" in The Captives (lines 653-54). But such directions are ubiquitous in Heywood's output. There are single examples in The Four Prentices (Quarto 1615, sig. C1r), The Rape of Lucrece (Quarto 1608, sig. E3r), 2 Fair Maid of the West (Quarto 1631, sig. C2v), The Silver Age (Quarto 1613, sig. H1r), The Golden Age (Quarto 1613, sig. E2r), 1 The Iron Age (Quarto 1632, sig F2v), another example in addition to the one cited above in The Late Lancashire Witches (Quarto 1634, sig. B1r), The Royal King and the Loyal Subject (Quarto 1637, I4v), and Fortune By Land And Sea (Quarto 1655, sig. A4v); the construction appears twice in A Woman Killed With Kindness (Quarto 1607, D3r, G1r), three times in 2 The Iron Age (Quarto 1631, sigs. D4v, E1r, H4r), and no less than four times in both The Wise Woman of Hogsden (Quarto 1638, sigs. A2r, D3r, G4v, H2r), and The English Traveller (Quarto 1633, sigs. D3r, E3v, H2v, K1r).

The proliferation of such directions certainly suggests "habitual and distinctive" lexical preferences on Heywood's part. But if we return to the directions of Edward IV it can be seen, I think, that there is more at issue here than chosen forms of diction. Just before the emotional reconciliation between Edward's queen and Jane Shore, the betrayed wife threatens the new mistress with a dagger, "making as though she meant to spoyle her face" (Q2r). This instruction would seem to be a perfect illustration of what Anthony Hammond has called "directions of the third kind": those directions "which relate essentially to whatever the [spoken] words leave out, to the control of all those muscles of the actor's body other than the mouth and tongue which are busy fulfilling the rest of the script's directions: ie. delivering the lines." Hammond goes on to observe that such directions also constitute "an attempt by someone--usually, in the Jacobean period, the author--to take away some of the actor's autonomy, to exercise control over an aspect of performance which had traditionally been the actor's prerogative." (39) The text of Edward IV is full of such directions, including many in which the dramatist attempts to convey to the actor not merely the physical gesture of a character, but his or her thought process, particularly when that process manifests a disjunction between appearance and "reality."

In part 1 Spicing is said to be "thinking to enter" the city's gates (scene 9, 1. 175. 01; sig, D3r), Matthew Shore "lookes earnestly" to penetrate Edward's disguise (scene 17, 1. 115. 01; sig. H4r), and when Jane Shore encounters her estranged husband in scene 22, she first fails to recognize him and "not knowing him, takes him for another Sutor," but four lines later "knowes him, and lamenting, comes to him" (lines 71. 01-2, 75. 01; sig.K4r). (40) Likewise in part 2, the boy actor playing Jane is instructed to enter "fearful" (scene 10, 1.0.2; sig.P4v), and Doctor Shaw must read his book "pensively" (scene 19, 1.0.1; sig.U2r). More unusual, however, are the directions that either hint at an emotion or that suggest a counterfeit one. Part One offers two examples: the former occurs when Shore "seemeth greatly discontented" (scene 17, 1.115.02; sig.H4r), and the latter when Edward "seemes to reade" letters from France "but glaunces on Mistresse Shoare in his reading" (scene 16, 1.153.01-2; sig. H1v). Beyond the parameters of the dumb show, this kind of direction is uncommon in the drama of the period, and the formulation "seems" or "seeming" particularly rare. As might be expected, Munday does offer one example, but the extant works of Dekker, Day, and Shakespeare, for instance, yield just two more between them. (41)

Once again Heywood transpires to be especially fond of such devices. Directions which instruct characters to simulate one emotion or thought process in order to conceal their "true" state of mind occur with considerable regularity. The Four Prentices of London has this direction: "Enter Tancred with Bella Franca, richly attired, she somewhat affecting him, though she makes no shew of it" (sig.F3v). The Golden Age has a direction that stipulates gesture, countenance, and motivation: "Enter at one doore Saturne melancholy ... at the other Vesta & the Nurse, who with counterfeit passion present the King a bleeding heart" (sig. C4r). In 2 The Iron Age, "Synon who had before counterfeited death, riseth up, and answereth" (Quarto 1632, sig. K3v). In The Wise Woman of Hogsden, Sencer and Sir Boniface are called upon to "dissemble one to another" (sig.G4v), and in 2 Fair Maid of the West Mullisheg "counterfets sleep" in order to deceive Goodlack (sig.C2r). Heywood's prediliction for such terminology did not abate; as late as 1637 the shepherdess Amphrisa is found entering "seeming discontented" (Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, Octavo 1637, 194).

The comparative rarity of such directions in anonymous plays of the period and in the extant plays of most other contemporary dramatists offers a strong reason to suspect Heywood's hand at work in the composition of Edward IV, but two caveats are necessary. First, the sole surviving theatrical work to which Drayton, Hathway, and Wilson were all contributors, Sir John Oldcastle, does contain one stage direction that is not only elaborate enough to merit comparison with the directions of Edward IV, but that also contains the unusual qualifying "as": "Enter Cambridge, Scroope, and Gray, as in a chamber, and set downe at a table, consulting about their treason: King Harry and Suffolke listning at the doore." (42) The second caveat stems from the first: the fourth dramatist Henslowe paid for contributions to Oldcastle was Munday, and the handful of extant plays in which he was involved reveals a similar penchant for directions that both show the playwright attempting imaginatively to manipulate the gestures of his actors--"consulting about their treason"--and that employ the qualifying "as" formulation.

There are no less than three examples of such directions in the original text of The Book of Sir Thomas More, which is undoubtedly in Munday's own hand. The first reads "Enter the Lady Moore, her two daughters, and Mr. Roper, as walking"; the second has the More family and servants entering "as in his house at Chelsey"; and the third attempts to clarify the shift of location: "Enter Sir Thomas Moore, the Lieutenant, and a seruaunt attending as in his chamber in the Tower." (43) The other playtext that survives (albeit in a somewhat mutilated state) in Munday's autograph, John a Kent and John a Cumber (1596), does not recapitulate the precise diction of these directions, but does yield examples of a playwright almost obsessively concerned with the gestures and the visual appearance of his characters. (44) However, the kind of specificity that most dramatists of the period reserved for the organization of their dumb shows reappears, in conjunction with the unusual phrasing so favored by Heywood, in the printed texts of his "Robin Hood" plays. In The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon Munday begins the second scene of his drama thus: "Enter Robin Hoode, little Iohn following him; the one earle of Huntington, the other his seruant, Robin hauing his napkin on his shoulder, as if hee were sodainly raised from dinner" (lines 165-68). (45) Elaboration, specificity--and occasional redundancy--characterize the directions of The Downfall throughout. In the sequel, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, they are generally much sparer; one direction calls for a child to be taken up "as dead" (line 943) and in another King John "foldes his armes, as if he did embrace her [Matilda]" (lines 964-65), but both are in extended dumb shows. The evidence provided by the appearance of this particular formulation in the works of Heywood and Munday is, then, inconclusive; the "habitual preferences" of both dramatists in this respect are distinctive when compared with those of other playwrights, but Heywood's and Munday's are sufficiently similar to make the work of distinguishing between them difficult. (46)

Altogether, the directions of Edward IV are strongly redolent of those found in the undisputed Heywood canon. As might be expected of a writer who not only supplemented the mythologically and theologically complex texts of his London pageants with purely visual display to charm the unlearned, but who vigorously and repeatedly justified his decision to do so, Heywood the dramatist invariably paid almost choreographic attention in his playtexts to what an audience would see. (47) Heywood was so consistently at pains to orchestrate the costumes, gestures, and physical dynamics of his characters' interaction that his extant playtexts, although almost always printed from his own "foul" papers, often read as if the interpolations of a bookkeeper have already been incorporated. To some scholars, this feature of the Heywoodian text must represent a paradox. Alan Dessen is by no means alone in arguing that dramatists who also enjoyed long-standing careers as players or who were, at least, intimately connected to the performance practices of a specific playhouse, were the least likely to produce the kind of "intrusive" directions I have been describing. "[E]xperienced playwrights," Dessen suggests, "particularly those attached to theatrical companies (e.g., Shakespeare, Fletcher, Heywood, Massinger, Brome), could take for granted and therefore build on the professionalism and expertise of their actor-colleagues so as to take a "leave it up to the players" approach rather than the "spell it all out" attitude associated with amateur playwrights." (48)

Thomas Heywood was, at least from the very beginning of his time with the Earl of Worcester's Men, both a sharer in his company, and, apparently, a player who "Acted almost every day," and yet a scrupulous, sometimes gratuitously fussy attention to detail is everywhere evident in his dramatic texts. (49) Of course, the question of how many of an author's descriptive directions were actually carried out by the actors is, as Hammond has wisely observed, "a question that comes close to what song the Sirens sang," (50) but I think it perhaps worth speculating that Heywood bombarded his fellow players with such precise and complex instructions not just because he was intrigued, throughout his career, by the popular appeal and immediacy which visual (and sometimes wordless) action could generate, but because he, unlike Shakespeare, did not have among his colleagues the genius of a Burbage or a Lowin, and he knew it full well.

This would also have been the position faced by the playwright(s) who prepared the first performances of Edward IV, in all probability the first play written specifically for a fledgeling company in a newly adapted playhouse. And I am reasonably certain that Heywood was indeed one of those playwrights. Few dramatists besides Heywood would interrupt the impassioned speech of Shore, apparently going to meet his death, to tell both actor and reader exactly where these lines should be spoken (part 2, scene 12, 1.43.01-2; sig.R1v). Similarly, it is a distinctively Heywoodian touch to reveal that Brackenbury carries the "releefe" he brings to Jane Shore "in a cloath" (scene 20, 1.55.01-2; sig.U3v), just as it is to specify that Jockie's charity towards her comprises "a bottle of Ale, Cheese, & halfepenny loaues," and to direct the player exactly how he should dispense it: "Iockie often breakes bread and cheese, and giues her, till Ieffrey being calde away, then he gives her all" (scene 20, 11.255.01-2, 260.01-3; sig.X3r). And surely no one but Heywood could have conceived something so charmingly absurd as "Iockie is led to whipping ouer the stage, speaking some wordes, but of no importance" (scene 22, 1.0.1-2; sig.Y2v); Heywood, after all, was the playwright who not only directed the plain-speaking iconoclast Hobson to suddenly slip "or'e into France," "in his Gowne and slippers," but who insisted that the venerable King Priam should face the flaming ruins of Troy in precisely the same attire. (51)

Notes

I am grateful to Mary Bly, Susan Cerasano, Mike Cordner, Isabel Davis, and Richard Dutton, all of whom offered encouragement and helpful observations on this essay.

1. Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635), 208. For the political ramifications of this quarrel, see, for instance, Peter Beal, "Massinger at Bay: Unpublished Verses in a War of the Theatres," Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 190-203, and John Kerrigan's chapter on Thomas Carew in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 194-95.

2. Thomas Heywood, Londini Speculum, in Thomas Heywood's Pageants: A Critical Edition, edited by David Bergeron (New York: Garland, 1986), 97.

3. Edward IV was first printed in a quarto of 1599; reissues appeared in 1600, 1605, 1613, 1619, and 1626. A good deal of recent work on Heywood, even when it pupports to focus on the textual status of the plays, relies on the six-volume "Pearson" edition of 1874, which was not only published before the discovery of the unique extant copy of the 1599 quarto, but which is, in any case, inaccurate; this decision renders problematic the conclusions of, for instance, Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and it does not enhance the authority of the otherwise invaluable A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, compiled by Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). References to Edward IV in this essay will be--by scene and line number--to my Revels edition of the play (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), and, by signature, to the 1599 quarto upon which it is based; stage directions will be reproduced in italic, although the first four quartos printed the text in black-letter and the directions in roman.

4. An even earlier instance of authorship attribution has at least comic value; to an edition of Thomas Goffe's The Carelesse Shepherdess, published by Richard Rogers and William Ley in 1656, is appended "an exact and perfect Catalogue of all Plays that are Printed," in which Edward II, Edward III, and Edward IV are all said to be by Shakespeare (no pagination). Similarly, attached to Edward Archer's issue of The Old Law, published in the same year, is a catalog which categorizes all four "Edward" plays as "Tragedies" but which declines to assign any of them to an author (sig. A3r).

5. A True, perfect, and exact Catalogue of all the Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Pastorals, Masques and Interludes, that were ever yet printed and published, til this present year 1661 (London: Francis Kirkman, 1661), 4. Kirkman's second Catalogue of 1671, appended to a translation of Corneille, preserves precisely the title of the first and restates the attribution of Edward IV to Heywood (p.4), as does the third and final issue (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1680), 4.

6. Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, or A Compleat Collection of the Poets, Especially the most Eminent, of all Ages (London: Charles Smith, 1675), 176.

7. William Winstanley, The Lives of the most Famous English Poets, or The Honour of Parnassus (London: Samuel Manship, 1687), 96.

8. Momus Triumphans: Or, The Plagiaries of the English Stage; Expos'd in a Catalogue (London: Nicholas Cox, 1688), 11; An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1691), 262.

9. See, for example, W. R. Chetwood, The British Theatre, Containing the Lives of the English Dramatic Poets; With an Account of all their Plays (Dublin: Peter Wilson, 1750), which amusingly lists the two parts of Edward VI [sic] as Heywood's, 32. F. G. Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642, 2 vols, (London: Reeves and Turner, 1890), 2:288.

10. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:10-11. Subsequent research by, amongst others, G. E. Bentley, Neil Carson and Jeffrey Masten has shown that Chambers's estimate of the proprietorial way in which playwrights regarded their works was overstated. The section of the Revels introduction on 'The Company' has shown that Chambers's second objection to Heywood's authorship, namely that there was not "any connexion between him and Derby's Men," is untenable.

11. W. W. Greg, Henslowe Papers, 2 vols, (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907), II, 173.

12. A. M. Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), 15; F. S. Boas, Thomas Heywood (London: William and Norgate, 1950), 17; Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood (London: Macmillan, 1994), 55-58, 86-91. Most critical articles similarly fail to acknowledge any doubt concerning Heywood's authorship.

13. Jeffery Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); see, for instance, Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and my review of it in Cambridge Quarterly 34:1 (2005), 79-85.

14. Michela Calore, "Enter out: Perplexing Signals in Some Elizabethan Stage Directions," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2001): 117-35 (131).

15. Alan C. Dessen, "Stage Directions as Evidence: The Question of Provenance," in Shakespeare: Text and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, edited by Lois Poter and Arthur F. Kinney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 229-47 (243).

16. See, eg., Samuel Schoenbaum, Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 182.

17. W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 121, 132. For interference in the directions of even an authorial theatrical manuscript by a bookkeeper, see Thomas Heywood's The Captives, prepared by Arthur Brown, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), xi-xii; for scribal influence on stage directions see, for instance, Fletcher and Massinger's Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, prepared by T. H. Howard-Hill, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vii-viii.

18. William B. Long, "'Precious Few': English Manuscript Playbooks," in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 414-33 (417-18). The first of these quotations repeats virtually verbatim claims made in Long's earlier essays: "Stage-Directions: A Misinterpreted Factor in Determining Textual Provenance," TEXT (Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship) 2 (1985): 121-37 (125); "John a Kent and John a Cumber: An Elizabethan Playbook and Its Implications," in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S. F. Johnson, edited by W. R. Elton and William B. Long (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 125-43 (127).

19. I quote here from the chapter on stage directions in Roger Holdsworth's still unpublished study of Middleton's and Shakespeare's respective shares in Timon of Athens, and I am very grateful to him for permitting me to cite this work. On Heywood's manuscript play, see Richard Rowland, "The Captives: Thomas Heywood's 'Whole Monopoly Off Mischieff,'" Modern Language Review 90 (1995): 585-602.

20. Linda McJannet, The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 121, 96-98. McJannet again alludes to the distinctive qualities of Heywood's directions on 178-79, but she also, importantly, identifies similar patterns in the work of Anthony Munday; both writers, she argues persuasively, incline to what she calls the "self-conscious textual reference"; see 136-37, and 187.

21. David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23.

22. Alfred Harbage, rev. S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama, 975-1700 (London: Methuen & Co., 1964). This construction is not mentioned in Dessen and Thomson's far from inclusive Dictionary.

23. The instances in Dekker occur in the following plays: If This Be Not A Good Play The Devil Is In It (1612), The Virgin Martyr (with Massinger, 1620), The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622-31), and The Wonder of a Kingdom (1623-31). The remaining five examples are found in Shakespeare's and Fletcher's Henry VIII, Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, Massinger's The Roman Actor, Cartwright's The Siege, and the anonymous (1640?) play, The Ghost. It is unlikely that Dekker himself could have been involved with Edward IV since he was working flat-out for Henslowe, contributing to no less than eight plays in the year preceeding the play's first appearance.

24. It should be noted in addition that of the fourteen remaining examples only two occur in plays written before 1620 (one in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598), and one in Narcissus, A Twelfth Night Entertainment, an anonymous MS. play of 1603), only four in plays written before 1630, and that of the ten post-1630 examples, three appear in one play, William Sampson's The Vow-Breaker (c. 1636).

25. The Heywood instances are: Fortune By Land And Sea (1655 quarto): "Enter Mistresse Anne meeting them" (D1r; Old Harding, John and William already on stage); "Enter Philip meeting them" (D3r; Clown and Foster already onstage); The English Traveller (1633 quarto): "Enter Besse meeting Y.Geraldine" (F4v; Young Geraldine already onstage); "Enter Dalavill meeting Young Geraldine going out" (K3r; Young Geraldine already onstage); and 2 Fair Maid of the West (1631 quarto): "Enter Clem meeting Joffer" (B2r; Joffer already onstage).

26. See, for instance, P. W. K. Stone, The Textual History of King Lear (London: Scolar Press, 1980), 20.

27. The survey of Dekker's output comprises all the plays reprinted in Fredson Bowers's edition of The Dramatic Works, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-1961), including doubtful plays like The Valiant Welshman; the four examples occur in the opening stage directions of 2 Honest Whore (I.i), The Whore of Babylon (V.iii), If This Be Not A Good Play The Devil Is In It (I.ii), and Patient Grissell (II.i).

28. See, for instance, McJannet, Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions, 155-58.

29. Humour Out Of Breath (London: John Helmes, 1608), sig. B3v.

30. The Book of Sir Thomas More, prepared W. W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907, rpt., 1990), 1.566; The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, prepared John C. Meagher, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), lines 302-5.

31. Russell West, Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 179.

32. Examples of the conventional "meetings" that necessitate a simultaneous entry are relatively plentiful in the Heywood canon, but one particularly merits discussion. In The Four Prentices of London is found this direction: "Enter at one dore Robert and Charles, they meete Evstace with his Trophee: Enter at another dore Godfrey, Tancred, they meete Gvy with his Trophee" (Quarto 1615, sig.I3r). The quarto marks no previous "Exeunt" for the defeated pagans but the dialogue makes it clear that there should be one, and therefore that this "meeting" requires a synchronized mass entry onto a cleared stage; but Heywood words the direction as if Eustace and Guy were already on the stage to be "met" with--they are not said to "enter"--and it is possible that they have indeed remained visible on the upper stage upon which they last appeared in dumb show, during only some twenty-five lines of dialogue which separates these ritualistic encounters. Other examples of the conventional meeting directions occur in The Wise Woman of Hogsden (Quarto 1638, sig. E1r); two in Fortune By Land And Sea (Quarto 1655, sigs. B2r, D4v); The Captives, lines 1429-30; The Brazen Age (Quarto 1613, sig. E1r); and The Rape of Lucrece (Quarto 1608, sig. A4v).

33. Richard Hosley, "Shakespeare's Use of a Gallery Over the Stage," Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 77-89. Calore, following David Bradley (From Text to Performance, 76), has rightly attempted to blur the rigid distinction between "fictional" and "theatrical" directions, a distinction she suggests has remained substantially unmodified from Hosley through to the extended discussions in Alan Dessen's Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); "Enter out," 118. Dessen himself has recently referred to the "myriad "fictional" or descriptive signals from Munday [and] Heywood"; "Stage Directions as Evidence," 237. As the commentary and introduction to the Revels edition make clear, Mile End was, in the 1590s, a location of social and political significance, not least because of the musters of citizen militias which took place there, and the archery contests sponsored by the Earl of Essex. It is quite possible that the players attempted to convey these associations by the manner in which they "marched," together with the use of sound effects and props.

34. "Knock within, as at dresser" is found in The Late Lancashire Witches (Quarto, 1634, sig. E4r); Dessen and Thomson, Dictionary, 12. Dessen also provides an informative discussion of this formulation in chapter 7 ("Much virtue in as") of Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary.

35. There are two similar usages in the collaborative The Two Noble Kinsmen (3.1 and 5.1), and also three more in The First Part of the Contention (C1v, F1v), but none of the latter find their way into the Folio text of 2 Henry VI. Dessen confesses to remaining bewildered by the theatrical implications of the Cymbeline direction (Recovering, 147), and recent editors are convinced it derives from the imagination of the scribe Ralph Crane rather than from Shakespeare; see, for instance, Roger Warren's edition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 73. We could add to this list the direction in 1 Henry IV which instructs that Falstaff "falls down as if he were dead" (5.4.76), in which, as McJannet has justly observed, "the character is pretending, as well as the actor"; Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions, 125.

36. Although I disagree with many of his conclusions, Lukas Erne offers some challenging observations on this subject in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

37. Two recent commentators on the text of the play, Paul Mulholland and Cyrus Hoy, argue that few scenes point conclusively to either dramatist as the principal writer and that "the designation "Middleton and Dekker" is the only one appropriate for much of the play." The former has also suggested that "Middleton's orthography" may have served as the printer's copy; Paul A. Mulholland (ed.), The Roaring Girl (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 11, 4; Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in "The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker," 4 vols, (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1980), III, 12-13.

38. The Escapes of Jupiter, prepared by Henry D. Janzen, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

39. Anthony Hammond, "Encounters of the Third Kind in Stage-Directions in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 71-99 (74, 81). It should be emphasized again that such directions are invariably of authorial origin; as Long has shown, in annotated manuscript play books there "are never new directions telling a player how to perform on stage" ("Stage-Directions," 130, my emphasis). Although he quotes extensively from Hammond's important article, John D. Cox ignores many of its implications in his attempt to argue not only that modern editors should refrain from adding new stage directions, but that they should, when they see fit, omit directions found in early modern playtexts; see "Open stage, open page? Editing stage directions in early dramatic texts," in Lukas Erne, Margaret Jane Kidnie (eds.), Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare's Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 178-93 (especially 187).

40. The unusual nature of these directions is confirmed by Dessen and Thomson's Dictionary; the first is not registered at all, the second is noted as one of only five examples, and the third is cited as not only rare in itself but the sole example which is not part of a dumb-show. Indeed, such directions are reminiscent of those found in much earlier dramatic texts. This is nicely illustrated in the elaborate instructions for staging the Creation in the Passion Play performed at Mons in 1501, in which an actor is told precisely where in his speech "God pretends to breathe on Adam" ("Dieu fait semblant de aspirer sus Adam"); cited (and translated) in Peter Meredith's stimulating essay, "Stage Directions and the Editing of Early English Drama," in A. F. Johnston, ed., Editing Early English Drama: Special Problems and New Directions (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 65-94 (72-73).

41. The Munday example occurs in The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, where Will Brand "seemes to lurke a doore"; prepared by John C. Meagher, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), line 1921. The only occurrences of "seems" or "seeming" in Shakespeare stage directions are when "Louel seemes to stay" in the collaborative Henry V111 (5.1.86), and in the dumb show in 3.2 of Hamlet (where Q2 has "seemes" twice and F has "seemes" and "seeming" once each). The words do not occur in directions anywhere in the extant works of Day, Chettle, Haughton or Dekker; the only comparable direction among the latter's plays is "Enter Angelo with a Booke and Taper lighted, they, seeing him, counterfeit deuotion"; The Virgin Martyr (II.i.86. 01-2).

42. The first part of the true and honrable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-Castle, the good Lord Cobham (London: Thomas Pavier, 1600), sig. H4r. The staging of this unusual entry is discussed by Mariko Ichikawa, Shakespearean Entrances (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 29-30, who also notes (but without drawing further conclusions) the unusual "meeting" formulation in Heywood's The English Traveller (79).

43. The Book of Sir Thomas More, lines 1282, 1411-12, 1728-29. In noting how rarely the "inner" or emotional states of characters are expressed in the directions of the period, McJannet also singles out Sir Thomas More as an exception; Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions, 199.

44. John a Kent and John a Cumber, prepared by Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). See, for instance: "Enter Pembrook, Moorton, Oswen, Amery, to them this crew marching, one drest like a Moore wth a Tun painted with yellow oker, another with a Porrenger full of water and a pen in it, Turnop speaketh the Oration" (lines 368-71); and "The boy trips around about Oswen and Amory, sing chyme, and they the one after the other, lay them vsing very sluggish gestures, the Ladyes amazed about them" (lines 1145-48). See also the direction at lines 581-83, and the direction in the margin of the manuscript, opposite lines 1257-59. It is also worth noting that Munday's use of the derogatory term "crew" in line 368 constitutes a rare departure from "the usually dispassionate, objective voice of Elizabethan directions" (McJannet, Voice, 131); but the same thing happens in 1 Edward IV when the citizens of London temporarily abandon the stage to "Spicing, Smoke, and their crew" (sig.C1r).

45. Cf. also "Enter, as it were in haste, the Prior of Yorke ..." (line 142).

46. One distinctive feature of both Huntingdon plays deserves further mention. In both texts characters are consistently called upon to exit cum (Latin = with) other characters; this never happens in Edward IV, and I have found it only once elsewhere in Heywood--in 2 If You Know Not Me, G3v--but this could be the preference of a scribe or even a compositor.

47. For Heywood's argument that the spectacular visual effects of his pageants were a guarantor of social cohesion, see note 2. The alleged crudeness of Heywood's strategies in constructing visual images in his plays has been eloquently defended in Alan C. Desson, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. chapter 1, "The arrow in Nessus." More recently Catherine Richardson has written persuasively on the complex interplay between objects, dialogue, and narrative in "Properties of domestic life: the table in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness," in Jonathan Gil Harris, Natasha Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 129-52.

48. Alan C. Dessen, "The Body of Stage Directions," Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 27-35 (34).

49. The "Advertisement to the Reader" appended to Kirkman's 1671 Catalogue, reprinted in W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (reprint, London: The Bibliographical Society, 1970), 3:1353.

50. Hammond, "Encounters of the Third Kind," 80.

51. 2 If You Know Not Me, (Quarto 1606, G2r); 2 The Iron Age (Quarto 1632, E3r).