Chapter 5 - Jane Shore’s Public: Pity and Politics in Heywood’s Edward IV

Summary

This chapter charts the affective-political communities that came together around the character of Jane Shore, the star of Thomas Heywood’s two-part history play Edward IV (1599). Not least of all in the theater, late Elizabethan Londoners increasingly came out to see and be seen. So too did their rulers, including notable forays to the Globe by the followers of the Earl of Essex and by the Duke of Buckingham. Across Heywood’s play, Jane Shore attains a similar degree of political celebrity. In the face of Edward’s incompetence and Richard III’s tyranny, Jane steadfastly defends the commons. Her popularity in the play’s medieval London was matched by her enthusiastic reception on the early modern stage. Edward IV was printed in both its parts six times between 1599 and 1626, and its heroine continued to hold the stage well into the seventeenth century. Together with the evidence of her reception in the theater, Heywood’s play maps Jane Shore’s public: the collectivity of strangers joined across time and space in defiance of royal tyranny and in pity for the beneficent Jane Shore, a populist heroine for the early modern age.