Ooh, yes! The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1, about the adventures of a cross-dressing tapstress-turned-privateer, is really fun. (Part 2, which was written thirtyish years later, is sadly nowhere near as good, although it's interesting to see the racial and gender ideologies getting more rigid, and farther away from modern sensibilities, in the span of just a few decades.) I also really like Heywood's Edward IV plays, which cover roughly the same historical era as Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI and Richard III, but are wildly different in emphasis -- as in, Jane Shore is the main character.
Non-Heywood recs: The Revenger's Tragedy is gloriously over-the-top. (Maybe a parody, maybe just "hey, let's go all-in with the blood and revenge and creative ways to poison people because it's fun, and it would be less-fun if you seriously felt sorry for the characters, so we won't bother with that part.") And The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a HOOT. (Grocer and his wife go to the theater, but they don't understand how it works and insist that their apprentice be cast as a knight in a play that wasn't supposed to have knights at all, and the poor beleaguered actors have to keep up with their increasingly ridiculous demands.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-04-21 02:35 pm (UTC)Non-Heywood recs: The Revenger's Tragedy is gloriously over-the-top. (Maybe a parody, maybe just "hey, let's go all-in with the blood and revenge and creative ways to poison people because it's fun, and it would be less-fun if you seriously felt sorry for the characters, so we won't bother with that part.") And The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a HOOT. (Grocer and his wife go to the theater, but they don't understand how it works and insist that their apprentice be cast as a knight in a play that wasn't supposed to have knights at all, and the poor beleaguered actors have to keep up with their increasingly ridiculous demands.)