The Wise Woman of Hoxton

The Wise Woman of Hoxton
Written by	Thomas Heywood
Date premiered	c. 1604
Original language	English
Genre	City comedy
Setting	Hoxton, London
[The Wise Woman of Hogsden on the Internet Archive Official site]

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. 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. The Victorian critic F. G. Fleay suggested that Heywood, who was also an actor, originally played the part of Sencer. 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".

The play consists of thirteen scenes divided into five acts, the longest of which is the final dénouement. 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. 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).

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