Edward Howard (playwright)

Edward Howard (baptised 1624 – 1712) was an English dramatist and author of the Restoration era. He was the fifth son of Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Berkshire, and one of four playwriting brothers: Sir Robert Howard, Colonel Henry Howard, and James Howard were the others. The brothers were sometimes confused in their own era, and Edward was sometimes given credit for his brother Henry's play The United Kingdoms.

Edward Howard was christened on 2 November 1624, at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

Howard had a reputation as an exacting and difficult author. In their famous satire The Rehearsal, the Duke of Buckingham and his collaborators mocked Howard for being demanding and contentious during the actors' rehearsals of his plays. Howard himself acknowledged his reputation; he wrote a Prologue to his Man of Newmarket in which the actors Robert Shatterell and Joseph Haynes criticize Howard for not allowing cuts or improvisations in his dramas. Howard complained that when the actors in his Six Days' Adventure encountered a hostile audience response, they neglected "that diligence required to their parts."

He has been described as "the arrogant, touchy Edward Howard." He "seems to have struck his contemporaries as the epitome of the literary fop...." In a quarrel over the Change of Crowns matter, actor and fellow playwright John Lacy reportedly called Howard "more a fool than a poet." Howard slapped Lacy's face with his glove, and Lacy cracked Howard over the head with his cane.

Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset wrote his Satire on a Conceited Playwright about Edward Howard; Dorset called Howard's poetry "solid nonsense that abides all tests." Thomas Shadwell caricatured Howard as the "poet Ninny" in his first play, The Sullen Lovers (1668). Alexander Pope included a mention of him in The Dunciad, Book 1, line 297.

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