Westward Ho (play)

Westward Ho (or Ho!, or Hoe) is an early Jacobean-era stage play, a satire and city comedy by Thomas Dekker and John Webster that was first published in 1607. It had an unusual impact in that it inspired Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston to respond to it by writing Eastward Ho, the famously controversial 1605 play that landed Jonson and Chapman in jail.

The consensus of scholarly opinion recognises that Dekker's and Webster's play must have been on the stage before the end of 1604 to have inspired the reaction of Eastward Ho early the following year; a few have argued for a date as early as 1603. Westward Ho was entered into the Stationers' Register on 2 March 1605, though the entry in the Register is crossed out and marked "vacat."

The play was published in quarto in 1607 by the bookseller John Hodgets; the title page of the quarto states that the play was acted by the Children of Paul's, one of the companies of boy actors that constituted a distinctive feature of that era. It received its first modern performance in 2009, at the White Bear Theatre, as part of their Lost Classics Project.

As a response, Eastward Ho was acted by the other troupe of boy actors, then called the Children of the Queen's Revels, generating a kind of theatrical debate between two sets of dramatists and two acting companies. And Dekker and Webster would in turn answer Eastward Ho with their Northward Ho later in 1605 – completing a trilogy of "directional plays."

Critics generally agree that Dekker's hand is dominant in Westward Ho, while Webster's is the minority contribution; but they have disagreed on particulars. Peter Murray estimated Webster's share at roughly 40% of the whole. Scholars have tended to see Webster's hand most clearly in Act I (especially scene i) and Act III (especially scene iii).

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