ABSTRACT
Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London is close to a perfect play: an elaborate, resourceful fantasy that leads its audiences into the far-fetched adventures of its protagonists, satisfying ambitions and desires they might not have known they had. Not many audiences or readers have ventured this opinion—at least not those who left an account of their reactions to it. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607) a grocer recommends it as the kind of thing he would like to see more of—“Read the play of The Four Prentices of London, where they toss their pikes so”—but the point of the scene seems to be that the grocer’s taste is awful. In his prefatory letter to the printed text of Four Prentices even Heywood acknowledges that it was done “in my infancy of judgement in this kind of poetry.” Later scholars and critics have not been much kinder. But these judgments come from audiences who record their accounts. That the play’s spectacular action is explicitly cited in another play means that even then, eight years before any edition we know of, Four Prentices had a recognizability matched by only a few other plays of the period: Tamburlaine, The Spanish Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. The earliest extant quarto of Four Prentices was published in 1615 (reprinted without significant change in 1631), with Heywood’s apologetic letter placing its composition “fifteen or sixteen years ago.” If Heywood’s letter was written not long after 1610, when the military musters that he praises resumed, Four Prentices has a history of demonstrable popularity of nearly four decades, without ever having been enshrined in a fancy folio. While those who wrote down their opinions did not find much to admire in Four Prentices, other publics voted with their feet and their pennies, and rewarded it.
