‘To register her vertues, I should spend / an age of time’: political echoes in Thomas Heywood’s Ages pentalogy

Renwick, Chloe (2021) ‘To register her vertues, I should spend / an age of time’: political echoes in Thomas Heywood’s Ages pentalogy. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

This thesis reads Thomas Heywood’s Ages pentalogy in relation to their political contexts chiefly in relation to the 1590s to argue for their value to understanding more about how the stage was satirising English political representation and propaganda in these years. In my reading, what emerges is an obsessive use of mythology to think about the iconography, person, and court of Elizabeth I. The plays have suffered critical neglect due to their fragmentary narratives, showy special effects , and uncerta in dating. This thesis argues that we should, however, recognise the value of these texts by reconceiving the terms upon which they are studied. Popular in their time, the Ages pentalogy use classical narratives and legacies as smokescreen s for barbed crit ique of the English political system, reaching time and again for the spectacular as a vehicle of politicised meaning.

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