Plays
His best drama is arguably The Change of Crowns. Samuel Pepys saw it on 15 April 1667, performed by the King's Company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; in his Diary Pepys called it "the best that I ever saw at that house, being a great play and serious." During the première performance of the play, however, cast member John Lacy improvised some lines that offended King Charles II, who had Lacy incarcerated in response. As a result of the controversy, The Change of Crowns was not published in its own era.
Howard's other plays were treated roughly by the critics of the day. Restoration dramatists often reworked the plays of earlier playwrights; "Ned" Howard was accused of relying on work by James Shirley.
His five plays are:
- The Usurper, 1664 (printed 1668)
- The Change of Crowns, 1667
- The Women's Conquest, 1670 (printed 1671)
- The Six Days' Adventure, or the New Utopia, 1671 (printed 1671)
- The Man of Newmarket, 1678 (printed 1678)
Read more about this topic: Edward Howard (playwright)
Famous quotes containing the word plays:
“The plays and sports of children are as salutary to them as labor and work are to grown persons.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“Nature is so perfect that the Trinity couldn’t have fashioned her any more perfect. She is an organ on which our Lord plays and the devil works the bellows.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“In all the wide gamut of human experience, nothing plays so important a part as faith.... Faith that is as broad as the heavens and as wide as the earth. Faith that comprehends in its vast sympathies everything human as well as divine, and carries one with the swift sure wings of the angels directly to his goal.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)