Eastward Ho! (New Mermaids)

by Ben Jonson (Author), Ben Jonson (Author)

• Used

  Illustrated
  1995

  $3.71

  This collaborative masterpiece of hilarious city comedy was performed by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars playhouse in 1605. The story is of an allegorical simplicity that lends itself to satire of civic mores and traditions as well as to parody of the sentimental, idealising London comedy presented at the amphitheatres in the suburbs: Goldsmith Touchstone, an upright London citizen, has one modest and one ambitious daughter, one righteous and one disreputable apprentice; virtue is rewarded, ruthlessness comes to grief - and receives a drenching in the muddy Thames. The introduction to this edition discusses various methods of establishing authorship and highlights the irony of the collaborators' comic vision of contemporary London life.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.36

  A major season of rarely performed Tudor and Jacobean plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre in Stratford Teeming with energy and larger than life characters, Eastward Ho! sees Touchstone, a London goldsmith, preparing to marry off his two daughters. Touchstone's two apprentices lead the wooing until the rakish fop Sir Petronel Flash arrives on the scene. A comedy of true love and virtue triumphing over social-climbing, deception and trickery.