A modern-spelling edition of Thomas Heywood's The Golden Age: or The lives of Jupiter and Saturn: prepared from the 1611 quarto

Abstract

This edition of Thomas Heywood's The Golden Age is designed primarily to be of use to actors. When teaching or directing Renaissance drama I have often found that actors, whether out of laziness or impatience, do not necessarily wish to learn all the rules and complexities of blank verse, nor the theatrical conventions behind stage directions and practical playhouse usage of the period. They do not want to be told to "obey the metre" in cases of unusual pronunciation; they want to know how the word is pronounced. Of course, no matter how much I try, I am unable to leave behind my own scholarly desire to know absolutely everything possible about the plays of the English Renaissance, and in more cases than less, the annotation contains much that an actor, director or casual student will doubtless gloss over. What I hope will be of interest, though, are some of the lineation problems discussed that have some impact on how a scene is played - the possibilities of where an actor might pause or how they might decide to interpret a certain stage direction.