We would like to dedicate this issue of Life Writing to David Heywood Parker (1943–2015). David taught a generation of life-writing scholars, first as a Reader in English at the Australian National University, Canberra, from 1974 to 1999, and then as Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, from 2000 to 2009. He was one of the early organisers of the International Auto/Biography Association, the gracious host in Hong Kong for the Fourth IABA international conference in 2004, and the editor of the resulting special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, ‘Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography in an (Anti-)Global Age'. He was also a writer of novels, memoirs, criticism, and theory. His important volumes on literature and life writing included Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge 1994), The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Cornell 2007), a number of influential edited collections, and many important essays on autobiography and ethics, with a special emphasis on the work of Charles Taylor. David was delightful company—generous, modest, and warm. In the acknowledgments to The Self in Moral Space, he thanks literally dozens of students and colleagues in Australia, Hong Kong, and in the IABA. His many friends in the life writing community will join with us in mourning his passing.

We misread Thomas Heywood’s city plays, I argue, when we read them as city plays, or as plays concerned with the city as a distinctly urban space separate from the world beyond its walls. Instead, Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II and Wise Woman of Hoxton resist this sense of “London exceptionalism” by drawing attention to the complicated ways that London fits within the extra-civic nation or kingdom. By exploring the curious social, cultural, and political position of the city in Heywood’s plays, this article draws attention to the confused status of the early modern city within its world: Was London the metropolitical center of a nation? Was it a key node in a cosmopolitical network of relatively de-nationalized “world cities”? Was it a semi-autonomous city-state thanks to its historic liberties and economic might? In some sense, it was all of the above, and Heywood’s plays help to make this fraught space ideologically knowable to their audiences.