THOMAS HEYWOOD
Art Neuendorffer
http://73.1911encyclopedia.org/H/HE/HEYWOOD_THOMAS.htm
HEYWOOD, THOMAS (d. C. 1650), English dramatist and miscellaneous author,
was a native of Lincolnshire, born about 1575, and said to have been.
educated at Cam ridge and to hav become a fellow of Peterhouse. Heywood, is
mentioned by Philip Henslowe as having written a book or play for the Lord
Admirals company of actors in October 1596; and in 1598 he was regularly
engaged as a player in the company, in which he presumably bad a share, as
no wages are mentioned. He was also a member Qf other companies, of, Lord
Soutbamptons~ of the earl of Derbys and of the earl of Worcesters players
afterwards known as the Queens Servants. In his preface tc the English
Traveller (1633) he describes himself as having hat an entire hand or at
least a main. finger in two hundred ane twenty plays. Of this number,
probably considerably increased before the close of his dramatic career,
only twenty-thre~ survive. He wrote for the stage, not for the press, and
protestec against the printing of his works, which he said be Jiad no tirni
to revise. He was, said Tieck, the model of a light and rapk talent, and his
plays, as might be expected from his rate o:
production, bear little trace of artistic elaboration,. Charle~
Lamb called him a prose Shakespeare ; Professor Ward, one of Heywoods most
sympathetic editors, points out that this epigrammatic statement can only be
accepted with reservations. Heywood had a keen eye for dramatic situations.
and great constructive skill, but his powers of characterization were not on
a par with his stagecraft. He delighted in what he called merry accidents,
that is, in coarse, broad farce; his fancy and invention were inexhaustible.
It was in the domestic drama of sentiment that he won his most distinctive
success. For this he was especially fitted by his genuine tenderness and his
freedom from affectation, by the sweetness and gentleness for which Lamb
praised him. His masterpiece, A Woman kilde with kindnesse (acted 1603;
printed 1607), is a type of the comddie larmoyante, and The English
Traveller (1633) is a domestic tragedy scarcely inferior to it in pathos and
in the elevation of its moral tone. His first play was probably The Foure
Prentises of London: With the Conquest of Jerusalem (printed 1615, but acted
some fifteen years earlier). This may have been intended as a burlesque of
the old romances, but it is more likely that it was meant seriously to
attract the apprentice public to whom it was dedicated, and its popularity
was no doubt aimed at in Beaumont and Fletchers travesty of the City taste
in drama in their Knight of the Burning Pestle. The two parts of King Edward
the Fourth (printed 1600), and of If you know not me, you know no bodie; Or,
The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1605 and 1606) are chronicle histories.
His other comedies include:
The Royall King, and the Loyall subject (acted c. 1600; printed 1637); the
two parts of The Fair Ma-id of The West; Or, A Girle worth Gold (two parts,
printed 1631); The Fayre Maid of the Exchange (printed anonymously 1607);
The Late Lancashire Witches (2634), written with Richard Brome, and prompted
by an actual trial in the preceding year; A Pleasant Comedy, called A
Mayden-Head well lost (1634); A Challenge for Beautie (1636); The
IVise-Woman of Hogsdon (printed 1638), the witchcraft irs this case being
matter for comedy, not seriously treated as in the Lancashire play; and
Fortune by Land and Sea (printed 1655), with William Rowley. The five plays
called respectively The Golden, The Silver, The Brazen and The Iron Age (the
last in two parts), dated 1611, 1613, 1613, 1632, are series of classical
stories strung together with no particular connection except that old Homer
introduces the performers of each act in turn. Loves Maistresse; Or, The
Queens Masque (printed 1636) is on the story of Cupid and Psyche as told by
Apuleius; and the tragedy of the Rape of Lucrece (1608) is varied by a merry
lord, Valerius, who lightens the gloom of the situation by singing comic
songs. A series of pageants, most of them devised for the City of London, or
its guilds, by Heywood, were printed in 1637. In vol. iv. of his Collection
of Old English Plays (1885), Mr A. H. Bullen printed for the first time a
comedy by Heywood, The Captives, or The Lost Recovered (licensed 1624), and
in vol. ii. of the same series, Dicke of Devonshire, which he tentatively
assigns to the same hand.
Besides his dramatic works, twelve of which were reprinted by the
Shakespeare Society, and were published by Mr John Pearson in a complete
edition of six vols. with notes and illustrations in 1874, he was the author
of Troia , or Great Britains Troy (1609), a poem in seventeen cantos
intermixed with many pleasant poetical tales and concluding with an
universal chronicle from the creation until the present time; An Apology for
Actors, containing three brief treatises (1612) edited for the Shakespeare
Society in 1841; Fuvcu,~fov or nine books of various history concerning
women (1624); Englands Elizabeth, her Life and Troubles during her minority
from time Cradle to the Crown (1631); The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels
(1635), a didactic poem in nine books; Pleasant Dialogue, and Dramas
selected c-ut of Lucian, &c. (1637; ed. W. Bang, Louvain, 1903); and The
Life of Merlin surnamed Ambrosius (1641).
See A. W. Ward, History of EngUsh Dram. Lit. i~ 550 seq. (I899); the same
authors Introduction to A woman killed with kindness ( Temple Dramatists,
1897); J. A. Synionds in thy Introduction to Thomas Heywood in the Mermaid
series (new issue, 1903).