Thomas Heywood

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Title page from A Pleasant Comedy, Called a Maidenhead Well Lost, 1634

Thomas Heywood (ca. 1573 – August, 1641) was an English actor, dramatist and miscellaneous author.

Heywood was born about 1575 in Lincolnshire. He is said to have been educated at the University of Cambridge and to have become a fellow of Peterhouse. Subsequently, however, he became an actor and playwright in London.

The first mention of Heywood's dramatic career is a note in the diary of theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe recording that he wrote a play for the Admiral's Men, an acting company, in October 1596. By 1598, he was regularly engaged as a player in the company; since no wages are mentioned, he was presumably a sharer in the company, as was normal for important company members. He was later a member of other companies, including Lord Southampton's, Lord Strange's Men and Worcester's Men (who subsequently became known as Queen Anne's Men). During this time, Heywood was extremely prolific; in his preface to The English Traveller (1633) he describes himself as having had "an entire hand or at least a main finger in two hundred and twenty plays." However, only twenty-three have survived.

Heywood's first play may hae been The Four Prentises of London (printed 1615, but acted some fifteen years earlier). This tale of four apprentices who become knights and travel to Jerusalem 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 spectators to whom it was dedicated. Its popularity was satirized in Francis Beaumont and Fletcher's travesty of the middle class taste in drama, The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The two parts of King Edward the Fourth (printed 1600), and of If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, or, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1605 and 1606) are history plays.

Heywood wrote for the stage, and (perhaps disingenuously) protested against the printing of his works, saying he had no time to revise them. Johann Ludwig Tieck called him the "model of a light and rare talent", and Charles Lamb called him a "prose Shakespeare"; Professor Ward, one of Heywood's most sympathetic editors, pointed out that 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.

Heywood's best known plays are his domestic tragedies and comedies (plays set among the English middle classes); his masterpiece is generally considered to be A Woman Killed With Kindness (acted 1603; printed 1607), a domestic tragedy about an adulterous wife, and The English Traveller, a Plautine farce, is also admired.

It was in his "Preface" to The English Traveller that Heywood made his often-quoted claim, that he "had either an entire hand or at least a main finger" in the authorship of some 220 plays. Of his total output, only about 20 plays have survived. His nondramatic prose work An Apology for Actors is a moderately-toned and reasonable reply to Puritan attacks on the stage, and contains a wealth of detailed information on the actors and acting conditions of Heywood's day. (It is in the Epistle to the Printer in this work that Heywood writes about William Jaggard's appropriation of two of Heywood's poems for the 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim.)

[edit] Other works

The Royall King, and the Loyall subject (acted c. 1600; printed 1637)
the two parts of The Fair Maid 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 (1634), 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 Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (printed 1638), the witchcraft in this case being matter for comedy, not seriously treated as in the Lancashire play
Fortune by Land and Sea (printed 1655), with William Rowley.
The five plays called respectively The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Brazen Age 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.
Troia Britannica, or Great Britain's 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;
Gynaikeion or nine books of various history concerning women (1624);
England's 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;
A woman killed with kindness
Pleasant Dialogue, and Dramas selected out of Lucian, etc. (1637);
The Life of Merlin surnamed Ambrosius (1641).

[edit] References

F.E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.