Born, in Lincolnshire, 1575 [?]. Probably educated at Peterhouse, Camb. A member of Henslowe’s company of players; of Earl of Southampton’s company; and of Earl of Worcester’s (afterwards the Queen’s) company. Voluminous writer of plays. Translated several Latin classical works. Died, 1650 [?]. Works: “If you know not me, you know nobody” (2 pts.), 1606; “A Woman kilde with Kindnesse,” 1607; “The Fair Maid of the Exchange” (anon.), 1607; “The Rape of Lucrece,” 1608; “Troia Britannica,” 1609; “The Golden Age,” 1611; “An Apology for Actors,” 1612; “A Funeral Elegy on the Death of Prince Henry,” 1613; “The first and second parts of King Edward the Fourth” (anon.), 1613; “A Marriage Triumph” on the Nuptials of the Prince Palatine, 1613; “The Silver Age,” 1613; “The Brazen Age,” 1613; “The Four Prentices of London,” 1615; “The Captives,” 1624; “Γυναικειον,” 1624; “England’s Elizabeth,” 1631; “The Fair Maid of the West,” 1631; “Eromena,” 1632; “The Iron Age,” 1632; “The English Traveller,” 1633; “A Maidenhead Well Lost,” 1634; “The Late Lancashire Witches” (with R. Brome), 1634; “The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels,” 1635; “Philocothonista,” 1635; “Love’s Maistresse,” 1636; “A Challenge for Beauty,” 1636; “The Royall King,” 1637; “A True Description of His Majesty’s Royal Ship,” 1637; “A Curtain Lecture” (under initials: T. H.), 1637; “Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas,” 1637; “The Royal King and the Loyal King,” 1637; “Porta Pietatis,” 1638; “The Wise Woman of Hogsdon,” 1638; “Londini Status Placatus,” 1639; “The Exemplary Lives … of Nine of the most worthy Women of the World,” 1640; “The Life of Merlin,” 1641; “Machiavel” (anon.), 1641; “Fortune by Land and Sea” (with Rowley), 1655. He translated: “Two … notable Histories” of Sallust, 1608; and edited: Lydgate’s “Life and Death of Hector,” 1614; Cooke’s “Greene’s Tu Quoque,” 1622; Sir R. Barckley’s “Felicitie of Man,” 1631; Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta,” 1633. Collected Works: in 6 vols., with memoir, 1874.

Personal

  Md. that this 25 of marche 1598, Thomas Hawoode came and hiered hime seallfe with me as a covenante searvante for ij yeares, by the Recevinge of ij synell pence, acordinge to the statute of winchester, and to begine at the daye above written, and not to playe any wher publicke abowt London not whille thes ij yeares be exspired, but in my howsse: yf he do, then he dothe forfette unto me, by the Recevinge of these ij^d, fortie powndes, and wittnes to this

  An Author that liv’d in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, and the Reign of King James the First. Tho’ he were but an Actor, as is manifest by Mr. Kirkman’s Testimony, and apparent from a Piece writ by him, call’d “The Actors Vindication;” yet his Plays were in those Days accounted of the Second-Rate. He was the most Voluminous Writer that ever handled Dramatick Poetry in our Language; and I know none but the Famous “Spaniard, Lopez de Vega,” that can vye with him; if at least we give Credit to his own Attestation, in the Preface to One of his Plays.

  Little as we know of his life, his dedications and prefaces make us better acquainted with his personality than we are with that of much more famous men.

A Woman Killed with Kindness, 1602–07

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  Pd at the apoyntment of Thomas Blackewod, the 7 of marche 1602, unto the tayller which made the blacke saten sewt for the womon Kyld with Kyndnes, the some of  *        *        *        *        *  X^s.

  Heywood is a sort of prose Shakespeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we miss the poet, that which in Shakespeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature. Heywood’s characters in this play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we see, but of the best kind of what we see in life. Shakespeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.

  The winding up of this play is rather awkwardly managed, and the moral is, according to established usage, equivocal. It required only Frankford’s reconciliation to his wife, as well as his forgiveness of her, for the highest breach of matrimonial duty, to have made “A Woman Killed with Kindness” a complete anticipation of “The Stranger.” Heywood, however, was in that respect but half a Kotzebue!

  The language is not much raised above that of comedy; but we can hardly rank a tale of guilt, sorrow, and death, in that dramatic category. It may be read with interest and approbation at this day; being quite free from extravagance either in manner or language, the besetting sin of our earlier dramatists, and equally so from buffoonery. The subject resembles that of Kotzebue’s drama, “The Stranger,” but is managed with a nobler tone of morality. It is true that Mrs. Frankfort’s immediate surrender to her seducer, like that of Beaumelé in the “Fatal Dowry,” makes her contemptible; but this, though it might possibly have originated in the necessity created by the narrow limits of theatrical time, has the good effect of preventing that sympathy with her guilt which is reserved for her penitence.

  The play, therefore, was finished when Henslowe paid £3 for it; and we may conclude, perhaps, that the “black satin suit” was worn by the hero after the fall of his wife, and when she was dying, in consequence of the undeserved tenderness with which she had been treated by her forgiving husband. Nothing can be more tragically touching than the whole of this part of this fine moral play, and we are not ashamed to own, after having read it many times previously, that we could not go through the mechanical process of correcting the proofs, without a degree of emotion that almost disqualified us for the duty.

  His masterpiece, “The Woman Killed with Kindness” (in which a deceived husband, coming to the knowledge of his shame, drives his rival to repentance, and his wife to repentance and death, by his charity), is not wholly admirable. Shakespere would have felt, more fully than Heywood, the danger of presenting his hero as something of a wittol without sufficient passion of religion or affection to justify his tolerance. But the pathos is so great, the sense of “the pity of it” is so simply and unaffectedly rendered, that it is impossible not to rank Heywood very high.

  In the centre of the choir, but quite invisible, stands the figure of Thomas Heywood, a voluble secondary writer in the class of Shakespeare and Fletcher, claiming “an entire hand, or at least a main finger,” in no fewer than 220 plays. He is remarkable chiefly for a pleasing mediocrity in picturesqueness, a prosaic, even spirit of flowing romance. Heywood rises once to real force of emotion in the naked, sombre atonement of “A Woman Killed with Kindness.”

The English Traveller, 1633

  Heywood’s preface to this play is interesting, as it shows the heroic indifference about the opinion of posterity, which some of these great writers seem to have felt. There is a magnanimity in authorship as in everything else. His ambition seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever contemplated the possibility of being read by after-ages. What a slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of such plays as the “English Traveller,” the “Challenge for Beauty,” and the “Woman Killed with Kindness”! Posterity is bound to take care that a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.

  This play is written in verse, and with that ease and perspicuity, seldom rising to passion or figurative poetry, which distinguishes this dramatist. Young Geraldine is a beautiful specimen of the Platonic, or rather inflexibly virtuous lover, whom the writers of this age delighted to portray. On the other hand, it is difficult to pronounce whether the lady is a thorough-paced hypocrite in the first acts, or falls from virtue, like Mrs. Frankfort, on the first solicitation of a stranger. In either case, the character is unpleasing, and, we may hope, improbable. The underplot of this play is largely borrowed from the “Mostellaria” of Plautus, and is diverting, though somewhat absurd.

  The plot of “The English Traveller” is especially good: and in reading few works of fiction do we receive a greater shock of surprise than in Geraldine’s discovery of the infidelity of Wincott’s wife, whom he loves with a Platonic devotion. It is as unanticipated as the discovery, in Jonson’s “Silent Woman,” that Epicœne is no woman at all, while at the same time it has less the appearance of artifice, and is more the result of natural causes.

  The hero of “The English Traveller,” however worthy to stand beside him as a typical sample of English manhood at its noblest and gentlest, cannot be said to occupy so predominant a place in the conduct of the action or the memory of the reader. The comic Plautine underplot—Plautus always brought good luck to Heywood—is so incomparably preferable to the ugly and unnatural though striking and original under plot of “A Woman Killed with Kindness” as well nigh to counterbalance the comparative lack of interest, plausibility and propriety in the main action.

The Fair Maid of the West, 1631

  The versification is varied and harmonious; but it is necessary to remark that Heywood appears to have been, in this particular, a somewhat careless writer, heeding little how his lines were divided in the printed copy, as long as they came agreeably or forcibly from the mouths of the actors. It seems to have been his great aim (like that of most, if not all, of his contemporaries) to satisfy on the stage, without thinking of the reader: the printer, too, has not unfrequently done his verse injustice; and we wonder that, as the sheets went through the author’s hands, he did not himself regulate the lines, in many places, differently. This consideration has frequently checked us, when otherwise we should have felt disposed to make some changes, merely of location, in order to render the blank verse more conformable to ordinary rule: upon a few, and very few, changes we have ventured; but it is quite evident in many places, which we need not point out, that the omission or insertion of a monosyllable would sometimes have restored the measure, injured perhaps by the imperfectness of the memory, or of the ear, of the performer. We have never felt ourselves at liberty to make the slightest insertion or omission, without either placing the added word within brackets, or distinctly mentioning in a note the exclusion of a particle.

  “The Fair Maid of the West” is one of Heywood’s most characteristic works, and one of his most delightful plays. Inartistic as this sort of dramatic poem may seem to the lovers of theatrical composition and sensational arrangement, of emotional calculations and premeditated shocks, it has a place of its own, and a place of honour, among the incomparably various forms of noble and serious drama which English poets of the Shakespearean age conceived, created, and left as models impossible to reproduce or to rival in any generation of poets or readers, actors or spectators, after the decadent forces of English genius in its own most natural and representative form of popular and creative activity had finally shrivelled up and shuddered into everlasting inanition under the withering blast of Puritanism.

General

  But tho’ many of these Plays being written loosely in Taverns as Mr. Kirkman observes, might occasion their being so mean; yet it did not in probability much contribute to their loss, as Mr. Winstanley would have it. To do our Author justice, I cannot allow that his Plays are so mean as Mr. Kirkman has represented them: for he was a general Scholar, and an indifferent Linguist, as his several Translations from Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Beza, Buchanan, and other Latine and Italian Authors, sufficiently manifest. Nay, further in several of his Plays he has borrow’d many Ornaments from the Ancients; as more particularly in his Plays call’d “The Ages,” he has intersperst several Things, borrow’d from Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Plautus, &c., which extreamly set them off.

  The prodigious quantity he wrote, for which he ransacked the ancients without mercy, whatever might have been his real merit had he taken time to correct and polish his works, rendered it impossible for him to turn any thing out of hand likely to secure him a solid reputation; and thus we have a list of twenty-four pieces, out of two hundred and twenty which he himself says he either wrote or was concerned in, little more known at this moment than by their titles.

  If I were to be consulted as to a Reprint of our Old English Dramatists, I should advise to begin with the collected Plays of Heywood. He was a fellow Actor, and fellow Dramatist, with Shakespeare. He possessed not the imagination of the latter; but in all those qualities which gained for Shakespeare the attribute of gentle, he was not inferior to him. Generosity, courtesy, temperance in the depths of passion; sweetness, in a word, and gentleness; Christianism; and true hearty Anglicism of feelings, shaping that Christianism; shine throughout his beautiful writings in a manner more conspicuous than in those of Shakespeare, but only more conspicuous, inasmuch as in Heywood these qualities are primary, in the other subordinate to poetry. I love them both equally, but Shakespeare has most of my wonder. Heywood should be known to his countrymen, as he deserves. His plots are almost invariably English. I am sometimes jealous, that Shakespeare laid so few of his scenes at home.

  Though Heywood had little of the enthusiasm of fancy of the genuine poet, there are in several of the pieces which remain, an unaffected ease and simplicity, and a power of touching the heart, which merit preservation in no common degree. He abounds, too, in pictures of domestic life very minutely finished, correct without being cold, and effective without being overcharged.

  He possesses considerable power of interesting the affections, by placing his plain and familiar characters in affecting situations. The worst of him is, that his commonplace sentiments and plain incidents fall not only beneath the ideal beauty of art, but are often more fatiguing than what we meet with in the ordinary and unselected circumstances of life. When he has hit upon those occasions where the passions should obviously rise with accumulated expression, he lingers on through the scene with a dull and level indifference. The term artlessness may be applied to Heywood in two very opposite senses. His pathos is often artless in the better meaning of the word, because its objects are true to life, and their feelings naturally expressed. But he betrays still more frequently an artlessness, or we should rather call it, a want of art, in deficiency of contrivance.

  As Marlowe’s imagination glows like a furnace, Heywood’s is a gentle, lambent flame that purifies without consuming. His manner is simplicity itself. There is nothing supernatural, nothing startling or terrific. He makes use of the commonest circumstances of every-day life, and of the easiest tempers, to show the workings, or rather the inefficacy of the passions, the vis inertiæ of tragedy. His incidents strike from their very familiarity, and the distresses he paints invite our sympathy, from the calmness and resignation with which they are borne. The pathos might be deemed purer from its having no mixture of turbulence or vindictiveness in it; and in proportion as the sufferers are made to deserve a better fate. In the midst of the most untoward reverses and cutting injuries, good nature and good sense keep their accustomed sway. He describes men’s errors with tenderness, and their duties only with zeal, and the heightenings of a poetic fancy. His style is equally natural, simple, and unconstrained.

  Heywood seldom rises to much vigor of poetry; but his dramatic invention is ready, his style is easy, his characters do not transgress the boundaries of nature, and it is not surprising that he was popular in his own age.

  Perhaps Shakespeare would not have left untouched so pathetic a tragedy as that of Jane Shore, if he had not seen it so well handled by Heywood.

  The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of these dramatists, was Thomas Heywood, of whom little is known, except that he was one of the most prolific writers the world has ever seen…. Heywood’s best plays evince large observation, considerable dramatic skill, a sweet and humane spirit, and an easy command of language. His style, indeed, is singularly simple, pure, clear, and straightforward; but it conveys the impression of a mind so diffused as almost to be characterless, and incapable of flashing its thoughts through the images of imaginative passion. He is more prosaic, closer to ordinary life and character, than his contemporaries.

  His plays, however, are for the greater part in verse, which at least has ease of flow enough; and he may be styled not only a prose Shakspeare, but a more poetical Richardson. If he has not quite the power of Lillo in what has been called the domestic tragedy, which is the species to which his best pieces belong, he excels that modern dramatist both in facility and variety.

  Considering how much he wrote, and the circumstances under which he appears to have written, it is no slight merit to have produced scenes as natural and affecting, and characters as true to life as those of Shakespeare, even without the power idealizing his conceptions.

  It would grieve me to seem unjust towards a writer to whom I have long felt very specially attracted—and this by no means only because of a pious although perhaps more or less apocryphal bond. Yet the highest praise which it seems right to bestow upon Thomas Heywood is that which was happily expressed by Tieck when he described him as “the model of a light and rapid talent.” Carried, it may be, by fortune or by choice from the tranquil court of Peterhouse to a very different scene of intellectual effort, he worked during a long and laborious life with an energy in itself deserving of respect, and manifestly also with a facility attesting no ordinary natural endowment. His creative power was, however, of that secondary order which is content with accommodating itself to conditions imposed by the prevailing tastes of the day. It may be merely his ’prentice hand that he tried on a dramatic reproduction of chronicles and popular story-books; but though even here the simplicity of his workmanship was due to a natural directness of touch by no means to be confounded with rudeness of hand, he cannot be said to have done much to revive a species which though still locally popular was already doomed to decay…. Of humour he had his share—or he would have been no master of pathos; but he cannot be said to have excelled in humorous characterisation; there is as a rule little individuality in his comic figures at large, and his clowns, although good examples of their kind, are made to order. Indeed, the inferior sort of wit—which of all writers dramatists most readily acquire as a literary accomplishment—his practised inventiveness displays with the utmost abundance; of all the Elisabethan playwrights he is one of the most unwearied, and to my mind one of the most intolerable punsters. In outward form he is nearly as Protean as in choice of subject and of treatment; his earlier plays more especially abound with rimes; in general, fluent verse and easy prose are freely intermixed. But—apart from the pathetic force of particular passages and scenes, and a straightforward naturalness which lends an irresistible charm to a writer as it does to a friend in real life—his strength lies in a dramatic insight which goes far towards the making of a master of the playwright’s art, while it has undoubtedly been possessed by some not entitled to rank as dramatic poets.

  The play which resulted,—the “Lancashire Witches,”—is interesting partly because it combines the two kinds of dramatic incident in which Heywood was most at home,—the domestic and the mythological. It unites a motive akin to that of the “Woman killed with Kindness” and the “English Traveller” with others drawn from that world of superstition and occult art of which Heywood had all his life been a persevering student and in which he was probably more deeply versed than any of his fellow dramatists. The character of the erring and repentant wife he had made his own; and the peculiar tenderness with which he repeatedly touched it was evidently something more than the stock pathos of a clever playwright. Mrs. Generous in the “Lancashire Witches” is the sister of the erring wives in the “Woman killed with Kindness” and the “English Traveller.” She is not seduced from her husband, as they are, by a human lover; but she yields to the fascination of the powers of darkness and becomes a witch. Generous, her husband, views her fault like his earlier counterparts, more in sorrow than in anger, and when she meets him after the commission of her fault and confesses her guilt he forgives her in a scene little inferior to the corresponding scenes in which Mr. Frankford and Young Geraldine receive the last penitent confessions of another sort of guilt.

  Never sinking to the lowest depth of the Elizabethan playwright, including some great ones, Heywood never rises to anything like the highest height. His chronicle plays are very weak, showing no grasp of heroic character, and a most lamentable slovenliness of rhythm.

  Heywood, the master of homely English life, the gentlest of all poets who have swept the chords of passion.

  Since his resuscitation he has suffered from a fresh injustice, the cause of which it is not easy to discover. Those who have complained of his flatness, rudeness, want of poetic art, have themselves increased these qualities in tacitly considering him as one of the latest of the great dramatic group. He is usually placed in chronological arrangement after Massinger, after Ford, with only Shirley and Jasper Mayne behind him. It is true that he lived till all but these were gone, but not on that account ought he to be considered as one of the latest of the group. The proper position of Heywood is in the center, at the climax of the drama. That miraculous decade (1590–1600) in which the green undergrowth of English literature, as if in a single tropical night, burst into wave after wave of sudden blossom, produced so much and developed so rapidly that the closest study is needed to detect the stages of poetic progress…. Heywood was not one of those poets on whom the gaze of all critics turns, as to a star whose beams lend themselves to infinite analysis; it is easy enough to divide the clear rays in his one pencil of light. He is a poet who will never, in future, want his friends, but who will scarcely claim one lover. It is not possible to be enthusiastic over the memory of a gossip so cheerful, garrulous, and superficial as this haunter of the Strand and the Exchange. He has a thousand entertaining things to tell us about the shops and the shop-girls; about the handsome young gallants, and the shocking way in which they waste their money; about the affectations of citizen fathers and the tempers of citizen mothers. He is the most confirmed button-holer of our poetical acquaintance; and if he were only a little more monotonous, he would be universally voted a bore. Somehow or other, he has a little group of listeners always around him; it is not easy to drag one’s self away till his stories are finished. His voice trembles as he tells us the strangest, saddest tale of how this or that poor girl came to shame and sorrow—of how such a noble gentleman, whom we must have often seen in the streets, lost all his estate, and died in want; and though there is nothing new in what he tells us, and though he hurries with characteristic timidity over every embarrassing or painful detail, we cannot help paying his loquacity the tribute of our laughter and our tears.

  Facile and most productive of dramatists, visited at moments by the golden touch of lyric inspiration.

  As a historical or mythological playwright, working on material derived from classic legends or from English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers, of the sweet tempered manliness, the noble kindliness, which won the heart of Lamb: something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something of his humour: but if this were all we had of him we should know comparatively little of what we now most prize in him. Of this we find most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day: but there is more of it in his romantic tragi-comedies than in his chronicle histories or his legendary compilations and variations on the antique…. He is English of the English in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, suppression is no longer either possible or proper, of all noble and gentle and natural emotion…. His prose, if never to be called masterly, may generally be called good and pure: its occasional pedantries and pretentions are rather signs of the century than faults of the author: and he can tell a story, especially a short story, as well if not better than many a better-known writer. I fear, however, that it is not the poetical quality of his undramatic verse which can ever be said to make it worth reading: it is, as far as I know, of the very homeliest homespun ever turned out by the very humblest of workmen. His poetry, it would be pretty safe to wager, must be looked for exclusively in his plays: but there, if not remarkable for depth or height of imagination or of passion, it will be found memorable for unsurpassed excellence of unpretentious elevation in treatment of character.