All history, all actions,
Counsels, Decrees, man, manners, State and factions,
Playes, Epicediums, Odes and Lyricks,
Translations, Epitaphs and Panegyricks.
In the ‘Address to the Reader’ prefixed to the ‘English Traveller’ he states himself to have had either an entire hand, or at least a ‘maine finger,’ in 220 plays; and the statement was made in 1633, before the end of his career. He also for many years composed the lord mayor's pageants in the city of London till they were dropped in 1640. His bookseller, Kirkman, asserts him to have been ‘very laborious; for he not only acted almost every day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every day for several years together;’ yet, according to the same authority, ‘many of his plays were composed in the tavern, on the backside of tavern-bills, which may be the occasion that so many of them are lost’ (cf. Symonds, pp. ix, xx). Though many of his plays succeeded, he only published a few, to guard against ‘corrupt and mangled’ editions, and never collected his works (see addresses prefixed to the Rape of Lucrece and the English Traveller). He must also have been an omnivorous reader. He translated Lucian and a variety of Latin writers, both ancient and modern, borrowed two of his plots from Plautus, and busied himself as translator or adaptor with both ancient and modern history. But he also, as Mr. Herford (pp. 170, 239–40) expresses it, loved the byways of literature, German anecdotical history, and in especial magical lore (see above all the Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels). Occasionally, as in his account of the big ship of the period, he was a mere bookmaker.
We know nothing of any special patronage; but he was probably rewarded at court for such a play as ‘Love's Mistress’ (1636), which was repeated three times within eight days, and called ‘The Queen's Masque’ in honour of Henrietta Maria, to whom he had dedicated his ‘Hierarchy’ a year earlier. The Earl of Dover, too, seems in Heywood's later days to have been a liberal patron, both in Broad Street and at Hunsdon House (see Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas). Loyal and patriotic, mindful of the great days ‘of that good queene Elizabeth’ (A Marriage Triumph), and an ardent protestant (England's Elizabeth, passim), Heywood was at the same time careful not to give offence to the state or great men (Apology, p. 61; cf. Collier, ii. 349 n.; and cf. ‘To the Reader’ before pt. ii. of the Iron Age; see, however, Collier, iii. 87, as to the personalities imputed to his company in 1601). He was always ready, however, to protest against the ‘vilification’ of actors by such a ‘separisticall humorist’ as the author of ‘Histrio-Mastix’ (dedications of the English Traveller, 1633. For a curious earlier attack upon puritanism see his Britain's Troy, canto iv. st. 50–4). The lines in the ‘Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels’ (bk. iv.), repeatedly quoted by modern writers, in which he dwells on the genial custom of calling the great dramatists of his day ‘Will’ and ‘Ben,’ and so forth, and ends by declaring ‘I hold he loves me best that calls me Tom,’ show also his generous admiration for his superiors. The keynote to his character seems to have been an unaffected modesty. After at least fourteen years' authorship he calls himself ‘the youngest and weakest of the nest wherein he was hatched’ (Apology, ad in.; cf. Introduction, p. iv). It is to be regretted that he never carried out his design of writing ‘the lives of all the poets, foreign and modern, from the first before Homer to the novissimi and last, of what nation or language soever’ (Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, p. 245, cited in Introduction to Apology, p. xiv). He is noticed as still alive in 1648 (in the Satire against Separatists; cf. ib. p. vi). It is not known whether he left a family behind him; the conjecture in Introduction to ‘A Marriage Triumph,’ p. x, is worthless.
As a dramatist Heywood essayed many styles, beginning apparently with plays resembling the old chronicle histories, and chiefly designed for city audiences. ‘The Four Prentices of London’ was so typical of its kind that Beaumont and Fletcher ridiculed it in ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’ (1611 c.) ‘Edward IV,’ written about the same time, likewise appeals to city sentiment, and shows Heywood's pathetic power in the episode of Jane Shore. The two early plays on the history of Queen Elizabeth's troubles are uniformly prosaic. In part ii. the foundation of the Royal Exchange and of Gresham College is put alongside of the destruction of the Spanish Armada. Not later than 1603, when Henslowe paid him 3l. for the play (Diary, p. 249), Heywood produced his masterpiece in the domestic drama, ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness.’ The scene of this piece is laid in contemporary English middle-class life, which none of our dramatists has portrayed more naturally. But the simplicity and directness of his pathos are even more distinctive of his dramatic genius. Of a rather different type is his best-known romantic drama, written possibly at an even earlier date, ‘The Royal King and the Loyal Subject,’ the hero of which is a kind of Patient Grissel of chivalrous loyalty. To a later period
